Pumpless Liquid Manure Spreader

Pumpless Liquid Manure Spreader MANURE HANDLING Equipment 14-5-11 A gravity-filled, gravity-unloaded liquid . manure spreader lets Bill Patterson, West Baden, Ind., empty the manure pit outside his hog building with little expense or maintenance. Patterson paid $100 for a galvanized 300-gal. tank and mounted it on a home-built pipe frame that rides on a Volkswagen axle. He ran a 4-in. dia., 60-ft. long PVC pipe out of the bottom of the 1,500-gal. pit down to a 3-ft. deep, 6-ft. wide trench that he dug into the side of the hill. Patterson backs the manure spreader into the trench and manure flows by gravity through the pipe and into the fill hole on top of the spreader. "I built it because I needed a faster way to empty my manure pit without spending . a lot of money," says Patterson, a high school student who started his operation on a shoe string. "My gravity-based system lets me unload the pit in only two hours and requires no maintenance be-cause there's no pump. I checked out the prices of liquid manure pumping systems, but found that the cheapest one cost $3,000. I spent less than $200 to build my pumpless system. It would work on a larger hog operation if a larger tank was used." To unload manure from the spreader, Patterson opens a valve at the rear of the tank. Manure flows from an outlet pipe, hits a steel plate, and fans outward. A chain is used to secure the tank to the pipe frame. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Bill Patterson, Rt. 2, Box 65, West Baden, Ind. 47469 (ph 812 936-9560).

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