- The next speaker we have is Adam Hady.
He is the Extension Ag Agent for Richland County.
And he's going to be talking about composting livestock,
mortalities, so with that I'll put Adam on.
Thank you.
- Thanks, Otto. As Otto said, my name's Adam Hady.
I'm the Ag Agent down in Richland County,
so I'm Otto's counterpart in the southwest part
of the state of Wisconsin,
and I'm here to talk to you today
about the successful methods for efficient and safe composting
of mortalities.
So basically we're all in the livestock business, right?
So unfortunately at some point in livestock,
you end up with dead stock,
so what do we do with dead stock?
So starting off here,
first thing we have to know when we do have a mortality,
we do have to have-- we have some obligation
and responsibilities for livestock disposal.
And I think we skipped over a slide here.
Yep. So in the state of Wisconsin,
we actually have a timeframe when livestock--
or our mortalities have to be take care of,
so it's 24 hours from-- in April through November.
So in the summertime, it makes sense.
We should get rid of these animals
in a more efficient manner.
We all know--we've all droven down the side of the road
and we've seen deer that have been hit there,
and they've been sitting there for a while.
We don't need that on our farms.
We need to take care of them in an appropriate manner.
However, we get into our winter months,
we get a little bit of a break.
We have 48 hours by state law
to take care of those animals.
We have a few options.
We have rendering, so the dead truck that comes through.
We have burial.
We have burning, landfilling, and composting.
So there's advantages and disadvantages to all of these.
And today we're gonna focus on composting.
The one method that does get used sometimes,
and I'm not saying that anybody in here would ever do that,
but there is what I call the "Back Forty Method."
Years ago, we used to drag 'em to the back corner of the woods
or the back forty, throw some lime on 'em
and let 'em sit out there
and let the scavengers take care of 'em
or the whatnot.
That is illegal.
We don't want to encourage scavenging on our property.
I mean, the next part of this conference today,
we'll be talking about predators.
And if there's a better way to start attracting predators,
it's by leaving our animal carcasses there.
Also, we want to make sure that we're not contaminating
any well or waterways.
And we want to make sure
that we're taking care of the mortalities
in a efficient manner because generally there's a reason
that they died, and it usually is connected
with some kind of diseased pathogen transfer,
and we want to make sure that we take care of that as well.
So we're going to talk about composting,
and composting isn't just throwing 'em in a pile,
we'll let 'em sit there, and it'll be taken care of, okay?
So composting is an aerobic recycling process,
so that means we're gonna use oxygen.
These are bacteria that, like oxygen,
they're gonna break down the organic material
so that the animal itself will be broke down
in a controlled environment,
so this controlled environment is really key
to the composting process.
How are we managing this pile?
There is work and effort into it.
It's not just throw it in a pile;
we'll come back at some point,
and we'll have the animal completely broke down.
But we want to end up at the end with a stable product
that we call humus
and that we can actually back to our fields
in a safe manner.
So composting really is bacteria farming, okay?
So we don't think, you know, we always think
of our traditional farming. We got our livestock.
We got our crops.
Well, when we're dealing with composting,
we're really looking at providing bacteria
with the environment to grow properly.
So we have these kind of three different levels
that we have our general bacteria,
and they account for about 80% to 90%
of the decomposition activity,
and they generate heat, okay?
So these are bacteria that love to live in warm environments.
They break down sugars, starches, proteins, and fats,
and start on the cellulose production--or breakdown,
so that really tough material.
We have the akino-- actinomycetes--
I am really bad at saying that word,
but we got through it, and so you'll see it
from now on I'll just say the A-bacterias.
They're another level order of bacteria
that help in the second step, so they start helping
break down some of that tougher tissue.
And then finally we get to our fungi state,
and it's very similar.
They start breaking down that cellulitic material,
so break down the bones and tendons,
all that really tough stuff in the animal.
So some of our advantages to composting is bio-security.
It's a quick, efficient manner.
We don't have the dead truck coming onto our place.
We don't have anybody else coming onto our place,
so we're not bringing somebody else's diseases there.
And we're taking care of our own issues in-house.
It's environmentally friendly.
You're not leaving--nutrients not leaving your place.
You're able to put it back out into your own farms.
