Joel Salatin talks compost

another stair step come forward another stair step once we come all the way out here then we go next door and pull it out of the back end and restart a pile over there using this material again so we use a lot of extra carbon um because of the sloppiness of this material and um and we go through two cycles in order to use all the carbon up we've gone through three before Dan and I have this running Feud about three I like three because it really gets it down to humus but three sometimes it's so decomposed sometimes not enough carbon left to really do the job and so they yucky spots so um so I'm fine with with the two it's okay what's the time cycle time cycle so it'll it'll take us uh it'll take us goodness um you know three months uh two or three months to build this out and so the first stuff is everything pretty much decomposes to nothing within about 60 days all right and so then you um so then you can go through another cycle but we generally don't spread it it usually is a 12mon kind of cycle start to turn to to you know to second injection reusing the carbon and and second injection and then and until it finally gets spread we're not in a hurry it's okay all right so to start you put down about 12 in of uh 12 Ines of carbon and uh the 12 in of carbon is going to is going to uh give you a nice a nice uh pack and then to keep the edges all pushed up here so it's saucer shaped so we don't have any blowouts because this stuff is pretty uh pretty soupy as they say all right and um so we the the the edges the saucer shape keeps it away from the edge so you don't have a blowout you know where a posum or a raccoon or some vermin's going to going to uh come into it now if you guys will step aside enough to let um Justin come in with the guts and we'll drop those in and do this backe off the room so normally of course that that whole front and loader would be full so this is just you know a very small demonstration okay now you come on in that's great Okay so so then so then we then we'll spread this out on it and as we do we'll make sure we're careful to keep our saucer shape okay keep our edges up so we don't have anything blowing out so on a normal processing day when you're doing 600 500 that's still enough big enough of an area oh yeah oh yeah yeah uh now obviously if we do you know if we do 500 Birds you know we might come up 12 to 18 Ines or if we have a cow that dies or a pig uh that's often a question you know what do you do with it well everything goes in here know excuse me you cut the not normally I'm too lazy we just dump her right in here you know make her make sure her feet are sticking to the inside or whatever but then then of course you're going to put a pile of chips you know if the cow is this thick you know you want to you want to have her you want to have that covered up you know half half as much as the the uh thing itself and she'll just decompose right down to nothing and of course whenever I do whenever I do tours Bon and all um well yeah if the cow goes in Her Bones go in too we don't debone [Laughter] her um now there was there was one time when we cut when we cut one when we cut them up and that was several years ago some this will be in in another book sometime uh and the chapter title will be when 911 calls you you know you're in a rough day 911 called us and we'd had a we'd had the cxx railroad had been working on a on a crossing over near one of the Farms that we rent and had not closed the gate and our cows um uh got into a weak spot in the fence got onto the neighbors the neighbors was where the crossing was nine of them got down on the Railroad and Amtrak ran over nine of them fortunately didn't derail nobody was hurt you know that would have really been exciting but we had nine Dead uh big steers out there on the railroad they picked them up for us and we brought them home we took the saws all and whacked them up into pieces so we could stack them that would have been a lot to to of course they were already in pieces some of them um but anyway it's funny you know kid course you know when when when uh you know when eight-year-olds were around here of course little boys are always picking around these piles you know they're fing little chicken legs and you know different things and of course you know inar be one of them here comes a head a cow skull you know and boy then or you know some jaw bone or something then walking around and they got this big trophy carried around all day you know and I I've often wanted to uh to get to one of these biology um biology for for biology teachers you know where they have skeletons and different things and get a human a plastic human skull in the edge I have these 8y old kids and they go to rooting around this kid you know just see eight-year-old boy rolls out a human skull oh you freaks oh Uncle George I wondered where he went for a couple months you know be sued for emotional [Laughter] trauma rodents pums those not a problem at all not a problem at all and I think there several reasons one is one is that that it's got some it's got some confinement around you know it's you got to you got to really want it and most of those kind of verman are are pretty lazy they're opportunist you know they they they walk a lot and they just look out you know kind of look around and uh and and so the the wire and the stuff you know it's it's a little bit confining secondly there's a lot of heat here uh you dig in here just just a couple of inches and um and it's hot I mean you know 140 150 deg so that tends to be a deterrent number three what do you smell and we're standing here amidst you know thousands of pounds of guts blood guts feathers you know I know there's a couple dead pigs I think there's one dead steer in here a couple weeks ago when you have a thousand head you know you're going to lose one once in a while and um but I can eat lunch in here okay and it's that smell that attracts you know they're attracted to the Vermin the smell is what's attractive to the Vermin and then