A Simple Composting System for Small Farms | Four Winds Farm

foreign [Music] hey nerds farmer Jesse here so we are officially kicking off our summer farm tour Series today with no-till farming Legends Jay and Paulie armor of Four Winds Farm in New York talking about their super simple super productive organic compliant composting system Jay and Paulie are where I took the inspiration for my own static aerated compost system but theirs is designed around the use of a tractor and front end loader and can do well over double the amount of compost that mine can so hopefully between the two videos you can see if this system would be right for you and how to build your own the first few minutes are a bit about the history of how this system came about followed by the nitty-gritty details of how it works also there's a really fascinating tidbit about chunky compost in there it's worth listening to anyway last thing you know how I'm always like you can support this work by becoming a patreon member or buying a copy of the living soil handbook or merch at no tollgirls.com will this series is a direct result of that support and we were able to send my partner at notogailgros.com Jackson roulette up to the east coast to film some of the best no-till farms in the country that's real you did that so thank you now without further rambling for me here's Jane Paulie armor a Four Winds Farm hi I'm Jay armor I'm poly armor we're co-owners of Four Winds Farm in Gardner New York in the beautiful Hudson Valley we had a friend who was an itinerant grass-fed beef farmer and he had a herd of beef cattle but he did not have land he he rented a farm he rented land from other people for his his cattle and he needed a place to put his cows for the winter and at that point we were still making hay and we only had a small flock of sheep so we always made more hay than we needed and didn't have enough manure and we said hey we'll we'll keep your cows for the winter in exchange for their manure and two of your babies and so that's what we did and we ended up with with all this cow poop I mean one large cow is 50 pounds per day per animal we thought wow this is wonderful um we also realized how wonderful cows are as animals I've always been afraid of cows because they're big but you know after having them and feeding them every day and interacting with them and realize oh they're better than sheep the sheep run away from you but the cows come up to you the Sheep are hard to keep in and the cows you can keep them in with a single strand of electric so we ended up uh buying this person's cows from them because we just love them and that was another turning point for the farm was getting our own our own herd of cows we started collecting their manure we learned all about raising them outside on on pasture and we started getting manure from a horse farm to mix in with it so because calmador is pretty Gloppy by itself but when you mix it with horse manure and the shavings are straw that are usually with horse manure it makes a really nice mix and compost well so we were doing you know just I think what you would call static pile we'd take take the cow manure mix it with the horse manure put it in a in a pile and just let it sit for a while um and you know keep an eye on it and all that but then we'd turn it after weeks or months we'd turn it once or twice and the following year use it on the garden and then Jay well what what happened was in the early years the the organic regulation wasn't uh really solidified as far as definitions between compost and manure we are a certified organic operation and so the certification is important to us maybe some of the people don't know what the the rule is when you're making compost if you're using a static row um you have to turn it up a minimum of five times over a 15 day period and maintain the temperature between 130 170 degrees um there's a another way you can make compost and that's with a forced air system and with that you set it all up you pump air through the pile and you need to maintain that temperature between 131 degrees and 170 degrees for three days and that's it you don't have to turn it or anything like that and so um I started scratching my head trying to figure out you know how can you get that how can I get there you know three days is a whole lot better than 15 days especially you don't have to turn you don't have to turn so that was my challenge was trying to figure out how to do that and so one day I went online and I looked at you know yeah Googled compost some of them it's like oh I could do that you know it's just a series of pipes on the ground and a fan pushing air through the pipes and I knew that somewhere in our barn you know there's always right yeah always something in your barn that you can find for whatever project you've got in your head and so I knew somewhere in that Barn we had a fan that came out of a an old Greenhouse that was used for a heating system in a greenhouse hooked it up to pipes and laid it out in the barnyard and put the manure on it and turned it on and you know fan was running constantly because that's the way the picture looked and the pile did not heat up then I found out that the reason it didn't heat up was because I was moving too much air through the pile and what I needed was a timer to turn that fan on and off and while talking to somebody I learned that I could get the exact timer that I needed from a hydroponic supply store that they use that sort of thing for hydroponic systems for circulating water and so I got one of those and I put it on and I set it up and sure enough the pile heated up and I thought well this is great and that's how we make compost now in terms of where what was this seven or eight years ago I started doing this the way I'm doing it now is the same way as I was doing it back then um the the issue with the fan uh the fan is what they call a Duct Fan uh used in forced air I mean uh it's a squirrel squirrel cage fan so you could you could scab one from like an old uh forced air furnace but the the problem with the duck fan is that