[Market-farming] Another Cotton Burr question

Steve Diver steved at ipa.net
Wed Feb 13 09:58:47 EST 2008


West Texas Mark - 

"Back to Earth" is the compost facility/brand in West Texas 
that composts cotton burrs.  So you could learn a few things
by listening to those guys.

The bottomline is that farm-scale composting follows
tried and true methods for "how" to build and manage
compost piles and windrows for C:N, moisture, temperature,
feedstocks, microbes, organic matter humification.  In 
addition, there are a half dozen practical methods for 
turning large piles with tractor setups.  

In my way of thinking you would greaterly benefit from getting 
into composting to increase the organic matter content of your 
soils and to enhance the biological activity of your soils.  

But you don't need 4" of compost. Now way, Jose.  You can
eventually manage organic managed farms with a quarter-inch 
or an eighth-inch.  If you could make enough for a 1-inch 
application to get started that would be awesome, but you 
don't need more than 2 inches of compost and certainly not 
4 inches... which could plug up your soils digestion system. 

Much of the horse dooky you read about "inches of compost"
comes from urban horticulture where neither scale of application 
or cost of purchasing does not matter.

You can learn what you need in a nutshell among these three
items on farm-scale composting:

Farm-Scale Composting 
ATTRA-NSAIS
http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/farmcompost.html

Compost Production and Use
John A. Biernbaum and Andy Fogiel
Department of Horticulture, Michigan State University
http://www.hrt.msu.edu/course/HRT491/Compost/CombinedCompost.pdf

The Art and Science of Composting 
Leslie Cooperband, Univ of Wisconsin
http://www.cias.wisc.edu/pdf/artofcompost.pdf


To explore practical ways that farmers manage compost
piles with tractor-based equipment, feed mixers, augers,
manure forks, and gadgets, check out back issues of 
Farm Show on CD-ROM: 

Farm Show magazines 
http://www.farmshow.com

The bottomline is that you can increase the capacity of
your soil with biology management.  This includes
composts, compost teas, cover cropping, microbial
inoculation, organic amendments, and related practices 
that exponentially increase the bio-effect of the rhizosphere.  

That's what Texas needs, not more Roundup-Ready GMO cotton 
and Roundup-Ready GMO corn that is propped up with synthetic 
leaching commercial fertlizers and sprayed with herbicides.

Sincerely,

Steve Diver
Austin, TX 







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