When done right-- and I will stress this--
when done right, it's low odor.
So it doesn't have some of the associated smells
that we might think of
when we talk about decomposing mortalities.
Again, while properly managed, we can destroy the pathogens,
weeds, seeds, and other insect eggs,
so we can be using some of our older feed stocks
that we want to get rid of in this process,
and we can, you know, kinda kill two birds with one stone
and actually have a stable and a clean product
to put back out on our fields.
And again, provide stable nutrient
that can be returned to the farm.
There are disadvantages to it, though.
If everything in farming had pure advantages,
we'd be a lot better off, right?
So we gotta look what are some of the disadvantages.
There's definitely a cost to it.
The cost can be prohibitive, and it could be an advantage
depending on your management system.
Labor, as we look at things,
decide it's a controlled system, right?
It's a managed system,
so anytime you're managing something,
there's also labor that goes into that,
so we have some labor that we have to look at.
There's monitoring and maintenance.
Yeah, but don't just-- like I said at the beginning,
it's not just putting 'em in a pile,
and you don't look at it till you're ready to incorporate it.
And then finally, do we have space to incorporate it?
How do we incorporate the compost itself?
So that's kind of the quick and dirty of why we should,
but now let's start looking at the different elements
'cause we said it's a management system, right?
So in a managed system we have the separate elements.
So the first element that we have to deal with is moisture.
And, you know, we talk about the amount of water
that's in live tissue.
You know it's over 70% of the body's water,
so we have to manage this moisture.
But inside this total pile, we want the moisture to be
at about a 40-60% moisture range.
So if we have a pile that's too dry within there,
we don't get enough moisture for adequate bacterial growth,
so the bacteria don't have enough--
doesn't have enough moisture to grow and expand.
And if they're not growing,
we slow down that decomposition rate.
The flip side, we get it too wet, right?
We start to close the pores.
We said that we want oxygen in the system.
We start putting this into a--an aerobic digestion system,
so it's a whole different set of bacteria
that come into play.
We have slower decomposition time,
and then we can also start to get some odors
associated with the pile.
So how do you know--
are you going to take the moisture out there every time,
look at your compost pile,
see if you're at the right level?
There's kind of a rule of thumb, test feel.
Have you guys ever done-- taken a soils class,
and you used to make ribbons with the soil?
You could kind of do the same thing with compost.
You take a handful and you squeeze it, right?
If it doesn't come together-- clump together,
it's too dry.
If you squeeze it and there's water dripping out,
you're too wet.
But if you can make that nice-- just clump--
it's almost like the kids playing in the mud
a little bit, you know?
If they got something that they can make something out of,
that's about where you need it to be.
So we want to look at it just by that hand feel.
So we want just a little bit of water to come out,
but we don't want too much.
But this one is the real key to our whole process.
This is carbon/nitrogen balance.
It's said we're farming bacteria, right?
So these are the two elements of bacteria need to grow.
So our carbon/nitrogen are the two main ingredients,
and our optimal ratio is 25 to 1.
So the composting occurs as low as 10 to 1,
and as high as 50 to 1.
If we have high ammonia odors caused by not enough,
or too low of carbon/nitrogen ratio
within the-- within the mix.
So when we're looking at how do we manage this ratio,
what are some of the things that we need to look at?
So this is where we start looking at what we call
our co-compost or bulking materials.
So what are we making this pile of, right?
We know we have the dead mortality.
That's giving us what element?
It's giving us the nitrogen element out of our ratio,
so now we need to find what carbon sources to add to this--
to the pile to help with the composition.
So we need to A, provide carbon.
The other things that come into play with
what are you gonna pick,
is how does it give structure to the pile, right?
We need the oxygen to be able to get in the pile,
so we need some structure.
We need to provide a cover, a casting over this pile
so that we're not allowing predators to come in.
We also have a lot of liquid, right,
that's coming from the center of the pile,
and we don't want any leachate coming out,
so what are the absorptive properties
of the composting material as well?
So when we're considering what we're gonna put into the pile
for our carbon source, what is the availability?
What do we have available to us?
What are the costs to it?
Carbon to nitrogen levels,
moisture properties, and particle size?
