Horses and their connection to water quality!

The Illinois Horse industry is a $1.3 Billion dollar industry, and the highest concentration of horses in Illinois is found in McHenry and Lake Counties.

And every adult horse generates up to 55 pounds of manure every day. When you add in the bedding straw, that amount to 12 TONS of the stuff per horse per year.

When not managed properly, horse manure can increase flies and spread of parasites among horses. It can also impact water quality when not stored correctly. And that can mean excess nutrients, bacteria and parasites in local streams or even in the groundwater.

Now, one might ask "why don't the horse farms just spread it on the fields?" That's a good question! First off, depending on how much land one has, and how many horses, it could be problematic to spread that much manure on the fields. Second, many horses have round worms, and if their feces are spread on a field, the worms (a nasty parasite) can survive up to 10 years - so that's potentiall 10 years of round worm infections for the horses.

However, hot composting of the manure will kill most bacteria and parasites - provided the compost process is of a sufficient duration.

In Lake County, a waste hauler, Prairie Land Recycling & Disposal, collects horse manure from many farms and takes it to a facility called Midwest Organics that composts the material with other compostables. They bag the finished product, and it is actually sold at Whole Foods!

There is another option that has been developed by the University of Illinois Extension service: ManureShare. This is a manure exchange program that links gardeners and landscapers who are searching for good compost material with livestock owners who have excess manure.

Quoting from the website: This benefits water quality by removing excess nutrients from farms and by lowering the amount of commercial fertilizer used by gardenrs and others.

The Hooved Animal Humane Society (HAHS) in Woodstock is working with Extension to run a demonstration of on-site composting of horse manure. It will be interesting to see how the program works!