Making compost - tips please!

[Beef farmer]

That would be the best bet, more straw for the pigs, would they benefit and fatten faster? With current planning regs, convert another shed and house more pigs if they pay? As there won't be many new sheds built anytime soon

 

[Spud]

That would be the best bet, more straw for the pigs, would they benefit and fatten faster? With current planning regs, convert another shed and house more pigs if they pay? As there won't be many new sheds built anytime soon

We're not particularly tight with straw now, but it certainly won't slow them. Another pig shed on the way, got pp this summer.

 

[Devil's advocate]

Wowzers.
Just spread your dung. Adding cost and work to make compost out of fym is the most absurd thing I've heard. Why?

composting can kill weed seeds & fungal disease spores on the straw.

 

[e3120]

As often occurs there is conflict in 'best practice'. At a defra workshop in the spring targeting ammonia emissions, all the chat was of piling it as high as possible, covering with a sheet and incorporating it 'raw'.

Acidification of slurry was also favoured. I don't think either do much for soil health.

 

[ollie989898]

It's a trade off between retaining the nutrients in it, emissions of ammonia and getting the stuff broken down into a more friable (and less offensively smelly) form.

If you leave muck for two years it will rot one way or the other and be nicer to spread. If you turn the heap a few times it will rot down aerobically and be nicer to spread.

My concern is the more you rain on it and the more you disturb it the more of the available nutrients will be lost.

If you are able to take wood chip/bark or some other organic by product I would be asking for money for doing so, and more importantly, I would be very concerned of any ferrous or plastic content it may have.

I would be more inclined to compost and mix the material if I was getting big volumes of high carbon stuff like paper, bark or sawdust delivered in. This stuff needs to be mixed with actual muck to get it to break down properly.

I would aim to cover a significant acreage of any arable area each year, of course it depends on the following cropping and weather. For significant tonnages I may even consider a proper spreader and throwing it on from tramlines.

Of course the beauty of solid materials is that they can be stacked for years if necessary.

 

[Drillman]

Imo the best and cheapest thing you can do to improve FYM is push it up into a big tidy heap as soon as possible after tipping in the field. Less surface area to volume like that and allows it to heat up and rot down into something more powerful per ton faster.

leaving it scattered across a field a trailer load at a time is the worst thing you can do.

 

[Devil's advocate]

Imo the best and cheapest thing you can do to improve FYM is push it up into a big tidy heap as soon as possible after tipping in the field. Less surface area to volume like that and allows it to heat up and rot down into something more powerful per ton faster.

leaving it scattered across a field a trailer load at a time is the worst thing you can do.

opps,

sheer necessarity here, sadly.

 

[Midlands Farmer]

Interesting thread!
it’s got me thinking if I’m doing the right thing or not, we spread approx 800t of cattle fym each year but half of it is from next doors farm (muck for straw) however a lot of the muck from him is woodchip based so we try and mix it with straw muck (a 360 stacks heap as we tip)
Normally we make two heaps as tall as possible as to minimise field area damage, and I liked the way the heaps gets hot so it kills blackgrass seeds? But now I’m worried that the heat isn’t good for bugs etc, in theory I could turn the heap but there would be a large cost and a larger field damage area and I’m wondering if it’s worth it? Ideas welcome!
Thanks

 

[le bon paysan]

Please open and read the attachment in post 5

 

[N.Yorks.]

I am looking at the potential of making compost as a soil improver, partly to get more benefit from the muck on the farm.
I've done a little reading, but need to do more. Malcolm Beck seems to be a man that talks in practical terms, think I'll have a read of his book.

Currently we produce about 1200t of fym per year, due to rise to 2000t within a year, all straw based
We have some grass that we currently make hay of, that potentially could become a compost ingredient
Bark peelings are available locally at sensible money
Limex a likely addition?
Adding more straw is also a possibility.

What is unclear is the C:N target - some say 1:1, some say as much as 30:1 Carbon:Nitrogen ratio.

Some say muck is a carbon source, some say its a nitrogen source.

I don't want to create a lot of work and worry for nothing, but would like to maximise what I have got.

Thank you

Why do you think composting will get you more benefit from your muck?

 

[Spud]

Why do you think composting will get you more benefit from your muck?

I was exploring how to get the same benefit from less tons/ac applied - thereby lowering transport costs and allowing more acres to receive the benefit.
Why compost? Lots of dd people seem to use it, and some potato growers. It's a means of utilising fairly cheap potential soil amendments

 

[JCB_JCR]

After spring turn out we try to stack the dung from the shed in the shed if we can. This reduces the volume considerably and makes it lighter and much easier (faster) to spread later. Saves time and diesel

 

[ollie989898]

I used to work on a place where we would tip loads all winter in fields (headlands) and then push the lot up later when we could get around to doing so with the telehandler. Obviously being in a big heap high up meant less rain went on it and it minimised the area it took up and the mess involved. Of course heaping it up introduced air into it and the stuff would be steaming and red hot in no time afterwards.

