https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/herbicide-carryover
This is something I heard about a few years go and stsrted seeing crop up in forums more and more recently.
Imagine you carefully prepared your garden…brought in good soil (or were lucky enough to already have some)…added a few bags of manure…raked it all out …set up your planting areas…lovingly planted the seeds you spent hours researching…
Yipee! Baby plants! You dote over them. You take pictures and share them online for the world to see.
And then…at only a few inches tall your baby plants start to get curly leaves when they should be straight. Then they turn yellow! Next thing you know…they fall over and die.
What happened? Too much water? Not enough water? Wrong light? Someone dumped a bucket of straight urine on the whole thing? Blaming the cat? The dog? You know it wasn’t the goats or there’d be nothing left…
Turns out certain herbicides don’t just disappear after killing the undesirable plants in hay crops. And many of the plants for food happen to share the same family as the undesirable one. So, the chemical manages to pass through the cow, goat, horse, sheep, rabbit, etc digestive tract and stays in the manure.
Then when you hopped along and bought the store bagged manure…it was waiting. And destroyed your garden. Fun part? Everywhere you added manure will be useless this planting season and maybe a couple unless you want to grow hay in that spot.
And it’s not just store bought manure. Any manure can have this, even your own animals unless you don’t feed hay. The only way to know for sure the manure is clean is make your own hay for the ruminates…and that will take space and time. You can try to find manure from a ruminant raiser who feeds hay without herbicide in it, but it’s still a gamble.
I asked at a feed store if their hay had been grown with grazon… they had no idea and didn’t seem interested in finding out even after I explained why. As a small animal raising person, feed stores are my only way to get hay. This tells me how hard it would be to find “clean” hay unless you can store a semi trailer or more and go directly to a farmer.
The only way to slow this is to go the regulatory route and demand that anyone using these chemicals much clearly mark the bales so the end user knows its there…and then force commercial manure sellers to clearly label that their manure may have the chemicals in it and list the symptoms that will show if it is affecting plants.