So a structure becomes also important,
so the structure size, that quarter of an inch
to an inch is kind of where we want
some of the particle size to be.
And here we can see this is just a chart
that came from the "On-Farm Composting Handbook,"
but it just lists some materials down through there,
and their carbon to nitrogen ratios.
We look at typical things that we might find on-farm
that we might use for co-compost.
Anybody have a old pile of corn silage or something
that kind of got a little bit spoiled
that we don't want to feed anymore.
It's a pretty common one. That's 38 to 40 to 1.
We look at some of the literature.
A lot of people talk about using sawdust.
It's very absorbent.
We look at a 200 to 750 to 1.
Very variable depending on if you're getting it
dry sawdust versus wet sawdust.
So there's a lot of different things to consider here.
But as you're going through,
look at what the different carbon sources are,
and we have a lot of things like straw
and corn silage-- corn stocks, especially--
that are on-farm already that
might be cheap alternatives for us as well.
So as we look at those, we talk about the structure
because oxygen is very important.
The compost uses, again, an aerobic decay,
and so those bacteria and fungi need that oxygen
to reproduce.
They can get pretty low levels of oxygen.
We can down to about 5%
needed to keep the decomposition going.
And so when we start figuring out how are we managing this?
What are some indicators that our pH might be--
or our oxygen might be a little off?
As we start to get odors associated and low pH
with too little oxygen.
So if your pile really starts to stink,
we might look at--we might have to start aerating it.
The other thing is if we aerate it too much,
we can cool the pile significantly,
so it becomes a management system.
So we talked about pH being a little bit of an indicator
for our pile management,
so I want to be as close to 7 as possible,
with a range of 5 to 10.
But temperature is really gonna be our management measurement
as we go through the system, okay?
We want the heat ranges in the pile to be 110 to 150 degrees.
These are where these bacteria really like to work,
and this is where they--
the faster the pile reaches those temperatures,
the more efficient the composting becomes.
So as we measure these temperatures,
the pile needs to heat up to 131 degrees
for three consecutive days to kill pathogens.
And in a little bit later here, we'll talk about
managing the temperature and what that can tell us
as far as pile management.
So those are the key elements.
I just want to show you
some work that was done in Arlington.
This was done in 2001, 2002,
so it's a little bit older, but you can definitely see
how simple these structures really can be.
It doesn't have to be an elaborate
covered roof or anything,
but there's a lot of options here.
But what they did is they set up these different cells,
so they had four cells.
Cell one was just their feed stock,
so they were using sawdust. This was just a sawdust pile.
There wasn't really anything in there.
In cell two, they had a cow,
and they had it in the straw treatment.
In cell three, they had a cow in sawdust treatment.
And then cell four, there was a calf bin,
so then some mixing area.
So we're gonna look at some of the different data points
from that demonstration.
So this is just to talk about how fast
those piles can heat up, okay?
So as we look in here, this was a 1,350-pound cow.
It was placed in the pile at 8/7,
so at the beginning of August.
Well, ten days later at 8/17,
the temperature in the pile had already reached 133 degrees.
So it stayed above 130 degrees almost till the first part
of September, so 9/6 was went it
kinda started to drop down in temperature,
between 9/6 and 9/16,
so, really, we had this really nice, good month
of really warm, fast digestion, right?
And then the temperature kinda slopes down.
You can kinda see there by the middle of October.
You're sitting at about a temperature of 108.
So as you start to--
as that temperature starts to level off in the hundreds,
is when we're going to start thinking about
possibly turning the pile.
We'll talk a little bit more about that.
So this one was the calf bin, and there's two charts.
The top chart is actually the temperature chart
for the calf bin, just like we did with the cows.
And you can kinda see there's some up and down,
but it definitely has this nice shaped curve to it.
If you were to draw kind of a line through there,
you could see where it's nice curved.
And so the real comparison here that I want to highlight
is the bottom is the precipitation that they had
during that same timeframe.
So one of the concerns becomes, "Okay, yes,
"we get this nice heating. It's August.
But what happens during rain events?"
Is that cool--how much does that cool the pile?
You know, there was this big variations in swings,
depending on the external happenings of the pile.
