permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Toby Hemenway wrote:

> I would minimize contact with any animal waste until it's been thoroughly
> composted. Bird droppings, for example, can pass a host of diseases.

There are millions of tons of useful livestock waste created each year.
Look at all the different methods of composting this material that are used:
Indore, the one used by the Austrians using sticks for aeration, cold 
composting,
BD composting, anaerobic digestion, anaerobic + aerobic digestion (using 
Elaine Ingham's techniques),
the typical aerobic windrow process with predefined dimensions and periodic 
complete turning
and irrigation and the plain backyard compost pile with a diversity of 
ingredients.

And there is sheet composting where limited quantities of raw manure are 
applied evenly over land and
either initially or later lightly tilled into the top 2-6" of soil, depending 
on the lay of the land and slopes involved
with manure possibly washing away and ending up where it is not wanted in 
greater concentration than desired.
This always seemed to me to be the easiest and most effective way to amend farm soil with livestock manure as only the 
simplest equipment is required. An ideal scenario:  horse, mule, goat, cow, poultry, sheep and rabbit are spread over
hay fields and garden space and in orchards. Cover crops are planted in those areas. Crops are scythed and left in place 
to decompose. More manure is applied over these areas, more cover crops are planted to be scythed and left to rot. This 
cycle could be repeated endlessly and in rotation with staple crops to build some of the finest soil imaginable. Of 
course, spreading quantities of rock dusts, rock phosphate and greensand or azomite at the time of each application of 
manure would produce the best results.

If you have equipment and have a large quantity of rock dust on hand then mixing it with manure in 25% rock dust/75% 
manure and shaping it into a pile to compost or applying it immediately to the fields is an excellent system.
This can be done in the backyard or on a large scale involving hundreds of 
tons.

What do the Cubans do with livestock manure other than make vermicompost with 
it?

Debate over which composting method is best has gone on for decades yet 
effective and reliable methods have been used
around the world for thousands of years with variation based on climate, lay of the land, equipment available, types of 
manure, soil types and crops grown, and the need for sanitation and disease prevention. The Japanese collect toilet 
waste from urban households and truck it to sites where it is dried (and I assume biologically broken down/composted) 
then recycled back to gardeners and farmers as fertilizer. Does the process they use involve sheet composting? Is the 
sludge spread thinly over land to dry out and break down to be collected later for redistribution?
You always hear that root crops, if not most vegetables grown in "night soil", using this humanure, is not to be eaten 
raw, but cooked. Most traditional staple Japanese and Chinese cuisine is cooked and very little is eaten raw. It would 
seem that humanure could be composted and made safe to use in production of crops that are eaten raw.

I advocate adding rock dusts from quarries to batches of compost, regardless of size. The microbes always get a diet of 
fresh trace minerals this way, not depending on available manures and biomass, some of which may be mineral-deficient, 
for total mineral nutrition

What do you think is the best way to make nutrient-rich, sanitary compost 
when the primary ingredient is manure
(human, cat, dog, ruminant and fowl)?