Howdy all. George Wagner is providing us with a lot of information. I will post the emails I receive with or will add pictures as time and my internet provider will allow. Here is the first one. Tom
I have a little trouble trying to comprehend the full scope of things like Earth Day. If you delay your consumption by turning off your lights for twelve hours aren’t you just delaying the inevitable. Wouldn’t it be better if we actually functioned on this planet in a manner which was not only beneficial to us but also to the benefit of our environment and actually improved the environment which sustains all living things. I can’t say in the future whether I will move from point A to point B using a diesel engine, an electric engine, a old plow horse or my own two feet. What I do know is that like so much of nature I depend on clean air and water along with nutritious food to keep me going. Thinking like this often gets me in trouble and that is exactly what happened when I was asked recently to explain to a group of Fur Harvesters just exactly how is it they are part of the solution to so many of our problems today. Trouble for me always starts when I have to string words together to show a coherent thought process.
We already know the need to impact on our wildlife correctly and we see this with disease control, depredation and predation, animal damage control and managing a population to the land’s carrying capacity. All of these functions fall easily into the realm of the Fur Harvester as we know, but there is another step after the harvest of giving back to the land. This step is carcass composting. As a livestock producer who does compost fur bearer carcasses I realize I give more back to the land when I compost carcasses than any other work in which I engage.
The end product of composting gives us a product which locks elements such as carbon and nitrates in place until they can be correctly used by soils and plant life. in a correctly functioning ecosystem compost aids the process by which carbon is actually sequestered into the soil. A carcass tends to have much more in the way of trace minerals than plants and so the composted carcass makes available more trace minerals which are critical to correctly functioning soil and these trace minerals ultimately end up in our food chain giving us more nutritious food. Correctly functioning soil are capable of chelating heavy metals. This means correct soils can basically lock an element like lead into the soil where the lead is not a hazard. Compost added to our soils provide organic matter which helps our soils hold water. Not only does this holding of water prevent water erosion, it also begins the proper cycling of the water which ultimately causes springs to function again.
If we examine nature closely we can see the breakdown of a carcass through composting is a natural soil function as opposed to a carcass rotting. It is common in nature to come across a carcass at times which has been dismantled in a relatively short time. If we follow this dismantling of the carcass we could see a coyote carrying a piece of the carcass. Part of a deer leg is about the right amount of carcass which a coyote can carry in its mouth while quickly moving away from the carcass which could be the kill of a larger predator that would easily rip the coyote to shreds. At some point the coyote buries the piece of carcass in a shallow hole. You may recognize this as a dirt hole.
What happens next starts out equivalent to your refrigerator and pizza. Many of us know fresh pizza tastes better after a night in the fridge. Part of what happens to the pizza in the fridge is enzymes and the like continue to break the pizza down making it taster the next day. I’m not sure how long pizza can stay in the fridge until it is deemed rotten but it will rot (spoil) over time no matter how strong your gut. Back at the dirt hole a breakdown process has also begun only in this case if the coyote never returns the soil will continue to break down this piece of carcass until the piece of carcass becomes non-existent and only soil remains where once there was a piece of carcass. For me just a whiff of a rotting carcass is often enough to trigger the gag reflex in me and yet I can go to a trapping convention and put my nose right over bottle after bottle of coyote lure and bait trying to determine if a certain bottle has the right stuff to bring in the yotes.
COMPOSTING THE CARCASS
When a Fur Harvester takes the pelt off an animal a couple of things happen. First, the pelt is comprised almost completely of protein. If this animal was to die in the wild and rot down the protein in the pelt would break back down into its base elements in this case that means a lot of nitrates being released into the air and soil. Those nitrates released into the soil are susceptible to making their way into water sources. Second, taking the pelt starts the natural process of breaking down a carcass and cycling it back through the soil. Since most carcasses are larger than what the soil can handle on the spot we construct a compost pile which carries out the same exact function of soil on a smaller piece of carcass.
To construct a compost pile you need a few things:
Carbon (wood chips, sawdust, spoiled hay, etc.)
Nitrogen (carcasses)
Moisture (water)
Air (oxygen)
When these ingredients are combined in proper amounts a compost pile will heat up to temperatures in the 150 degree range, in effect the pile "cooks". Most literature you read will say that once the temperature drops from cooking to turn the pile. This process of turning allows more air into the pile and reestablishes a good carbon to nitrogen contact. In other words the wood chips are touching what is left of the carcass. This process of turning will cause the pile to heat up again, cook. You will notice that finished compost looks quite a bit like soil which is what it is more or less.