So we can see in the beginning,
8/10, right away, kinda close to the beginning here,
there was an inch of rain, so--
if I can just kinda get my cursor over here.
If you guys can see this.
Going across here, you know,
here's about that 1/2 inch of rain.
So there's some significant rainfalls that are happening
on top of these piles during this timeframe,
and really had no real effect on the temperature
inside the core of that pile, so by building these pretty--
by using the right compost material
and having that structure, we can really maintain
those temperatures within the pile itself.
So they also logged what kind of bacterial growth
was happening in there.
So we can see--this was just kind of the time
going across there.
If we look, the dotted green line
is the temperature,
so we can see that we definitely had
some increase in temperature there.
So as we had that increase in temperature,
we also had that blue line kinda follow that green line.
So these are the populations
of that first level bacteria that we talked about, okay?
So they were doing kinda their thing right away
at the beginning, so you can see, you know,
we kinda get two little waves there.
And then it kinda matches up to fungi and the A-bacteria
that I talked about earlier.
They start to match up, and actually the fungi
grow a little bit better than our regular bacteria
to finish off that composting process.
So you can kinda see how those three tiers of bacteria
that we talked about at the beginning
work into the system in their growth patterns.
So this was that August cow in that sawdust pile.
So this was nine months later in May,
so it composted through the winter.
It was turned a couple of times.
But what you can start to see here is, you know--
get my cursor over here.
So we have a big bone here; we have a big bone here,
but there's no tissue to speak of, you know what I mean?
We're really now just looking at the bigger, harder bones.
So this was a 1,350-pound cow.
So it's not like there was a lot of soft bone tissue there.
We're talking about some harder tissue.
So we start to get some serious--
pretty much everything is gone except for the bones
are starting to get brittle at this point.
We can further put them into the composting process,
and some of the data that I've seen
shows that if you took this out to a full two years,
you wouldn't have even the femur bones left
with mixing 'em in the proper piles,
so we can get rid of them,
depending on when you want to complete that process.
So what are some of the equipment that we're gonna need?
We said it's managed system, right?
So we first have--the first thing we need to have
is some kind of equipment for loading and turning the pile,
so typically these are skid steers, front-end loaders,
some way that we can move carcasses,
move bulking material, mix the compost,
and turn it into a finished product.
The second one here is a 3-foot temperature probe.
Now, we want a 3-foot temperature probe
because we're making a fairly substantial sized mound, right?
So if we want to monitor temperature,
temperature's gonna be our key indicator
for how the activity--
microbial activity in the pile's working.
We want to get into-- as close to the center
of that pile as we can.
So having that 3-foot probe allows us to take temperatures
within the middle of the pile.
The second one-- or the third one up here
is a lancing tool.
So a lancing tool, well, why would you need this?
Well, as we're building the pile,
it's suggested that you lance the rumen
prior to completely filling in the pile.
Again, we've all seen that deer
on the side of the road in August.
You know how that expands
with the gases within the cavity.
If we lance that animal prior to that,
it allows for the release of the expansion,
and we don't degradate the structure of the pile itself
when gas built up, and it also encourages
faster decomposition because now we're also allowing
some of the rumen bacteria to move out into the pile as well.
A log book. Again, we said that this is a managed system,
so just about every Extension recommendation
will tell you guys that record keeping
is coming into play some point, right?
And we all know how much everybody loves paperwork,
but it really does give you an opportunity to monitor,
"When is my pile really starting to drop in temperature?
Is it time to aerate it?"
And if you have this log book, you start looking at the pile
and looking at different things for structure
and that type of thing.
And then there's just some miscellaneous tools suggested.
You know, if you do have kind of a composting area,
that maybe you have a set of pitchfork and shovels
and some of those things that are just designated
for that area,
so you're not dragging 'em to other parts of the farm as well
for bio-security.
So we saw some demonstrations,
but what do these structures really look like?
So the first one here is--
you have basically three different options here.
We have compost bins,
and these can be anything,
so you can see in the picture here
they've taken some old round bales,
made a little square, and this is what they're gonna use
for a bin.
Prior to my work with Extension,
I worked in the poultry industry.
We had some people there that were building
concrete-walled bins.
There's tub tumblers as bins.
