Composting

Many organic farms produce farmyard manure which is one of the sources of nutrients on the farm. At Greenmount we normally use it before a second arable crop in the rotation and for silage swards.

Straw is costly, difficult to source and labour intensive to spread in livestock houses, however, it breaks down well during composting. In contrast, wood chip is cheaper and requires much less labour to spread.

Its downside is that it is much slower to compost ready for spreading. If raw or only partly rotted wood chip is spread, it will rob nitrogen from the soil as it continues to break down, rather than supplying nitrogen.

Greenmount’s composting facilities were until recently crude. An old silo is used to stock-pile manure when the houses were cleaned out, but both its size and shape meant there was little opportunity for proper composting through turning to aerate the manure.

As a large proportion of our of bedding is wood chip based, this caused us concern over nitrogen robbery, as well as contamination of silage from lumps of wood chip being picked up during silage making operations.

The old silo used for storing manure

Our plans have finally come to fruition, and we now have a composting silo.

It is covered to keep the rain out, and will allow us to turn the manure regularly to get air into it to allow it to rot down properly.

Temperature of the compost is being taken regularly to determine when it needs to be turned. Cooling means there is not enough air present, and it may also need water added.

We now intend to work to a yearly cycle so that compost being spread will be a year old. This should help avoid possible nitrogen robbery in the soil from spreading uncomposted wood-chip.

We will also have the opportunity, should we think it is needed, to add straw and organic poultry manure during turning, which should also speed up the composting process.

By doing all this we would hope to have fully composted manure by March in the year after the house is emptied.

Composting silo alongside the silage silo