ductwork is rectangular and pipes are circular so I had to go from this rectangular opening to this circular pipe that I use underneath the piles and so I got a short Square bucket cut a round hole in the bottom and I put uh I made a tapered pipe out of the funnel sort of a thing yeah out of the side of an above ground swimming pool sort of rolled it a certain way and put a big hose clamp around it and stuck that into the hole and the other end into the four inch pipe that I used for the circulating the air that's what I did seven years ago and that's what I still have so I I mean I could modernize the whole thing if I wanted to but yeah they probably make I'm sure they make pieces of duct work that would negate the need for the Cobb job but the cob job works fine so I'm up with it you know we have the squirrel cage fan which is in like an old dog house to protect it from weather and from that fan comes the the bucket and the and the above ground pool stuff and so forth going to just four inch PVC you know schedule schedule 40 schedule 80 PVC it comes out and then it splits uh into a sort of a manifold so it comes out and you can do we've done as many as four yeah four lines coming off it right now they're about would you say three feet apart two feet apart yeah about three feet three feet apart so it comes out and it splits the the numbers are arbitrary yeah there's no Rhyme or Reason Why scale it to the space that you have and how you access it so these these four inch pipes come out they have holes drilled in them about every four inches six inches apart we use you know rigid schedule schedule 80 now I guess we've moved to yeah I guess that's the one one big change yeah you move from when I first first did this I used the the white perforated pipe yeah sewer and that just collapsed from the Heat and the weight of the yeah the manure being piled on it so I use a schedule 80 now yep so he he sets these up uh on a bed of wood chips and we get the wood chips from you know the power company or when we have tree work done here we just stockpile them so he lays down a bed of wood chips and has the pipes laid out parallel to each other about three feet apart and on top of that it starts to pile the horse manure the cow manure whatever Garden waste we have yeah we truck in horse manure from a nearby horse farm and I mixed the cow manure in with the horse manure you know I'll dump the horse manure in the in the barnyard dump the cow manure there pile it up a little bit let it sit for a little while and then I mix it using Forks on the tractor mix that up a little bit and then I dump that on these pipes and he he does it what about six feet tall yeah as far as as tall as I can make it really with the bucket loader you'll you'll see our tractor the equipment we use for this is the tractor with the bucket loader attachment and the forklift attachment that's all we use um and that's really all the equipment we use on the farm too yeah pretty much and uh so he builds it about six feet tall which is about the amount you can comfortably dump with the bucket loader that we have and it's I guess about 15 feet wide 28 feet 28 feet long each section is 14 feet okay pipe a pipe so I've got two sections of pipe so that's 28 feet 28 feet long by the widths of the thing and that's that's it the and the the blower is plugged into just a standard house current coming out of the barn and he builds it and within how many what a day or two two days it's up to temperature right now it's that I think 162 or something and you built it yesterday three days ago three days ago um and so there it sits for as long as we leave the thing on usually it's about 15 days yeah you know I keep records for three days because that's what I'm required to do I usually write the final temperature when I take that apart and put a new pile on there just for my own interest um the first pile that I made this year I didn't get around to doing the next pile for a month but I mean it can't hurt it to stay there longer than two weeks or whatever yep so it sits there until I get to it yep but it's it's a great system because it's pretty much set it and forget it as far as how long to keep it on or off I I read it somewhere I don't know where I got the information from was told three minutes on 20 minutes off okay and the neat thing about this particular style of timer is it's called an app tart timer and it can be set so that it goes on for three minutes and then it goes off for 20 minutes so the the numbers are are sort of arbitrary but the really neat thing is that I can look at the temperature of the pile and you know if it's getting too hot increase the amount of time that that fan stays on to cool it down some so you know the a good starting point for anybody would be three minutes on 20 minutes off but then tweak it yeah look at what your temperature is and make adjustments accordingly yeah another another question that I get a lot of times is uh what happens in the winter time you know because you sort of think well uh you know summertime is it's warm out um it's it the air temperature is not affecting the ability of the pile to make heat what's what's making the Heat or the microbes that are in the manure if you give them the right amount of oxygen they'll get really excited and do a lot of work in there and produce the Heat and produce the hand the energy the Heat and so it really doesn't matter what temperature that oxygen is that's moving through there generally when I do this during the winter it'll take maybe three or four days to get up to temperature rather than two days but that's about the only difference I think another important thing to keep in mind about our compost and um it's something I mentioned a lot to to um beginning Farmers that are trying a you know you know using their compost in a no-till environment um our compost is not screened so you know when it comes from the horse farm there's shavings in the manure there's hay that the cows and the horses don't eat that gets mixed in there so the the compost is very fibrous and that creates something a