There's a lot of different composting bins
that can be built, so you can put a lot of money--
you can put roofs and everything over them.
So--but basically a bin.
We're just taking a certain amount of area
that allows us to minimize the space
and actually build up within and contain the material.
We have static piles,
and so these would be essentially like this bin
except for we wouldn't have walls around them, per se.
And so these will just be a mound, basically.
And then windrow composting, this is typically what's done
if you had say more of a health--
a major health outbreak
where you had lots of mortalities at once.
You end up making, like, that static pile,
but it gets extended out in long windrow.
It allows you to manage multiple mortalities
as you move forward.
So when you're going-- if you're going to put in
some compost bins or piles or windrows,
there's really kind of this
long site checklist for facilities.
We want to avoid wet areas, right?
We want it to be kind of that high and dry.
We don't want anything spilling over
into our water streams, waterways.
We want to divert--
we don't want to be in the clean water areas.
Want to make sure that we're at least 3 feet above
high water tables, and I'm not real familiar
with the water tables up here,
but I did see a lot of water as I was coming in,
so my guess is there's certain areas in the county
that the water level's pretty high,
so you want to make sure that your hitting that
above 3 feet above the water table.
You want to put it 300 feet from streams, ponds,
lakes, or drainage areas.
Again, we're really trying to protect the environment
because one of the reasons we're doing this
is it does have a benefit,
but we don't want to make it a detriment as well.
Weather access.
So we talked about those big bones, right?
That was nine months to a year
that we're gonna have these piles on there.
And we have some management system
that we have to take care of.
So can we access where we're gonna put the piles
with our end loaders to turn the pile
if it needs to be turned in the winter?
Is it really hard to get to that place
'cause we have mud in the spring?
So we need to take in consideration
what is our access?
Do we have suitable storage?
So if we're using sawdust,
do we have some old feedstuffs that we're gonna separate out?
'Cause we don't really want to mix our feedstuffs
with our compost stuff by our feedstuffs
'cause we don't want to be co-mingling our--
and then running through areas to try to transmit disease.
Farm traffic in general.
You know, we kinda want to put these in an area
that they're kind of-- once we set 'em,
we can kinda let 'em be.
We can monitor 'em, but we don't have to run it 'em
on a daily basis.
Consider prevailing winds.
I don't know if any of you guys got neighbors,
but sometimes if the pile isn't quite working right,
there are some odors that are produced.
And we want to make sure that
we keep our neighborly relations.
And just the aesthetics and landscaping.
My guess is up with a lot of tourists driving through
to get to the lakes and waterways,
probably right next to Highway 53
is probably not the best place to have you composting piles
and your mortality issues out for everybody to see.
We just want to make sure that we keep it
aesthetically pleasing for everyone.
So we picked a site.
We've got all these elements that we're gonna look at.
So how do we construct it
to make sure that it's doing its job effectively?
So the first thing we do is we start with a base.
And we may be using different materials
for different parts of this,
so the base we want something that's gonna be
sound and absorbent, right?
'Cause the water's gonna leach down.
So this is what we're gonna put the livestock on,
the mortality on top of.
So we want about 24 inches, 18 to 24 inches of material
in a bed big enough that we can place
the mortality in the center,
and you have about 2 feet around that mortality.
So this is a considerable amount of material
that we're using,
so when you look at the total volume of those piles,
about 12 cubic yards.
So it's a pretty good size pile when it's all said and done.
The mortality, we want to place it in the center of that base,
24 inches from the edges, again,
and then we want to build this blanket or cover.
So there can be 12 to 24 inches over the top of the mortality,
and we want to make sure that we shape it, right?
So just before we're putting on this blanket or cover again,
we want to lance that mortality,
and then we want to start shaping this blanket or cover
and we want to use the co-compost.
Here we want something with a little more structure maybe
than we had on the base layer, so ones that come up here,
a lot of people use, say, some corn silage, for example,
becomes pretty popular, some sawdust,
some mixed manure a little bit in here.
'Cause we already have some added nitrogen.
We have some moisture.
We also have some start of the bacterial growth.
Also if you have continuing compost piles,
using a little bit of that compost
from one pile that's almost finished
is almost like a starter culture in the pile.
