THANK YOU

Rod Smith/ Smith Trucking for purchasing my market lamb

Colt Laverdure

Machinery For Sale

Flexi-Coil 600 36-ft. chisel plow. Also air seeder with Friggstad 140 bushel tank. Mounted harrows, packers and seed boots. $8000 White 5542 combine, 16-ft. header, excellent condition, low hours.

Mayrath 10”x40-ft. auger, PTO drive.

8”x24-ft. auger with 16 hp Kohler engine.

Versatile 24-ft. pull-type swather, PTO drive.

New Holland 114 swing tongue, hydraulic hay mower. $1500

New Holland 281 small square baler. $450

AT Ferrell Clipper large seed cleaner.

60-ft. sprayer, 500 gallon tank.

13.5-ft. chisel plow.

Call Bill O’Connell at 406-581-8569

Located north of Bozeman, MT

Myth vs. reality: What’s the truth behind some common gardening practices?

Reality can get skewed when there are so many sources of information - books, magazines, newspapers, nurseries and, most of all, the internet and social media open up lots of room for contradiction. So, how do you find the right answer for gardening questions?

Experts from Oregon State University Extension Service stepped up to bust some common gardening myths. Read on to get some research-based answers to 10 common misconceptions.

For additional questions, call the OSU Extension master gardeners in your area or submit a question to Ask Extension, an online question-and-answer service. Providing a photo is important.

MYTH: Lime will remove moss from your lawn.

REALITY: Lime will not fix the problem. Moss prefers to grow in wet, shady conditions. Lawns with moss need more sunlight, i.e. trimming, pruning and thinning trees. If you like the trees the way they are, you will continue to have moss and you should think about shade-tolerant alternatives to grass. Moss also grows well in infertile soils, which includes acidic (low pH) soils, but more importantly it also includes nitrogen-deficient soils. Lawns, like a lot of cultivated plants prefer nitrogen-rich soils. Regular fertilizer applications (four applications per year, two in the fall and two in the spring) with products containing nitrogen, combined with improved sunlight will result in a green, dense lawn that can out-compete moss. – Alec Kowalewski, OSU Extension turf specialist

MYTH: Ponderosa pine needles make the soil more acidic (low pH).

REALITY: The notion that pine needles change the soil pH so that nothing will grow or that it will damage plants has been out there for years. The truth is pine needles do not make the soil more acidic. It is true that pine needles have a pH of 3.2 to 3.8 (neutral is 7.0) when they drop from a tree. If you were to take the freshly fallen needles (before the needles decompose) and turn them into the soil right away, you may see a slight drop in the soil pH, but the change would not be damaging to the plants. For those that leave the needles on the ground, they will begin to break down naturally and the microbes (decomposers) in the

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Transforming chicken manure into fertilizer

An international collaboration between researchers from Brazil and the United States has identified a process for turning poultry waste into a soil additive for agriculture.

“Several countries have large poultry production, especially United States and Brazil, where agriculture is also concentrated,” says Aline Leite, a Post Doctoral researcher from the Federal University of Lavras in Brazil. “So, reusing a global residue generated in large amounts is an interesting way of promoting a circular economy.”

The researchers harvested poultry manure from an experimental site in the United States, which they heated to turn into biochar, a carbon-rich substance that is used as a soil additive to replenish critical nutrients like phosphorus.

“We are focused on understanding mechanisms that are responsible for increasing phosphorus availability in materials like manure,” says Leite.

Poultry manure is full of calcium and requires higher temperature treatments to turn the waste into biochar, however, these higher temperatures can have an effect on the amount of phosphorus available.

In order to ensure that the biochar contained sufficient available phosphorus, the researchers enriched it with another mineral, magnesium, which protected the phosphorus from the heat and enabled it to form more soluble forms of phosphorus.

Using the IDEAS and VLS-PGM beamlines at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask), the researchers were able to visualize the connection between phosphorus and magnesium and confirm the success of their technique.

Their findings were recently published in the scientific journal, Chemosphere.

While phosphorus reserves are found across the globe, the nutrient is a finite resource. Finding ways to recycle the mineral is an important issue for scientists.

“There’s no excuse for not using the phosphorus that is already in the food chain, for example, by reusing the waste that is already generated,” says Leite.

Leite says that synchrotron technology is essential for research into agricultural applications.

“This technology is extremely important for agriculture because it helps determine the concentration and forms of elements that are essential for plant growth,” says Leite. “By accessing the distribution of elements and understanding potential impacts, it gives us a great perspective for sustainable agriculture. The effective use of this technology in the study was only possible due to an international collaboration with researchers of different backgrounds.”

Leite’s study was developed at Cornell University, and carried out under the supervision of professors Johannes Lehmann (Cornell University) and Leônidas Melo (Federal University of Lavras, Brazil).