product that sticks around on the bed the reason we're putting it on the bed is to suppress weeds and when you purchase compost from a compost manufacturer they screen that compost they screen up for a number of reasons there's it's a trash that's in there there's sometimes they're using a lot of yard waste so there's branches and so forth that don't get fully composted so they want to screen that stuff out a lot of times they you know screen it out and they put it back onto the next pile that they're making so it eventually gets worked down but they end up with this these little pellets very very fine those pellets break down after about a month and a half so if you're putting it on your bed to suppress the weeds in May by July that's going to be decomposed decomposed to the point where it's no longer sitting on the bed and you lose the the weed suppressing the Moultrie respect of it of your compost whereas our compost sticks around all well sometimes it'll stick around two years guess the answer to how much do we need to make or how much do we make is never enough um we've used up everything I made last year for this year and we could use more what's our limiting factor uh my time your time yeah yeah it's and it's not that you don't have the time it's that you're doing other things I'm doing other things yeah you've kind of moved away from from much of the farming duties and are now semi-retired or trying to be trying to be yeah I mean we we could make more compost we simply don't well it means more hauling of horse manure horse farms seem to be popular around here and a lot of the horse farmers you know the their it's a waste product yeah it's a waste product for them they have to pay somebody to take it away and they're happy that I'll come along and take it away for nothing yeah we have a small trailer that we we take our dump trailer and we park it there and as they muck out they muck right into the trailer and they give Jay a call saying come take your trailer it's full and so he goes down there gets it brings it back and dumps it in the barnyard and we stockpile it there every time I move a pile I keep thinking I'm gonna count how many buckets I'm doing and then I get like halfway through and I lose count um reducing like 120 to 150 yards of compost during a in any given season this is the Barnyard and the cows are in this space during the winter and so we've got this um area of the barn that's open this this all faces South and so um it's sheltered from the north wind and it's gets the sun is low so it gets some sun and the cows are pretty happy here we feed them in the barn and they hang out there and they leave their manure in there and uh that's where we collect it so all winter long it gets piled up in there they pile it up in there and uh then this time of year I slowly dig it out mix that with horse manure that I truck in and then it goes on to the pipes here the 140 160. oh 158 157 I think it is pretty hot and that's about where I want it to be so what I do is I let it sit like this for about a week and then I actually come in here and I turn this with the forks of the tractor I um originally when I was making these piles I would build this up and then I would move a finish compost on top of the pile and that seemed like something you know I'm taking my finished compost from over here and putting on back on top of here and it seemed like a step that I didn't really need to do so I've gotten around doing that by just mixing this whole pile and put the forks on the tractor and I shove them in there and I lift it up and shake it and that mixes it up and that way I get what's on the Outside Inside what's on the inside outside and that uh gives me a more finished product yeah this is sort of like my staging area of the finished product but if you look at it there's there's a lot of substance to this stuff there's you can see the shavings from the manure you can see bits of straw still from the uh you know the hay that wasn't eaten a couple of Twigs from the poor quality of hay that came in some wood chips here's some wood chips because sometimes I'll scrape up the wood chips that are on top of the pipes but that fiber helps to create a you know a product that's going to suppress weeds and it's going to stay on the bed all season long over here this is like the remnants of what was what's left over from this year's so this is what that looks like after sitting for a year and you just dig into here with some nice material I'm hoping that oh there's a worm hoping to find more worms in here here we go sometimes I'll dig into your inches it'd be red with worms it's just beautiful and that's what goes on our beds all right like this video If you like this video if you are not subscribed to this channel hit the Subscribe button and if you are subscribed you're awesome you can always support more videos like this as well as the videos I make by going to notogurus.com and picking up a copy of the living soil handbook or a hat or just go to patreon.com Growers and sign up like I said this video series is literally a product of your support or you can always just hit that super thanks button that works too super thanks for watching we'll see you later bye [Music] um and it's it's wonderful to work at and I feel like I'm like I have to restrain myself from calling the staff over and say look at this look at the soil isn't this is flocculation see the tendency of the soil to form small Aggregates that's the organic matter holding the mineral particles together this is what we do this is why it is it's hard for me to not do that

Channel: No-Till Growers

Views: 82,765

Keywords: compost, compost making, composting, improving compost, regenerative, agriculture, small scale, no till, no dig, farming, gardening., garden, bug free, soil health, cucumber beetle, squash bug, horn worm, armyworm, cut worms, damage, no tillage, transition, organic, living soil, strip till, strip no till, grass paths, clover, forced air, composter

Id: bu9aYT7h5Gs

Length: 23min 48sec (1428 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023