It really can help accelerate the pile itself.
So once we get the pile all managed, built,
we want to start checking the pile regularly.
I don't know about you guys, but every time--
I've never built the perfect mound of material
that stayed the same two months later.
So when we're checking this pile,
I want to make sure we're not having flat spots in it.
We want to make sure that the mound stays fairly uniform.
So we start monitoring temperature.
And you saw in that earlier graph, you know,
temperature kind of has this nice, little bell shape.
And then the one with the bacterial growth,
we saw kind of a bump in temperature again.
When you go-- when the temperature gets down
to about that 110 degrees,
it's a good indication that that might be the time
that we want to turn the pile or add some air into that pile.
So that temperature kind of tells us that we're gonna--
the temperature's getting a little bit low,
so the bacteria aren't growing as well for us.
We need to add a little oxygen into the system.
So we might turn and reshape that pile,
and then we should get another spike in temperature.
So that first--first one is gonna probably take us
about four to nine months, somewhere in there,
depending on temperature outside and some of those other things.
But then we're gonna turn the pile
by monitoring the temperature.
When we turn that pile,
then we should see another spike in temperature,
and we're gonna do this every couple of months
till we really don't see much of a spike
in our temperature anymore, and then we know
that we have a completed composted product.
So when we're monitoring,
I thought we're gonna have some problems,
so these are our kind of our troubleshooting guides.
And this came right off the Department of Ag's website,
so if you guys want this troubleshooting site
or list, it's right there.
But improper temperature,
so we're just not getting the temperatures
we think we should.
So what are some of the causes?
Do we have-- is it too wet, too dry?
You know, is our carbon to nitrogen ratios--
are they matching up?
Especially when we get into that second and third heating.
Sometimes we might not get the heating
that we're expecting to get.
If we had a really successful first round,
we might have eaten up a lot of our nitrogen source.
So we may have to add some nitrogen source
back into the system.
And one of the simplest ways to do that
is if any of you have a bedded pack system,
you just add some manure back in there
because you're gonna get the nitrogen
out of the cattle manure to help boost bacteria again.
Odors, again, we talked about that.
Too wet and moving from aerobic to anaerobic digestion,
and that will increase the odors.
Flies. It's one of the things we really don't think of,
but if we construct these piles adequately,
we're gonna have some flies around the pile,
but there shouldn't be large volumes of flies
and also are scavenging,
so when we talk about those two,
pile management becomes a real concern
because there might not be enough cover,
and we want to make sure that we have those piles
to the point where we're not attracting unwanted critters.
So this is great. We're doing a lot of stuff.
We find the environmental part of it
now is really cost-effective, okay?
We just talked--there's lots of materials that you can use.
Lots of different things, so what happened here
is a university in Canada,
they set out to determine the efficiency and stability
of using sawdust, corn silage, or solid manure
in composting mortalities on feedyards.
So what they did is they took two sites,
so they have two sites in southwestern Ontario,
and they just wanted to go over the normal mortalities.
So they actually set up six bins on each of these sites,
and their bins were very similar to
the ones you saw at Arlington.
They were just made from bales,
so it wasn't a lot of concrete and mortar type bins,
but they used bale systems.
Both of these feedlots finished out about
1,000 to 1,500 cattle a year,
so, I mean, they weren't extremely large,
but they're a good size.
So they have fairly regular mortalities.
And they wanted to use-- look at how
these composting substrates
were affecting the composting rate.
So you can see here this is site one and site two.
And they each had their six bins,
and as you look at the dates,
they weren't filled all at the same time,
so these are truly, truly utilizing on-farm mortalities.
They weren't trying to load it.
So the first--but you look on average the second column
or the--this column here-- oops.
This column right here,
this was their first mixing time,
so you can see it was about six months
before they mixed their piles for the first time.
And then, when they did their final mixing,
so they were running anywhere from about 10 to 12 months
So they were going through almost a full year
with the piles.
Some a little longer,
some a little less.
So this table here, this shows site one.
Site one had 21 carcasses
that they said went through their system.
So we look at the table.
So this was their base,
so they put in a base of 25 to 30 centimeters.
So if we look about that, it's about a foot
is what they were putting down for a base.
