The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Smallholding => Techniques and skills => Topic started by: Small Farmer on July 22, 2012, 09:26:52 am
-
Found this while looking for something else. In England this would of course be totally illegal unless someone spends half a million proving it works
http://www.sheepandgoat.com/articles/compostsheep.html (http://www.sheepandgoat.com/articles/compostsheep.html)
-
The theory of the method is widely proven but with a whole carcass? Surely cutting it up someway would speed up the process and you are still going to be left with bones. We are so strict with environmental health that there would be doubts about consumption of the foodstuff grown in the compost.
If the heat in the composting process isnt high enough to kill any pathogens this could go badly wrong.
A proper study would have to take place to convince me.
-
Half a century ago carcases were flung on the muck heap and mixed in by front loader. No attempt was made to prevent run-off, of which there was plenty. I'm not convinced that sawdust would prevent run-off of the large amount of liquid produced by a decomposing whole adult animal, although if it's in the middle of the heap it might just drain downwards - into the watercourse? I suspect also that the appropriate organisms needed for total and efficient decomposition would not be at home in sawdust. Proper burial underground would still be preferable, although in Britain we now have a good incineration industry. The potential fertility of decomposition is lost during incineration of course, but is preserved in both burial and this composting process.
-
There s chap in the states at Sugar Mountain Farm who does this with cattle.
-
that will be the guy that is raising pigs on grass and has everybody well nearly everybody (not me )thinking it can be done in the UK
in the old days the pigs were used as animal disposal
even if you did prove this system worked it would not be allowed in the UK :farmer:
-
So we take our fallen stock 20 miles to a rendering plant where it's incinerated. Just how sustainable is that? The nearest hunt kennels is 25 miles.
We've started a training programme for the local wildlife so they don't just die in the hedges like they used to but stagger over to a convenient spot where they can be collected for proper disposal.
-
small farmer i don't know where you get your ideas from but fallen stock in Scotland go to make bio diesel and other products it is farmers that have the incinerators that saves them the cost of disposal
i hope you have started the badgers and foxes first ;D :farmer:
-
Robert.
I'm probably wrong but I have a suspicion that an awful lot of deed sheep never make it to a any form of "official" disposal. For sure the on-farm burial of horses and cows has fallen dramatically, but smaller stock?
-
i am sure horses can be buried yet cattle cannot unless you are in the highlands and islands there is exemption for certain areas any animal that is not disposed of correctly that owner is in breach of two laws at least the wild dogs act and the disposal of fallen stock also depends if you are in a sea eagle area they are in before your time limit on disposal :farmer:
-
Not sure its ok to bury horses because Defra make a definition of pets can be buried but other animals cannot. So even if you keep sheep / horse as a pet then it needs to be disposed of using fallen animals legislation. (some scottish exemptions).
This also covers fallen chickens ( if i remember correctly). but not cooked or raw chicken carcass remains if you decide to eat them.
-
Presumably Defra also want to ban composting toilets.
We have a number of deep (c80ft) Victorian cess pits on our land which didn't get wet in the recent monsoon season - one reason why we had hosepipe bans upto a fortnight ago. One would really struggle round here to pollute a watercourse by burial let along composting.
-
Morning all,
Are there not small scale composting solutions that take all waste (meat scraps and bones included) such as, IIRC, Green Cone + others?
If they work on a smaller scale then could they not be up-scaled to do the same on a large scale so long as the contents were reduced to smaller physical individual parts? Just in the same way as composting a whole tree branch would take years and years but, reduce the size (chip it?) and it is composted quite swiftly.
Rgds
Sskye.
-
:thinking: I think I'd rather just get the knacker in than spend a day chopping a dead horse into little bits :innocent:
-
Round here you can still sell horses (alive) to the butcher!!! Ive already told my boy that and repeated it when hes in a bad mood
-
:roflanim: :roflanim:
-
Taboo subject I know but what exactly is the problem everyone in this country has with eating horses? A lot of good cheap meat goes to waste in my opinion.
-
Not everyone - I have eaten horse on the Continent and it was perfectly tasty. A reason for me not to eat it regularly, apart from that it's not available here, is that you don't know how the animal has been reared, how old it is or what meds it's had. There's also something a bit spooky about knowing you could be tucking into Jemima's little pony :eyelashes:
-
Someone I know has looked into getting a pony slaughtered and butchered for meat but has given up on the idea due to a lot of hostility from people.
-
There's nothing wrong with cultural objections. Our culture is what we are as a nation, though we seem to have got a bit nancy about eating offal in recent years.