Joel Salatin demonstrates how Polyface Farm runs their compost operation. They compost all their scraps including meat, offal, and carcasses from the slaughtering process. Filmed at Polyface PIDS 2015.
Great video. I appreciate that its still here. Also your patience with all the comments is commendable. I've learned a lot just reading the comments as well. Thank you
Actually I think that the noise is coming from the pigs getting into the feeder. If you watch the video the camera pans over to the pigs and you can see the feeder with lids on each section of the feeder. It was driving me crazy too!
The book is likely referring to a small composting system that won't get as hot and run by an amateur, so good chance of improper care - and attracting rats and so on. We also don't usually compost human feces...but then there are composting toilets and the Humanure Handbook. The simplest idiot proof method is - just veggies, no meat or human feces.
the thing about using meat in the compost... u need to cover that up be really shure no animal can find it or smell it.... i use quail feathers and his organs in the compost pile
if you're not in the city and you have fowl (or other omnivores i suppose), look into a fly-larve setup for small scale meat conversion. Mine is literally a 3.5g bucket (with lid) hung from a tree. Just drilled several holes in the bottom and up near the top, once that stuff gets to stinking, man the flys ABOUND! Couple days later larva will be pouring out. Don't use it continuously though, the smarter chickens will quickly become complacent by it and just sit under the thing waiting for bugs to fall out instead of grazing.
I thought that you were not supposed to put dead animals in compost...although i remember as a kid seeing dead animals in the woods or along the road/ditch and as they decomposed, the grass was always taller and greener. Great video!
If you are making compost in town it is often recommended to not use certain things like meat that can smell or attract scavengers that will dig up your compost and strew it around. The compost Joel Salatin is making is mainly so he can dispose of his dead animal parts as he butchers. Also, if you are spreading compost on your vegetable garden you don't want to use things that may transmit pathogens to humans. No pet feces or raw pork because of the chance of worms, for instance. I think Salatin spreads this compost on animal pastures, not vegetable gardens. And as others have replied, if you make sure the compost heats up enough it will kill the pathogens. Many backyard compost piles don't get hot enough because they are too small. The items will break down but pathogens won't be killed by heat.
@@oldauntzibby4395 I think it's more that the pathogens die out once their food source is depleted. If they didn't, ALL dirt would be unsafe for vegetable gardens.
Just bury the dead animals straight in your garden. It works like a champ. Dead animals and fish are the absolute best fertilizers in the world. Mukch over top and you got perfect growing soil.
The bones decay, but only over a long period of time. If you're wanting to get the compost back out on the fields within a year then expect there to be large bones in there. Which you'd need to avoid if you're putting it on a hay field because the bones can jam up the equipment. If you're dealing with small things like young chicken bones, they *may* decay within a year in an active compost pile.
I was getting so annoyed with the person I thought was flipping the lid.... until at 9:10 they show the pigs were doing it!! Then I had to forgive them... they're pigs...
just before 14 minutes he says "as long as it'll go through the manure spreader..." maybe idk what it is but how would any of this rough compost go through any spreader except by hand? curious
@@k_froggy We've been using maggot buckets since i was a kid. My grandma used them since she was a kid. We've put all kinds of things in there, chickens, all flavors of road kill, table scraps, gut piles from hunting and fishing trips. No issues to report.
I watched an interview with him saying we need more carbon in the soils and life. But I think he needs to be promoting biochar mixed with compost because manure and compost does lose nitrogen and things over time but the biochar can absorb it, and provide space for microbes.
No.... he said bones and all? This was after Joel said she decomposes to nothing. The guys was asking if the bones decomposed as well. Joel misunderstood the question... so did you.
Especially when he later said kids can find bones in the compost so they don't put it where they are growing hay as it jams the machines? Maybe he meant the guts they put on first decompose to nothing but the whole carcass still has bones left over?
