My neighbor just gave me a large dump truck load of cattle manure from his feedlot. Mostly produced this past Spring with about 15% hay mixed in. I would like to let it sit in the pile and apply it next Spring. As I go to a farmers market and some people tell me not to apply then due to pathogens?

if you compost it out a year should be no issue

mix it with your leaves this fall , pee on it a few times and feed it a beer and you should get it steaming if you can keep it 104 internal temp for a week = no pathogens

time or heat kill pathogens that can harm humans

you can compost your own feces if you let it go a year or a week at >104 2+ weeks is better

You're getting "advice" from people that don't know anything other than headlines they read on Facebook. Unless you're throwing raw manure on plants, and then eating them unwashed, it's a non issue.

It's best if you can turn the pile a few times over winter. But even if you can't, spread it on next spring and til it in. No worries.

even if you never put even one human turd in your compost pile , this is a good read , very well researched composing knowledge.
https://humanurehandbook.com/contents.html

Let it sit and make some heat then use it.
Turning a few times like stated is best.

Keep away from growing potatoes cause the will be full of scab on their skins.

This would be my perspective. The manure is already 4-6 months old and a reasonable portion being non manure OM. (Hay) To me applying now and letting it start to breakdown in the soil before freezing and building up related soil organisms etc. will give you a head start on next spring. Sure it will be more composted next spring but it will take longer for the nutrients to match the soil organisms for breakdown. It won't be compost,but then setting it in a pile for a winter won't make it a lot better compost either. Mother nature deals with all the leaves and vegetation etc. that comes in the fall and starts that process for the next year. I don't see much value in waiting. The manure won't be fresh either way for the plants next spring, what works best for you?

Bryce

Be ready for a lot of unwanted growth. I did the same thing and all kinds of seeds from the hay and seeds from what the animal ate grew uncontrollably in my garden. Maybe if you compost it long enough the seeds will die

If you leave it in a pile and not turned and low heat the seeds will survive better than if in the ground. Any annual seeds that sprout in the fall won't live the winter.

Bryce

Thanks for the replies.

1 more gardeners opinion. I am in northern Michigan. I use cattle manure, darn near right out of the steer. I do apply it to my garden about 4 inches thick. I do this in the fall, about now right after I pull the frost killed veggie plants. I put the manure down then cover it with my fall leaves up to a foot or more thick. Why? It insulates the ground, frost if it penetrates at all is minor. The worms and microbes work it all winter under our foot or more of snow that lasts till spring. I can dig down through snow, leaves and dig soil in -20 F temps. By spring manure is almost gone into soil. I till early as ground is thawed as soon as snow is gone. I cover my potatoes with a thick layer of leaves, I dig them all through winter. Another plus is all the night crawlers and manure worms for spring trout opener. Uncovered ground will freeze hard up to 40 inches deep here.

Do yourself a favor and read up on composting. Knowing about aerobic and anaerobic bacterial breakdown of the composting material, the temps generated in each phase, the effects different temps have, how to go between phases, etc is important. I used a lot of horse manure generated this past winter in my garden this summer. It resulted in a lot of unwanted weeds because the winter was so wet I could not get the pile hot enough to kill the weed seeds. If you don't get it hot enough the weed seeds won't be killed. Get it too hot and you will burn out the nutrients.

My grandfather cleaned out the mule stables every year and we spread it in his gardens, He had great gardens.

If you can find a dairy farm close to you that uses anaerobic digesters, see if they will let you get a load of their solids as that process kills almost all of the bacteria and a huge amount of the weed seed. Also manure from these size farms will have far less weed seed in the feed and the manure then more conventional and smaller operations that feed large amounts of dry baled that is later cut and or oats which typically has far more weed seed in the grain than corn, especially corn grown the way it is now.

Bryce

do you plant winter carrots to harvest all winter like you do the potatoes. I here they are outstanding

Bigfoot , are winter carrots already gown by first frost or do they grow over the winter in total darkness under a thick layer of leves ?

the potatoes are grown , and harvested then placed in a pit to form a natural refrigerator.

dig a pit line the bottom with straw , layer in potatoes and straw till the pit in nearly full then a final thick layer of straw then dirt mounded up over the top.

Feeding grounds has modified this centuries old storage method to his climate and available carbon source

I have heard of carrot boxes with sand or even keeping them in the dirt in dirt floor basment.

is this s similar storage method to the potatoes?

A lot of good comments and advice in the above posts. Putting raw manure out on a field and letting mother nature take its course is called sheet composting. In my 40 plus years organic farming the only issue with that is you can pick up new weeds that are hard to eradicate. Over the years I have brought in at least 5-6 new perennial type weeds that continue to bedevil me. My father before me brought in symphillids in a load of manure that on occasion still give us heartache.

Pile composting and getting the pile turned several times will take care of the issue if the carbon/nitrogen ratio is correct. A good compost pile should heat up to 140 or better. Pathogens and weed seeds are cooked between 95-120F.

As noted in a spot above, getting earthworms to feed on the manure is great because their activity helps aerate the soil etc etc

If organic some tools you can use for weeds and manure are.
1 Use manure from sources that use less bedding and dry forages. Fermentation does offer some weed seed control.
2. Get solids from places that give you digester solids or solids from anaerobic storage as that lessens weed seeds a lot as well.
3. Plan your garden and rotate so you have sections that you can plant later or harvest earlier. This allows you to spread in the fall earlier and you can till those sections multiple times in the fall and also in the spring in areas where you plant later. Tillage is hard on organisms but allowing seeds to germinate and tilling them eliminates them from the seed pool.
4. Mulching or laying down protective layers of fiber or plastic will create enough heat to germinate the seeds and with no sun they will die, so over time the weed seed pool declines.
5. If you have a village near by that collects all the leaves maybe you can get them to mulch them and drop them off or you get some. Lay that on top of your garden at a depth you feel comfortable with. Then rake out your rows and lay down some garden fiber and slit and plant. Weed seeds will be much less in the leaves and also as they germinate the top of the mulch will dry out and most weeds will die off. Then in the fall work that mulch into the soil and put new leaves or OM on the next spring. We have heavy clay around us which means we have very heavy mineralized soil with organic matter percentages in the low 2 range so all the organic matter we can get in the soil the better.

Bryce