Composting Manure

Today I'm going to show you how we turn our farmyard manure into compost using that machine behind me. I bought this old compost turner about three years ago. It's quite a simple thing and it doesn't take a lot of horsepower nor time so we use it on all of our muck now. These things produce about 600 tonnes of FYM for us every year and we compost all of that. So the compost turner is essentially just a big corkscrew with beaters attached to it. It's mounted to the the three-point linkage of the tractor and folds up vertically. The beater just runs off the PTO at 540 rpm. The main component of the compost is our farmyard manure. We then add a few different components to the mix, depending on what we've got access to at the time. This batch is going to have some apple waste, some wood chip and some rotten silage. The apple waste is a by-product from the cider apple harvesting process. Before the apples are sent to the cider press, they've got to be cleared from debris such as sticks and leaves. This waste has got small apples, sticks, leaves, soil and clumps of grass in so a really good mix of ingredients to go in compost. Wood chip originates mainly from brash we have left over from hedge laying. The wood chip helps introduce a range of different microorganisms into the compost. Once the wood chip is mixed in it helps to prevent the compost from slumping. This keeps it aerobic which is vital for a successful composting process. I also sprinkle a small amount of last year's compost onto the new batch. This should, in theory, help inoculate the new batch with a range of different microorganisms. Any rotten or waste silage is also chucked on. First of all we've got to push our trailer loads of tipped up muck into a nice uniformed windrow. Once it's been windrowed I'm able to go through it with the compost turner. Moving the muck around with the grab also helps aerate it and begins the composting process. Now we have something that looks like this. Time to add the next ingredients. First of all a little sprinkle of last year's compost, the apple waste and finally the wood chip. That's all the ingredients added and the windrow complete. I'll leave it a few days and the next step is turning it. That's that windrow turned. I'll leave it a week to 10 days and then come and turn it again. You can see the muck, the apple waste and the wood chips being pretty well mixed together now. I'll do a few updates as the weeks go by on the progress of this windrow for you. So you'll be able to see it turn from this to this. Finally, the less glamorous part.