Smart Phone Applications for Your Manure Plan

Smart Phone Applications for Your Manure Plan

By: Ted Funk, email ph. 217-369-7716

When I was not-so-subtly convinced to get my first “smart phone” last year, I was dragged kicking and screaming into another dark and ominous corridor of the 21st century—that’s a frank admission that, even though I consider myself an engineering nerd, I am not always thrilled with adopting the latest electronic gadget. That said, I did want to look into ways that the new toy on my belt could be used for nutrient management plans. This smart phone thing may not be so bad after all, even though it’s a size that would fall between concrete slats….

It has always been evident to me that one of the most difficult aspects of keeping manure plans valid is in the little things—records, quick calculations, and fast and error-free communication of information from field to office desk. A dust-collecting plan is no plan, as far as I can see. So I hoped to find a low-cost gizmo, a “mobile app”, which would help pork producers with plans maintenance.

The list of applications is short. (Funny, but it seems that not many people want to write apps for manure.) But aside from the dedicated commercial applications linked to field equipment, there are a couple of apps that Illinois producers might find useful. One is “Manure Calc”, and the other “Manure Monitor.” They are a pair of applications coded by the same outfit, Move Creative, Omaha, NE.

The Manure Calc app costs $0.99. Yes, only a buck. As I worked through the features it became pretty evident that the authors were mainly interested in liquid manure applications. Manure Calc provides “Calibrate”, “Nutrient Application”, and “Value Estimator” buttons. Manure Calc works with calibrations of tank spreaders or center pivot irrigation. (Solid manure box spreaders are included in the app, but the processes are not as well defined as for liquid manure.) You enter the pertinent data for the formulas, based on your equipment, manure sample, and field acreage, and Manure Calc does the math and saves the result in memory. Then based on what you entered, it will calculate nutrients applied to the field. The email feature will send either the single result, or a spreadsheet-formatted summary of all such results residing in your phone’s memory. Manure Calc’s third feature, the “value estimator”, lets you take the information from previous steps and figure about how much commercial fertilizer cost is replaced by the manure you’ve spread.

Manure Calc is a little rough on some user-entry features, such as having preset selectable spread-width that vary by 5 feet or 10 feet at a step instead of one-foot increments; and when you’re doing a tank calibration based on width spread times length driven, you won’t be able to enter just any field travel distance—increments are 200 feet. But it could be a handy tool to record calibrations, especially since there may be one cell phone traveling with just one tanker on any given day. The “value estimator” could spit out a quick number for the curious neighbor, when you just finished covering his field with the good stuff from your pit. And, of course, the “nutrient application” feature can email to the manager’s account the summary of N, P, and K applied so the data can be put into the Producer Activity Document (PAD) of your CNMP.

For another ninety-nine cents you can also get Manure Monitor, produced by the same outfit. Manure Monitor is designed to help you collect and organize phone numbers and procedures for emergency response. It also lets you record rainfall amounts, manure storage levels, some equipment inspections, and animal mortalities. As with Manure Calc, you can email either single record events or a “history” of spreadsheet-formatted records. There is a feature in the emergency plan section that allows you to synchronize phone numbers among multiple devices within an organization.

The big value I see in Manure Monitor is emergency response—cell phone in hand, an employee can quickly open the application, press a button, and call the top-priority contact on the list. With a little training, your staff could feel much better prepared for a manure spill emergency.

Manure Calc and Manure Monitor were produced by staff at the University of Nebraska with funding from USDA and input from a variety of ag sources. Both apps are maintained by Jill Heemstra at the Livestock and Poultry Environment Learning Center on eXtension,

If you have an iPhone, iPad, or Android phone, I’d encourage you to get these applications and try them out. Let me know what you think. It’s hard to argue about the price—about like a cup of coffee at a fast-food joint.

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