You could call around to tree service companies and see if you can get on their radar for delivering wood chips. Unfortunately, I've found that that pretty much never works. Like, never. Tree service guys are too busy and can't (won't) keep lists of people close by to deliver to. If you want the stuff delivered for (mostly) free, your best bet is to stop a tree service crew chief at a gas station and offer (bribe) him $20 to deliver the chips at your place. He'll only do it if you're relatively close to where he's chipping. If you've got a pickup truck, almost every tree service has a yard where they dump excess chips (usually the county landfill has one of these, too) and they really want people to come and take the chips. So, if you don't want to pay for a gym membership, you can go hand load some free chips using a manure fork or ensilage fork. :D Other options are to get on Craigslist and see if there are any places trying to offload mountains of sawdust (like furniture companies or sawmills).
+tkjazzer It depends on what you want to read about. If you want a good overview of the whole sustainable food landscape and a book that evangelizes that method, then read "The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer". If you want a book that will encourage you-realistically-to go farm for yourself, read "You Can Farm". Those are probably Joel's best ones to start with.
I'd agree with Jeff here. I did alot of online reading of Joel's principles and watched alot of his videos on RU-vid and the likes, but after reading "Sheer Ecstasy" I felt empowered and excited to make changes and move forward. Great book, really! Cheers +tkjazzer
I read 1/2 of Sheer Ectasy. I like it. It is a good read. I have to cringe when he wanders too much in to science though. He's not a scientist! But it's a great book overall. Just have to cross out certain sentences... which I think is funny. He should get an editor who is both an organic farmer and a scientist
sci·en·tist- a person who is studying or has expert knowledge of one or more of the natural or physical sciences. Aren't most of us scientist? We all study natural and physical sciences on the farm. We just don't do it in a university setting. We may not have expert knowledge on everything there is to know, but many of us including Joel has expert knowledge on a good amount of what he does and the science behind it.
+tkjazzer Joel just leaves them in the compost. Then he puts them out on the fields via the manure spreader. As he says at 13:50, you put compost that will have skulls in it on fields where you don't mow hay, for obvious reasons.
If there were ever bones leftover, you could turn them into biochar. They make a great biochar. Then you can inoculate the biochar by putting it back into the compost which will be applied to the soil which will be able to store more nutrients, biota, etc. and increase soil fertility. You just gotta love how efficient nature is.
On your next video, please edit the audio to be loud enough, and then edit out any unwanted sounds, like the banging, which is louder than Joel. But thanks for the video.
+aaro neous I'm not sure. I know the intern quarters have composting toilets, but I'm not sure exactly what model they're using for those or if they put the intern humanure into these larger piles to degrade fully.
+Koo Laid When a person is dealing with the general public and the FDA it just can't be done. He would probably do it if he was just feeding his family. You can't give yourself a disease you already have, but you can spread diseases to others. Also, it's just too risky, if a food born illness was traced back to his farm it could shut him down.
Joel, I save human urine, which is sterile, and use that as a N source for composting and for liquid fertilizer. You have a lot of people, have you ever used liquid gold?
It's actually pretty normal to use urine as an innoculum for compost because it adds moisture and nitrogen. It's not normal in commercial operations, but it's pretty normal for homesteaders. If you're selling your produce to consumers or at farmers' markets or wherever, it's probably not allowable. One thing to watch out for is that you can't use urine tainted by medications (pharmaceuticals). They'll get into the compost and mess things up.
The old practice of "wassailing" from the Christmas carols; people would go from farm to farm singing in groups, being given cider or beer and they would pee on the fruit trees to help fertilize them for the next year.
"Carbon" is any kind of lignified or woody material. It's material that is mostly carbon (as opposed to nitrogen and water). When composting, it's sometimes called the "browns" (as opposed to the "greens", which are things like fresh vegetable matter, coffee grounds, urine, lawn clippings, etc.). So for instance, "carbon" would be things like wood chips, sawdust, straw, hay, peanut (or any nut) hulls, cardboard, old leaf piles, etc. In this video, Joel's combining wood chips (carbon) with animal guts (nitrogen). If you combine browns and greens at a roughly 30:1 ratio, you'll get a properly thermophilic compost pile. It'll heat up, pathogens and weed seeds will die, and the whole thing will compost in a few weeks. The trick is that certain browns and certain greens have higher or lower internal brown/green (carbon/nitrogen) ratios. So, for instance, sawdust itself has a really high carbon ratio: it's 600:1. Hay has a much lower ratio, 80:1. So when you're combining a carbon source with a nitrogen source, you'll have to add more hay to get the same thermophilic effect as you would with sawdust. Hopefully this is helpful and not overwhelming. :) There's a good article on C:N ratios and composting here: whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/fundamentals/needs_carbon_nitrogen.htm
@@karlp1117 Really cool! I thought it had something to do with disease or something. You learn something new every day! I just discovered "bokashi bin" composing. :thumbs up:
@@CaptCutler yes those are concerns, but just not if you are placing the meat within a system that will properly compost it. I looked at the bokashi bin you mentioned; it says it can take meat but I dont really know anything about the fermentation it is talking about. If it is okay to put meat in there, it is not okay for the same reason why it's okay to compost meat. I wouldnt feel comfortable using that or extracting a tea if I had recently placed potentially hazardous material in it until I knew more about the process.