There is a ratio for all the ingredients which go into a compost pile. For me with wood chips the ratio of carbon (wood chips) to nitrogen (carcass) is simple I start my pile on the ground with about 12 inches of wood chips on top of this I place my carcass or carcasses and then cover them with 6 to 12 inches of wood chips and I simply keep doing this process of adding carcasses and wood chips in layers one on top of the other until I have the pile as high as I want it, in my case it is a pile about 4 feet high. Then I simply start this layering process of wood chips and carcasses again right beside my finished layers. In other words I have a pile of wood chips about four feet high and say 20 feet long when I’m finished layering this pile with carcasses the pile looks almost exactly like it did when it was only wood chips except now it has carcasses positioned all the way through.
The amount of moisture required for a compost pile will be given in an exact percentage in all literature on composting. At first this may seem a little intimidating. We know the carcass has moisture and since I used wood chips from green trees we know there is some moisture in the wood chips also. One suggestion on wood chips states that if you squeeze a handful of wood chips and they just begin to stay together then the moisture is about right, around 55%. I’m fortunate here in Northeast Nebraska in that the amount of moisture from Fall through Spring which we receive tends to be just about right so I don’t have to be too concerned with the moisture content of my pile. In more arid country you will have to add water and in places like the Southeastern United States you may need some type of roof over your compost pile as too much rain on the pile is not a good thing.
PASSIVE COMPOSTING
There certainly seems to be a degree of complexity to this carcass composting thing and that goes against my philosophy on life which is K.I.S.S.
Late last summer I positioned a pile of wood chips on my pasture. After the first of November with the start of the fur harvest I began to add carcasses to my pile of wood chips. That’s it, as the weather begins to warm in the spring at some point this pile will begin to compost. I don’t expect to spread this pile of compost on my pasture until around September. While my compost pile will have plenty of good compost when I’m finished it will also have a certain amount of small bone fragments which were not completely broke down. Since I’m spreading this compost on my pasture the fragments are of little concern. Additionally, these bone fragments are now broke down to a size where they will make good contact with the soil and be fully broke down into the soil in a matter of time.
Another example of passive composting is a spot on my pasture where I fed hay to livestock over the winter. I had a goat which did not make it through the winter so I took this carcass to where I had fed hay. I dug into the spoiled hay on the ground and put the carcass in this spot and covered it completely with spoiled hay. This goat carcass was well over fifty pounds and it will break down completely through the course of the summer so you can bet a lighter weight carcass from a fur bearer would be composted even better .
There is no problem with using this passive composting process to make compost for your garden. If the sight of some bone fragments does not sit well with those working the garden then simply sift the unwanted bone fragments out of the compost before you apply it.
If it is not possible for you to compost your carcasses you may find a neighbor or one of the farmers whose land you trap on would be interested in composting or allowing you to compost on their land. When you start talking about building organic matter in the soil or what a fantastic fertilizer compost is a lot of people begin to sit up and take notice.
A web search for carcass composting or just composting will overload you with information on composting. The Montana Department of Transportation has a twelve page pamphlet which I think does a good job of outlining the basics of carcass composting. You can find that pamphlet at:
http://www.mdt.mt.gov/publications/d…composting.pdf
My county extension office has been very helpful with information on composting. Both Montana and New York state are currently running programs to compost road kill. Oklahoma and Texas are working on composting horses. I would guess this is in part because of the ban on horse slaughter. It appears that just about any state with heavy livestock production has some type of information at their universities on carcass composting as a means to handle livestock mortality. Remember even coyote and big old boar coon carcasses are nowhere near the size of a cow or horse carcass so while the procedure to compost a carcass is similar you can easily compost fur bearer carcasses without the use of heavy equipment.
Recently I spoke with a commercial composter here in my State. He makes compost by the ton and sells out every year. His primary customers are row crop farmers who are more satisfied with his compost as a fertilizer than commercial fertilizer which requires natural gas or petroleum products to produce.
For many of us carcass disposal is an issue. While we may be glad if somebody shows up and hauls all of our carcasses off to a compost pile we should be aware of our correct contribution to our environment when our carcasses are composted.
