Use Caution when Fertilizing with Raw Horse Manure

Be aware of the hazards associated with using raw animal manure–including horse manure–to fertilize gardens.
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For home gardeners, spring is a busy time of year and there’s never a tomato with more flavor than one grown to full ripeness on the vine. But there are also many safety precautions to follow to prevent contamination of fruits and vegetables with pathogens that cause serious foodborne illness.

Michele Jay-Russell, DVM, MPVM, PhD, Dipl. ACVPM, a veterinarian and research microbiologist at the Western Institute for Food Safety and Security and program manager of the Western Center for Food Safety, recently co-authored a study that highlights the need to be aware of the hazards associated with using raw animal manure to fertilize home gardens. The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Zoonoses and Public Health.

The basis for the study began in July of 2010 when a Shire mare from a rural Northern California farm was brought to the University of California, Davis, William R. Pritchard Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital for treatment of colic. Following protocol, the veterinarians on call screened the horse for Salmonella to avoid infecting other horses during hospitalization. She tested positive and after successful treatment for colic, went home. Her owners then notified the veterinarians that some of their other draft horses were sick as well—all eight were tested and six came back positive for the same Salmonella Oranienburg strain, including the mare that still had the infection.

Jay-Russell heard about the case from her colleague John Madigan, DVM, MS, Dipl. ACVIM, professor of medicine and epidemiology at the school. The farm’s owners invited Jay-Russell and Madigan to the farm to see if they could uncover the source of the Salmonella infection. They sampled water from horse troughs, manure storage piles, wild turkey feces, and soil from the family’s edible home garden, where raw horse manure had been used as fertilizer. Each of those locations had a percentage of positive samples over the sampling period from August 2010 to March 2011

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