And then, the next row here
is the approximate weight of first animals.
So they were loading a couple of animals in
each bin at a time.
And so when we look at this, these are all in kilograms,
so we look at the 500, the 522,
that's about 1,100 pounds, so it kind of gives you an idea
about how big some of these animals were
that they were loading into the bin.
Then they put a second layer in,
the depth of substrate,
so they actually layered mortalities
on top of each other.
And then they had a bunch of these 295s.
And so the 295s in this one, they're actually also
utilizing some slaughter waste.
So the 295s were awful and things from a slaughter plant
that they were also utilizing in their compost bins.
So it was just a different-- so they basically had
their mortality in them.
They would put a layer of co-compost,
and then they would put some slaughter waste,
and then they would top it off with the 60 centimeters,
or about 2 feet of substrate,
over to cap their piles and the bins.
Farm two, obvious, didn't put nearly as many animals
into theirs, and they were a lot more consistent and even
throughout their loading.
So, you know, there was only 12 carcasses
put into the six bins here.
So just to kind of show you how use and management
affect the bottom line of the bins.
So costs associated. So when they did
the economic analysis, they had to set some guidelines
for what each farm suggested that they had for costs.
So they built bales, right?
So they used straw bales for their bins.
So they figured $15 per bale for their bin construction,
$6 per square meter for sawdust.
The one farmer said, "I'm not going to charge anything
"for my corn silage. It was spoiled.
"I wasn't going to be able to use it anyways,
"I'd either have to put it back out on the field,
"or do something with it, so I can use it in this system,
"but I'm not gonna put a dollar value
'cause it would have been waste for us anyways."
And then they also valued manure at $2.50 a square meter.
Site two again used bales construction.
They had a little bit higher cost per bale.
They charged themselves $20.
Their sawdust was $25 a ton.
Corn silage, they charged $25 a ton too.
And then about the same for manure costs.
And then labor costs were $12 an hour.
And then they figured $50 an hour
for machinery and operator costs throughout the system.
So what does that mean?
So they took the costs there for site one and site two.
So to build their bins,
it costs about $60 per bin.
Labor was about $10.
So if we look down through this,
we get to the point...
here, where we get total costs for the bin
is $161.80 for site one,
and 200--roughly $250 for site two.
Okay, so what-- some of the major differences
that come here is obviously one charged for the corn silage,
one didn't, so depending on how you look at your cost
for these bins, there can be some
drastically different costs per bin.
What they did then was compare it, "Okay, so if the rendering
"truck charged me $55 an animal to pick up,
"or $100 per animal to pick up,
what does that tell me?"
In the case of site one, if pickup was $55 per animal,
it was more efficient for them to use the compost bins.
It was cheaper for their operation.
If site two, it was definitely much cheaper for them
to use the rendering truck
than it would be to use their costs for composting
during this particular year, and this was 2006, I believe.
So what that really tells me, though,
is management becomes key factor,
and is this really
a economically viable option for me,
and is it something you want to do?
I will say, though, at the end part of the study
when they talked about some of the acknowledgments
and some of the other things that come out of here,
one of the things that the farms indicated
that they liked the composting better,
and even the one that was losing money
compared to the rendering truck was gonna continue to do that
because they felt that they were able to manage
their dead animals a lot faster
and more efficiently
and that they were able to return the nutrients
back to the soil, so there was some real positives
beyond just the costs that they felt was worth
continuing with the composting.
So in conclusion,
these are some environmentally sound practices.
When I talk about quick disposal time
of the mortalities,
it's not necessarily the quick time to get it broke down,
but how fast you can, from the point when you find the animal,
the mortality to the time when you actually
can contain the mortality, is extremely quick.
Can it be cost effective?
It may or may not be as we saw in the last one.
There's some positives there as well.
So there's opportunities here.
We can utilize the nutrients and some of the things
we have right on farm as an alternative way
to manage our mortalities on livestock farms.
And we all know that the regulations and laws
are getting stricter and stricter
about what rendering trucks are able to take.
So we may have to be looking at
new options for us in the future,
so here's a list of references and resources.
And all of you should have got a sheet of paper at the front
that has these resources at the end of it as well.
And with that, do you guys have any questions?
[applause]