Carbonaceous Diaper

Winter is just around the corner.  Here in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, we get an average 24 inches of snow per winter, and the ponds freeze over enough to ice skate for a week.  The grass turns brown, water troughs freeze, and for the comfort of both people and animals, we begin bringing things in to winter quarters.

For about 3 months of the year, our pastured livestock operation turns into much less pasture.  

The broilers (meat chickens) and turkeys are all gone by the end of October.  We don't even try to raise them in the winter.

Laying chickens (egg layers) begin coming into hoop houses (tall tunnels) by November 1 and are usually all in by Thanksgiving.  

Pigs are usually all in winter housing by Thanksgiving as well.  

The cows happily stay out as long as we have what's called "stockpiled pasture."  That's fall grass growth we defer until dormancy; the cold preserves it, and the cows enjoy it for as long as it lasts.  Often, the cows don't get hay (dried grass) until after January 1.

When the conventional livestock industry houses animals--which it does all the time in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)--it's a stinky mess.  The animals are either on some sort of permeable floor where manure collects in the basement, or the manure builds up into a sordid mess.  This is true mostly with cows.

Here at Polyface, when we house animals during the dead of winter, we create deep bedding out of carbonaceous material that absorbs the manure and urine and eliminates noxious odors.  

Most of the carbon is wood chips from our fence-line and road maintenance or forestry work.  Sometimes we pick an area to cut and restart a new forest or convert it into pasture.  Our county has twice as many trees today as it did in 1860.

In preparation for these various housing situations, then, we need to put in more than 12 inches of wood chips just to start the "diaper" process.  

On Friday last week, we chipped a tractor-trailer load of chips with our industrial Vermeer chipper.  That's some of the most fun work we do around here because whatever and wherever we're chipping becomes prettier and more organized while at the same time providing the raw carbon (biomass) for animal comfort and then eventually next year's fertilizer (compost).

When I see those chips pouring into the trailer or dump truck, I'm thinking about all the earthworms who will enjoy feasting on the compost we spread on the fields.  I'm also thinking about all those comfortable animals, lounging on clean bedding.  The carbonaceous diaper never freezes.  Under the cows, it ferments due to anaerobic compression and stays 50 degrees F even when the ground freezes.  That makes for some really happy cows.

The chickens scratch the bedding and keep it aerobic, stimulating decomposition.  We throw buckets of oats, barley, or wheat out on the bedding as a treat, but it's a treat on a mission.  The chickens eat the whole grains like candy, but some of it sifts down into the bedding and sprouts.  That encourages the chickens to scratch deeper to eat the sprouts, which injects more oxygen, which stimulates the decomposition.

The pigs are a bit different.  They don't poop just anywhere like cows or chickens.  They pick a toilet spot and do their business in that area, leaving the rest of the area relatively unsoiled.  Throughout the winter housing period, we throw old hay onto the pigs' toilet area; they eat half of it while it's clean, and tromp and poop on the other half.  That area gets quite wet with their urine, of course, and in the spring, when the pigs go outside, we mix the toilet area with the rest of the area and let it compost nicely for a month before spreading it on the fields.

As fall chills the air and leaves fall, the main farm activity is transitioning from pasture to winter housing.  Few things are as attractive as watching animals enter these freshly wood-chipped quarters for winter.  

With as many animals as we raise, metabolizing all that manure and urine with carbon is a huge undertaking, but it's the heart and soul of our fertility program.  That means we're not just prepping for winter quarters, we're also stockpiling the carbon as the basis of our spring compost application.

With a nip in the air mixing with the smell of sawdust and woodchips, our late fall/pre-winter projects are some of the most enjoyable of the year.  

We're putting the farm and animals to bed, as it were, and that has its own charm.  At Polyface, seasons dictate everything.  Unlike industrial farms, where everything is the same every day, we have a wonderfully attractive change of activity.  

Embrace the seasons; it's part of life's best flavor.

Blessings,

Joel