One should not necessarily be blithe about distributing fresh vs. aged poultry litter, if one takes to heart the findings of this study:
“Centrifugal spreader mass and nutrients distribution patterns for application of fresh and aged poultry litter,” W. D. Temple, M. Skowrońska, and A. A. Bomke [pictured here], Journal of Environmental Management, vol. 139, 2014, pp. 200-207. (Thanks to investigator Marcin Klejman for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of British Columbia, Canada and the University of Life Sciences in Lublin, Poland, report:
“Poultry litter (PL) consists of chicken or turkey manure, feathers and bedding material which is typically wood shavings, sawdust, wheat straw, peanut hulls or rice hulls…. A spin-type centrifugal spreader was evaluated using fresh and aged poultry litter… Relative to the aged litter, the broadcast fresh litter resulted in higher coefficients of variation (CV) over its transverse distance, a narrower calculated space distance between passes for uniform spread and lower soil available N [notrigen] concentrations…. [Our] results suggest that poultry litter should be allowed to age before broadcast application is attempted.”
Here’s detail from the study:
