Dave

As stated above, compost the manure with a good carbon source and you should be fine for flowers; for food crops let the compost cure longer to insure all antibiotics/hormones are dealt with by the composting process.

IMO, sometimes "common sense" can get us into strange situations too...

Blutranes

He ones lived in Brighton, just outside of Denver Colorado. He ones went to a feed lot to get manure.
After putting it into the garden, nothing wanted to grow anymore.
He knew a fellow who worked at this feed lot and told him about his disappointment.
The answer was this....
These animals are being fed something out of a bag, [outside the bag has a print, skull, with bones across]
He said, he would never get any manure from this feed lot, allot of terrible stuff are being fed.
My friend mentioned, afterwards he realised, when picking up that manure from a old pile, nothing, absolutely nothing
grew on this pile, not even a weed.
Konrad

Kim (may I call you Kim?), what do you mean by long enough for those antibiotics to dissipate? Where do they "dissipate" too? And what do you base this off of?

Kim is right about the fact that some antibiotics seem to be uptaken by some plants. The biggest immediate problem is that some people are allergic to those antibiotics and allergies are often triggered by very small amounts of an allergen.

Personally, I wouldn't use manure from anywhere that overuses antibiotics like that. They pump stuff that is banned for human consumption into animals people eat. It's proven that many of the antibiotics don't break down and we end up consuming them anyway (in the meat and the veges treated with the manure). The CDC supposedly has pretty compelling evidence of links between infections of resistant bacteria and the use of antibiotics in the animals the infected have eaten. There is a reason the World Health Organization, American Public Health Association, and the American College of Preventive Medicine have condemned the use of antibiotics in animals that aren't ill. Personally, I find the people responsible for pretty much wiping out the most deadly pathogen in the last several hundred years (small pox) to be worth listening to.

Has anyone read "The Omnivore's Dilemma"? I'm currently reading it and it just got into the conditions on a feedlot and why the manure is most definitely not to be used as a fertilizer and is considered toxic waste. The author is a journalist for the New York Times. Michael Pollan.

It also goes into the antibiotic issue, which I just read last night after typing my previous post. Ironic that this thread comes up while I am reading this book.

The book isn't some book that is promoting vegetarianism. At least not so far. I have only read the first 150 pages of it. It is not a book about the cattle industry, either. He follows a bushel of corn through the entire process from planting to making it to your plate at home. This includes how it becomes feed and thus meat on your table, dextrose for your coke, fructose for your syrup, flakes for your breakfast, etc. He mentions the antibiotics because of the fact that many of them wouldn't be necessary in the first place if cattle were fed what cattle evolved to eat: grass. He goes into detail on the digestive system and how corn affects the cows digestive system in ways that cause serious damage that leads to infections. He doesn't dwell on animal cruelty. He dwells on the perverse changes to our food that are affecting our national and even world health so that some companies make a huge profit. In actuality, I'd say this book is more a statement against big corporations and government screwing over the American Farmer and using our tax money to do it than anything else.