blue power
Member
- Location
- Staffordshire
Compost?
- Thread starter Hobbit
- Start date
I am running some trials on a solution to practical large farm scale application this spring - will keep the forum updated with progress
damaged
Member
- Location
- Gloucestershire
@ajd132 . I too, am wondering how to add wood to my N rich big heaps of dairy cow fym after listening to Joel on Monday. I have a dung spreader and an 8 ton tracked digger but manpower is limited. I used to just compost fym on its own, still good stuff but better if it was suited to AMF rather than bacteria.
- Location
- Bedfordshire
Do you mean wood as in wood waste (pallets, builders waste etc..)? or as in green compost ?
damaged
Member
- Location
- Gloucestershire
Woodchip or green waste will do but chip higher c:n ratio which I need to offset fym. Guess I could buy some chip for bedding
you wouldn't want (or be allowed to I expect) spread any treated wood on land
- Location
- Bedfordshire
Hence my question !!
- Location
- Bedfordshire
That would make it easier, is it much more expensive than straw?
damaged
Member
- Location
- Gloucestershire
Any unprocessed (except cutting) wood, ideal being bark chips or pellets. No idea of costs.
Cost prohibitive now, too many biomass boilers about...we used to be able to get woodchip for the cost of transport only from green waste people, all that Leylandii etc, it wouldn't compost easily so they were keen to be shot of it and we'd bed the outdoor corral with it, much cheaper than straw. Now it's £80/ton or so
- Location
- Leicester/England
You wouldn't, I'm just taking up the cudgel for a client regarding this.
damaged
Member
- Location
- Gloucestershire
£80 per ton ! I guess I'll just have to add green waste compost which is £5 / ton but not as good for fungi food.
Farmersdaughter
Member
- Location
- Gloucestershire
Anyone thought of growing the higher carbon component to put with FYM to make more fungi dominated compost. We have some very big hedges on the farm, they have not been cut for a long time. I have been thinking there is tonnes for brash there that could be chipped and added to compost. We should probably start doing something with hedges as although I think a big hedge is great for wildlife these are now too big. We pollarded a large number of withy trees in our meadows a couple of years ago and had brash piles as big as a house, they got burnt and I now wish we had chipped them. Not sure how the cost of chipping stacks up against buying in wood chip.
clbarclay
Member
- Location
- Worcestershire
Last monday a neighbour had a meeting looking primarily at composting. He had worked out a figure of £12.50 per ton for home made wood chip, but I don't have a break down for that figure. He is into a lot of grants so it may have included a pollarding subsidy. A significant cost though was chopping, including the hire of a 12" capacity chopper and the time taken. It was a fair size chopper, but he reckoned on only about 16 ton per day output, so labour cost is significant.
This year Ive brought wood chip from tree surgeons to add to cattle fym, in the past my compost, (windrowed and turned with a compost turner) always went wet sticky and anaerobic. This year after adding x4 14tonne grain trailer loads of wood chip to 600 tonne of fym, my compost has made a lot better. I Paid £80 per trailer load and tipped it onto the windrow with a grain bucket. Its just chipped green tree and hedge cuttings.
I buy in the FYM, but if you had your own cattle it would be better to chuck it in the bedding as it would have longer to break down.
I find the weather has a big impact on compost making, if its too wet or dry its a struggle. Im not prepared to water my compost as I do not have the time or the infrastructure to do so, but doing this would probably help.
So its taken me three years of owning a turner to be able to produce something that vaguely resembles and smells like good compost, now im going to look at making it more fungal, I think putting it very close to or ideally in a woodland would help a lot with this. The trouble is the time and cost of hauling around large amounts of material.
I buy in the FYM, but if you had your own cattle it would be better to chuck it in the bedding as it would have longer to break down.
I find the weather has a big impact on compost making, if its too wet or dry its a struggle. Im not prepared to water my compost as I do not have the time or the infrastructure to do so, but doing this would probably help.
So its taken me three years of owning a turner to be able to produce something that vaguely resembles and smells like good compost, now im going to look at making it more fungal, I think putting it very close to or ideally in a woodland would help a lot with this. The trouble is the time and cost of hauling around large amounts of material.
cozzie
Member
- Location
- Munster, Ireland
This is my first year trying composting so Im a green horn. I have a few big heaps of very rich FYM that have being out in the fields since about 1st of feb, I turned them a month ago but I assume the FYM is too rich in N and not a whole lot happening. So is it a case of adding carbon to the heaps to get things moving? If I was to mix in horse stable waste which is sawdust that I can collect locally would this speed up the process and make the whole heap more aerobic. What sort of quantities would I want to be adding. Could I mix it 4 to 1, Fym to Sawdust. Ideally I want this stuff ready for spreading around July/Aug
I would defiantly add some horse muck/ wood cip or saw dust. Whatever you can get it will help stop it turning into anaerobic slop.
I don't think you need that much to make a big difference.
90hp farming
Member
only just read this post, but have been thinking similar. I do some hedge laying in winter which generates a fair swath of brash. want to have in the local unimog and chipper to have a go - no idea how much chip it might produce and would need him to call in when passing to keep costs down. my other thought, similar to yours, is that instead of regularly flailing hedges - leave them for say ten years and then someone invent a harvester to chip the growth and take them down to four foot again. if you did this rotationally around the farm you could have a good mix of hedge growth stage, and I bet one chipping wouldn't cost any more than five flailings plus you have the chipped material.