beyond that uh there's a lot of people here and uh these interns and apprentices they stay up all night you know they they just they're party animals they just they never go to bed so they're just running around and a lot of them um you know carry sidearms this is the wild west here we encourage Firearms here so U so you know uh verman is fair game here and the big dog Michael you know will will pick one up and kill it once in a while so there's a lot of lot of activity going on but but no that's not been a problem and and uh rats are generally they generally come in with with grain so the pigs are the pigs the pig feeder is actually more attractive to Vermin than this is and U and that's one reason why when we when we clean out the pig the pig bedding you know sometimes we'll have some some excitement with some big rats in there with with uh Pig B the kind of material here you can see this is wood chips there are numerous kinds of material we prefer the wood wood chips the best we've used straw and old hay but those those are hard to get um uh they're not Frable and so you get these blow holes these these you know channels of of stuff that goes out and um and that you you just can't you know you just can't fill all the voids with with hay and straw and things like that corn fodder sawdust is kind of heavy and um uh pretty dense and so it has a hard time getting enough oxygen and tends to get too hot and Fir Fang uh of course also the the the carbon is a lot higher in sawdust it's 500 to1 wood chips with some leaves in it are down in the 200 to1 so you get a much better CN ratio because all obviously the material we're putting in here is primarily nitrogen um and you want to see in ratio of about 30 to1 in order for it to work well and so we're already struggling with too much carbon because we're using extra carbon because of the sloppiness of the material we're putting in and um and so it's a it's a little bit dicey one nice thing about the concrete floor is that we can honestly look at anybody and and and there's no lead shap you know that's always the big Le Leake and so by having on a concrete floor it puts its way of above board as far as any regulations or any you know whatever compliance permits um anybody can come and see well there's no juice you know and so it's it's a very clean situation other questions anything yes you have to worry about fire here I you got like Heat and Fuel like is it ever a concern no no yeah do you add any water to this or is the guts enough moisture the the gut it's pretty sloppy actually it's pretty sloppy and U yeah I mean this morning was not a fair I mean imagine that front loer full of blood and and just you know it's I mean normally when you're when you're doing this kind of final spread out you know you have trouble not sinking down into it you know it's it's it's it's like walk on whatever mud okay uh so it's pretty wet and then and then uh once it once it kind of cools down then we go through a second cycle again and do it all over again you know uh probably ideally there'd be a sprinkler on it you know once partway through but uh you know you can refine yourself to where there's just not enough time the day to do everything so so you know we we so we we are very um aware that we make a rough compost but a guy that would handled did the compost for sh grow company which is an organic uh fertilizer compy in fact 30 years ago came down and we were walking around and I was apologizing for our rough compost finally he stopped me about the third time he said but you don't have to apologize for anything said the stuff that we that we sell it's all you know screened and and done you know we Moisture Control we temperature control we turn we inject water we've got air Raiders you know all this stuff you know we're selling to a high-end market for f soil and stuff that's got to be completely ready to go right now he said your stuff's just as good as ours except the soil has to continue to work on it for a year well what's time to an Acton no by you know he's not in a hurry and so he said you don't need to apologize you're feeding the soil the soil biology is is breaking it down and making it look like ours in three times a time but that's okay who needs to be in a hurry so uh that really kind of cured me from being being embarrassed about rough comp you know look the thing is you don't want your nitrogen to evaporate you want to have a sanitary hygienic way to handle it you want to get a fertilizer benefit out of it and other than that you know if it's a little as long as it'll go through the Manure Spreader you know who cares and where do you put most of it where do we put most of it out on the fields this we put where we don't mow hay because cow skulls and things like that don't go very well in a hay B but uh but this we put where we don't don't make any hay there was one other question yeah well now when I was doing this it was much smaller scale so I was out there day the only time this gets turned is when you move it the only time it gets turned is when we move that's yeah it'll uh it'll it'll keep a it'll keep a pretty high temperature for you know three months yeah yeah it does in fact some of you I'm sure aware that some people you know coil up hose and you can put water pipe water hose in here we did that one time when we used to have it down right by the we used to have it right by where we where we processed chickens and um then we moved it but when we did it there one time we actually did take a bunch of garden hose coil It Up In Here cold water went in one end 140° water came out the other end pretty cool

Channel: Jeff Gray

Views: 390,229

Keywords: Joel Salatin, Polyface, farm, compost, mulch, wood chips, organic, green, agriculture, carbon, soil, polyface farm, meat composting, composting meat, joel salatin compost, farming, joel salatin farm, wood chip composting, mulch composting, simple compost, offal, offal composting, composting offal

Id: 5-O4ONVI4LE

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2015