I read something a while back that said meat is so full of nitrogen and decomposes so quickly that it can throw out the balance of the compost and turn it into an anaerobic mess. But as long as you put enough carbon in (like those wood chips) and manage any rodents it may attract then it is fine to compost.
This is the implementation of synthetic earth at every level. Carbon nanotubes and polymer coated proteins. Goldman Sacs quote - Synthetic is the new artisan.
If you butchered the animal, so you're the reason it's dead, that's fine. You may need to freeze it and feed it to them slower so it doesn't go off before they can finish it. But if you don't know what it died from, or you do and it's a disease, you could spread it.
Both of which are killed by proper composting. Although Joel's had his chickens tested and they don't even have salmonella in their poop. As Joel said, this compost goes out onto the fields where it fertilizes pastures. It's not going onto vegetable gardens. But I wouldn't worry about it either way. Animals poop and die in gardens all the time. It's something the natural system is designed to be okay with.
There's no smell in the compost shed besides the smell of wood chips. And considering pigs will eat each other I don't think they'd be particularly sentimental about a pig buried in wood chips in the stall next door. They'd mainly be frustrated that they couldn't eat it.
@@stacyyoust For instance, if a pig dies in the woods, the other pigs will come and eat it. Or a mother pig will kill and eat a piglet that's deformed (she decides somehow that it's not fit for survival). It's actually the same with chickens. They're omnivores, so they like meat and they'll scavenge it if it's reasonably fresh. My point is that pigs don't have the squeamish sensitivities that we have.
Its like watching a needlessly complicated machine, Look at all this infrastructure and land used, just to deal with animal waste from animals that also use tons of space... You could just eat plant products and use aggressive cover cropping and green cover cropping with good crop management and rotation. Regenerative ag my ass, More like waste as much time/space/energy as possible ag.
SunRa I think you’re underestimating the work involved in a plant-based ag system. Plant-based almost always requires lots of tillage, which is always destructive to soil. It also requires greater use of fuel and machinery due to the tillage. But fundamentally it doesn’t build topsoil nearly as quickly (if at all) as using animals. There’s also the issue that a plant based diet just isn’t going to cut it nutrition- and calorie-wise for most people. Especially in developing countries, their use of animals is the quickest and most effective way to get both calories and soil fertility. Plus, kids never run up to tomatoes and hug them. Animals add a level of wonder and joy to farming that pure plant ag lacks. And they taste way better than veg. :)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA... What are the names of your many books that you've written on the subject? Do you have an internationally recognized LOCAL farm? How many interns do you employ every summer? Do they come from every corner of the country? Let's see some credentials beyond 3 credit hours of Sustainable Ag.
You have never attempted to live off plants you have grown. If you did you would quickly realize that humans are not herbivores and cannot meet their nutritional needs this way without ENORMOUS energetic inputs. Greenhouses, quadraphonic, and all this stuff requires tremendous inputs.
Actually, Joel recommends as little infrastructure as possible. His methods regenerate the soil. Plants and animals (and humans) evolved together. The plants feed the animals and the animals feed the plants with what they compost inside their digestive systems. Even if you have a plants-only farm, you'd have to put some manure on it or some sort of fertilizer or the plants won't grow well. An all-plant-based diet requires some supplementation or we omnivorous humans don't get everything we need. In regenerative agriculture, the animals live nice lives, happily munching on the foods they love and were designed to eat, and then they feed us after a humane end. This is much better than how corporate agribusiness is done. I hope you at least will appreciate that.
