How to make a 'cow fertiliser' - a fermented organic fertiliser

In this video, you will learn how to make a microbial fertilizer using cow dung, urine, and molasses. This is an excellent fertilizer to make if you keep animals. You can also use other animal dung instead of cow dung. We'll follow the same method that Lifeworks uses to teach trainers who work with farmers and community groups in five easy steps. Today we are going to make a liquid microbial fertilizer using cow dung and cow urine. It's cheap and easy to make, and gets you really good results on your farm. To make the cow fertilizer, you will need the following equipment. A 200 litre drum, either new or used. You will need a stick to mix the cow fertilizer. If you're buying a secondhand drum that comes without a lid, you will need a net to cover the drum, and you'll need something to tie the net onto the drum. For your ingredients, you will need about 20 kg of cow dung, either fresh or dry. You will need 20 litres of cow urine. You will need 2 litres of sugarcane molasses. And finally, you will need 2 kg of flour. Today we'll make 200 litres of this fertilizer. A farmer with one acre, which is just under half a hectare, needs 20 litres of this. The process takes five days in all. It's simple to prepare in one easy step. The five days are needed for the fermentation, which allows the microbes to breed. Right, let's put our ingredients together. I've already put in 180 litres of water, which is about 9 jerry cans of water in here, which is up to here in my drum. Next, I'm going to add all my ingredients into the water. First, I'm going to add in my cow dung. Next, I'll be adding my 20 litres of cow urine. Now, I'm going to be adding my 2 kg of flour. For the flour, the best flour to use would be any pulse flour. That would be green gram flour or a bean flour. If you don't have that, you can use maize flour or ordinary wheat flour. Finally, I'm going to add my molasses. Now that all my ingredients are in the drum, I'm going to mix it well. Now, I'm ready to cover my drum either with the lid or the net. And once that's done, I leave it aside for five days and it's ready to use. Before applying the fertiliser on your crops, you need to dilute it in water. The recommended dilution rate is 1 to 200. As most of us use jerry cans, this means we need five capfuls for one jerry can of water. We use it at least five times during the crop cycle. For land preparation, for seed preparation, we apply on the ground when you see the first plants coming out, then when you see the first flowers and finally, when you see the first sign of the harvest, which would be the small fruits or vegetables. Farming is all about finding out what works and what doesn't. At Lifeworks, we train farmers and trainers to test how the microbial fertilisers work on the crops. We suggest you set up a trial plot to see the difference the fertilisers and compost makes. You can also download a data recording sheet from our website. Today, we showed you how to make a microbial fertiliser with animal dung, urine and molasses. Take a look at our other videos to see how you can improve your crop yield with other microbial fertilisers and an organic compost that is ready in just 18 days.