The main benefit was that it was more friable and easier to spread with less lumps. Done properly I could see how you could apply this to grassland with no issue.

In fairness the application of any material and then ploughing it under makes utterly no sense when you think about it. Better to plant your crop and sprinkle the stuff on afterwards. This is something I have done a lot of when contracting in the past.

 

[N.Yorks.]

I was exploring how to get the same benefit from less tons/ac applied - thereby lowering transport costs and allowing more acres to receive the benefit.
Why compost? Lots of dd people seem to use it, and some potato growers. It's a means of utilising fairly cheap potential soil amendments

Ok. By composting, the microbes that do the breakdown are respiring and releasing some of the carbon in the feedstocks and a chunk will be lost as CO2 to the atmosphere. Don't you really want that carbon to be in the soil to feed the microbes which are part of the soil 'food chain'? By giving soil fauna the carbon they'll then in turn contribute to nutrient cycling in the soil and help maintain a better soil structure etc. (they'll also release CO2 but will also have been contributing to soil health)

There's nothing wrong with compost but in FYM you've got a great material.

I'm trying to get my head around why you'd grow grass, dry it for hay then process into compost to apply to arable land (i'm assuming arable, apologies if wrong!), my first thought is that seems to be inefficient somehow, couldn't you get that grass through an animal first?

Graph shows you that by using FYM winter cereals yield slightly greater than greenwaste compost etc.

http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/WRAP_DC-Agri_research_summary.pdf

There's nothing stopping you from mixing your other organic materials with your FYM and spreading it at the same time.

 

[Barleycorn]

Hope I'm not letting out official secrets but on a recent BASE webinar with Frederic Thomas in France he said that you would be better off putting dung / slurry on cover crops rather than composting, as you lose a lot of ammonia in the composting process.

 

[honeyend]

I am looking at the potential of making compost as a soil improver, partly to get more benefit from the muck on the farm.
I've done a little reading, but need to do more. Malcolm Beck seems to be a man that talks in practical terms, think I'll have a read of his book.

Currently we produce about 1200t of fym per year, due to rise to 2000t within a year, all straw based
We have some grass that we currently make hay of, that potentially could become a compost ingredient
Bark peelings are available locally at sensible money
Limex a likely addition?
Adding more straw is also a possibility.

What is unclear is the C:N target - some say 1:1, some say as much as 30:1 Carbon:Nitrogen ratio.

Some say muck is a carbon source, some say its a nitrogen source.

I don't want to create a lot of work and worry for nothing, but would like to maximise what I have got.

Thank you

Am I missing something? I know people do muck for straw, why not do muck for hay, but sell the hay and charge them to take away the muck unless it straw or straw pellets, or even get them to deep litter your bark chippings.

 

[Spud]

Am I missing something? I know people do muck for straw, why not do muck for hay, but sell the hay and charge them to take away the muck unless it straw or straw pellets, or even get them to deep litter your bark chippings.

I was meaning grass as a compost ingredient, rather than hay, taken as an early first or late second cut (the other being the hay cut)
Hay goes to horse folk and suckler men, and in both cases best sold rather than swapped. The bark peelings are available to buy from a local sawmill.

It may be a crackpot idea, (if so it'll get shelved) just exploring a few ideas.

 

[Spud]

Hope I'm not letting out official secrets but on a recent BASE webinar with Frederic Thomas in France he said that you would be better off putting dung / slurry on cover crops rather than composting, as you lose a lot of ammonia in the composting process.

I think the most likely way forward is to bed the pigs a bit more generously to produce more tonnes of muck with a higher c:n ratio, and make the effort to heap it up more than we do in the field. And forget the compost idea

 

[Spud]

Ok. By composting, the microbes that do the breakdown are respiring and releasing some of the carbon in the feedstocks and a chunk will be lost as CO2 to the atmosphere. Don't you really want that carbon to be in the soil to feed the microbes which are part of the soil 'food chain'? By giving soil fauna the carbon they'll then in turn contribute to nutrient cycling in the soil and help maintain a better soil structure etc. (they'll also release CO2 but will also have been contributing to soil health)

There's nothing wrong with compost but in FYM you've got a great material.

I'm trying to get my head around why you'd grow grass, dry it for hay then process into compost to apply to arable land (i'm assuming arable, apologies if wrong!), my first thought is that seems to be inefficient somehow, couldn't you get that grass through an animal first?

Graph shows you that by using FYM winter cereals yield slightly greater than greenwaste compost etc.

View attachment 927724

http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/WRAP_DC-Agri_research_summary.pdf

There's nothing stopping you from mixing your other organic materials with your FYM and spreading it at the same time.

Thank you for that

 

[Chae1]

Thank you for that

Could you take grass cuttings and wood chips, leaves etc from landscape gardeners and tree surgeons? A farmer we contract farm on is a tree surgeon and takes the above waste from other businesses. . He pushes it up into big piles and composts it for years.

I'd think it would be good stuff mixed with FYM. He puts it through a screener and sells it to gardeners for £50/t so he won't give me any for farm land!

It smells amazing stuff.