Earth #1: Compost
Fertility, Soil and Compost
Objective → Strategy → Tactics
Because this is the first Earth series essay, I’d like to make a note on framework. As much as possible I will try to outline these essays in a framework I learned from Dr. Peter Attia: Objective → Strategy → Tactics1 ←Learn more and find some linked resources in the footnote.
You can find a near unlimited amount of tactical how-to essays, videos, and books on composting. In an effort to provide something a little different, I want to spend a brief amount of time on the fundamental why of compost (objective) and the underlying strategies before getting into the specific tactics that work on my homestead. I believe this is super helpful in any domain but especially so in farming because of context. Tactics are almost always context-dependent, whereas strategies, if laid out correctly, should be more context-independent.
For example, within my own compost-making tactics, I leverage my chickens. And while I do recommend getting chickens, in your specific context that might be impossible. If the strategies are communicated effectively, hopefully you can discover tactics that work specifically for your context.
Objective: Fertility // Increasing Life
Fertility - that is, your home’s capacity to produce life - is the building block of the homestead. Fertility shows its face in many forms: animals and their excretions, crops, fodder, stored or purchased fertilizer, the soil itself, and likely anything that’s green - or brown for that matter.
Soil fertility is by far the most stable and important aspect of your homestead’s fertility. You can have a great yield of crop for a year, even 10 years, but if it comes at the cost of your soil fertility you are literally destroying the life of your property.
The implicit or explicit goal of most homesteads, including our own, is to produce as much food and material as local as possible - with the home itself being of course the most local you can get.
With that goal in mind, nothing is as important as soil fertility. Its the base on which everything else is grown.
Compost is man-made soil. Man-made is a stretch. God certainly has more to do with the process than you or I. And as we’ll see later, I’d say my chickens deserve more credit for our homestead’s compost program than myself. Nonetheless, composting is our way of turning the resources on our property into the most valuable form of fertility: high-fertility soil. Here’s how we do it.
Strategy
Compost is made by some combination of vibrant decomposition and time. The more vibrant your decomposition, the less it time it takes. You can have compost-making protocols anywhere from the lazy gardener approach: throw a bunch of veggie scraps in a pile and wait about a year. To the full on market-gardener approach: getting the ratios and dimensions close to perfect and turning the pile every 3 days. The latter approach can produce compost in 30 days if done right.
Both make compost. The former, leveraging time. The latter, leveraging vibrant decomposition.
And then there are hundreds of unique approaches that find themselves somewhere in between. Leveraging some unique combination of vibrant decomposition and time. This is where my own approach lies.
Vibrant Decomposition
This is a term I stole from Joel Salatin2. Vibrant decomposition is the key to turning non-soil-like materials into soil-like material, fast. It’s accomplished by leveraging the following factors: Ratio, Discrepancy, Scale, Form and Moisture. When you get the factors right, your compost pile will get hot: ideally between 100 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit. This happens because of compounding microbial activity: the microbial activity creates heat as a byproduct and the heat stimulates thermophilic (heat-loving) microbes and the flywheel continues. This activity rapidly speeds up decomposition. Lets dig into the factors.
Ratio
Ratio is in reference to Carbon:Nitrogen Ratio - often abbreviated to C:N. The goal is to achieve a C:N Ratio of 30:1 in your pile. Thats 30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen. You can find lists of C:N ratios of various materials online. You certainly do not have to break out a scale and calculator to get this perfect, but the closer your are, the more likely you are to achieve Vibrant Decomposition. Overtime you can develop a good intuition for creating piles close to 30:1.
Feedback is important. If the pile starts to smell over time, your pile has too much nitrogen. The problem with too much nitrogen is that it can cause the pile to become anaerobic instead of aerobic. This stimulates the growth of pathogenic microbes. And perhaps more importantly, you are losing nitrogen to the atmosphere by its off-gassing into ammonia - this is primarily what you are smelling. When this happens, I turn it as soon as I can and add some more carbon to the mix.
You’re more likely to undershoot the nitrogen content. At least this is what I did my first handful of times making compost. In this instance, your pile just likely won’t heat up and you are likely to not experience as much vibrant decomposition. That or you are missing one or more of any of the following factors.
Discrepancy
This is again in reference to carbon and nitrogen. Not only does your pile need to achieve a 30:1 ratio but ideally that would come from discrepant sources. For example, alfalfa hay has itself a carbon:nitrogen ratio of about 30:1. And a pile of alfalfa does decompose rather nicely (I know because I’ve used it as mulch a good amount). But it certainly doesn’t compose as vibrantly as a pile of chicken manure and sawdust would. Chicken manure has very high nitrogen content relative to sawdust making the materials discrepant.
Scale
By scale, I mean the size of your pile. The minimum scale you need to achieve vibrant decomposition is a 3x3x3ft cube. Scale is a major factor in vibrant decomposition but not one easily leveraged by homesteads. I aim to achieve the minimum inside 3x3x3ft compost bins I built.
Form
Form is in reference to the actual form of the material. Saw dust, wood chips and a tree stump could in theory have the same C:N Ratio. They will not break down at the same rate. This is pretty intuitive. Most people realize wood chips break down faster than a wood stump. The reason is because wood chips have more edge for microbes to work on than a stump. Think about ways you can minimize the form of your material. Shredding leaves is a great example.
Moisture
Without water, Vibrant Decomposition will not occur. The goal is to have a moisture content similar to a wrung-out sponge. To test the moisture level, grab a handful of compost and squeeze it gently. If water drips freely, it's too wet; if it crumbles easily, it's too dry.
Time
The lazy-gardener approach works because time is your ally in composting. Nature has a myriad of ways of rebalancing herself (we already discussed the off-gassing of nitrogen as ammonia earlier). So don’t stress it if your pile isn’t perfect.
Tactics
As mentioned, tactics are context-dependent. In my own context, I do not have an abundance of time to dedicate to a full-on market-gardener approach to composting but I do have a wild card, and that’s chickens. I often joke that I have chickens primarily for their excellent compost-making ability. The fact that they lay eggs is a nice cherry on top.
Chickens spend all day contributing 3 crucial factors to the composting process:
Adding nitrogen: Their manure is very high in nitrogen (8:1 C:N).
Turning: Their constant scratching is continually turning the bedding they are on.
Minimizing Form: Their scratching also tends to help encourage decomposition by breaking down carbonaceous material (be it leaves, hay or woodchips) into a smaller form.
That said, here is the compost protocol I have iterated upon:
The Protocol
Step 1: Get free wood chips with my truck. My town has free wood chips available at the municipal yard waste recycling center. This might be fortunate or common. I’m not sure. I found it by googling “free wood chips near me”. I suggest you do the same.
Step 2: Shovel a truck bed full of wood chips into my outdoor chicken run and indoor chicken coop. Both the run and coop utilize variants of the deep litter bedding method.
Deep Litter Bedding
Deep litter bedding relies on vibrant decomposition for coop hygiene instead of cleaning out the coop every two weeks. If done correctly, you should only need to clean out your coop a couple times a year. Start with 6 inches of carbon material for bedding (wood chips/shavings, hay, straw). When the bedding becomes soiled, cover it with a thin layer of more bedding. Regularly turn the bedding to mix it well and introduce oxygen to the compost. I spread a half-gallon or so of grain scratch mix every day for my chickens to encourage them to turn the bedding themselves.
Step 3: The bedding on the inside the coop gets moved to the outside of the coop when its time to clean the coop. I do this because the bedding on the inside of the coop does not breakdown nearly as fast as the outside. This is almost certainly because of the lack of moisture inside the coop which - as we learned - is one of the critical factors of vibrant decomposition.
Step 4: We regularly throw all of our kitchen scraps into the outdoor run for the chickens to scavenge and the rest breakdown into the wood chips.
Step 5: When the bedding on the outside starts to look like soil instead of woodchips. I move it into one of my two 3x3x3 compost bins. At this step of the process I also try and add a good amount of fresh green material. For me, this is almost always comfrey. I have 10 comfrey plants that I regularly chop down when making new batches of compost. Comfrey is a nitrogen-fixer and nutrient-accumulator which makes it a fantastic compost ingredient. The reason I move material from the outside run into the bin is for the purpose of heating up compost. The material in the run decomposes pretty fast. 2-3 months depending on the season. But it doesn’t get hot. The benefit of hot compost is that it kills pathogens and weed seeds. Because we are regularly putting kitchen scraps and weeds into the run, this is an important step.
Step 6: Turn the compost from bin 1 into bin 2 after 3ish days. Repeat 1-2 times.
Step 7: At this point the compost should be ready for garden bed application. If its still somewhat chunky, avoid applying to a bed that is being direct sown soon, especially with very small seeds like carrots. Although I have gotten away with sowing into some pretty chunky compost. It’s still better to use compost that’s been through next steps for direct sowing.
Step 8: A portion of the compost goes into my vermicompost bins for further processing. Vermicompost is worm poop compost. The worms break things down even further and the end result is an excellent compost, very high in microbial activity. This hobby-enterprise also has the extremely nice side-effect of producing worms which happen to be an excellent high-protein snack for chickens. If I had a large enough vermicompost operation, it could become a crucial aspect of my chickens protein ration.
I love finding homestead enterprises that compliment each other in this way. That’s how nature does it. If we are wise, we should attempt to emulate nature as much as is practical. The worm population can double every 6 months if given adequate space and material. I expand by duplicating bins.
Step 9: The vermicompost can now either be directly applied as compost fertilizer or utilized to make compost teas. I also use our vermicompost as the primary ingredient of our home-made seed-starting mix. The contents of which will have to be subject of another essay.
Joel uses the term in the context of animal hygiene, stating that natures heals and cleans itself in two primary ways: rest and vibrant decomposition. The reason the two strategies sound the same is because they are. I used “time” instead of “rest” because it makes more sense in the context of compost-making as opposed to animal hygiene. These two strategies are fundamental to Polyface Farm’s tactics of rotational grazing (time) and deep litter bedding (vibrant decomposition).