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Compost Making

Vermont Compost Company produces high-quality compost and potting soils using a diverse mix of ingredients including cow, horse, chicken manures, food scraps, hay, and bark. They blend these materials and use chickens to further process the mix by foraging, aerating, and depositing manure. The mix is turned and aged over several months to fully mature and stabilize. The final product is a dark, odorless humus rich compost suitable for plant growth.

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Kivumbi William
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178 views2 pages

Compost Making

Vermont Compost Company produces high-quality compost and potting soils using a diverse mix of ingredients including cow, horse, chicken manures, food scraps, hay, and bark. They blend these materials and use chickens to further process the mix by foraging, aerating, and depositing manure. The mix is turned and aged over several months to fully mature and stabilize. The final product is a dark, odorless humus rich compost suitable for plant growth.

Uploaded by

Kivumbi William
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Made

The Compost:

Vermont Compost Company’s primary goal is to provide the highest quality composts and potting soils to
growers, enabling them to realize their plant growing goals. The performance of any compost is
determined by the content and structure of the materials being composted. Correct media behavior
depends on good process conditions and practices. We use the broadest range of appropriate
ingredients to support bio-diversity. Using a “multi-manurial” suite of excretas—cow, horse, donkey,
mule, chicken, and worm manures—as well as community food residuals, bedding hay, spoiled silage,
and hardwood bark, we move towards imitating the complexity of successful natural systems. We make
our compost on native soil surfaces amended to optimize compost process and intended to return to
tillage in enhanced form if and when the need for the compost making diminishes or ends. Our manure-
based compost is the main ingredient for all of our products—from our seed starting mixes to our
nutrient booster and perennial blends. High performance composts demand excellent ingredients in
correct proportions. We use the finest available to us.

The Beginning:

We start out by blending raw manures, bedding, bark, and oxidized silage. Mature compost is added as
an inoculum to guide the process. This blend of farm and forest sourced material is used as bulking to
manage the carefully source-separated rescued uneaten food from community schools, stores,
restaurants and homes. The porous, carbon rich bedding, bark, and manure help to mitigate the odors
and absorb the nutrient dense liquids associated with food residuals. The combined ration is placed in
windrows inside simple high tunnels for our layer flock to forage on for feed. A complex sequence of
metabolic processes are in motion; chickens tumble and agitate the mix searching for bugs, grubs, and
bits of cooking food to feed on—all the while depositing their protein rich excreta. Worms come in and
up from the soil around and below—further aerating the mix and leaving behind their valuable castings.
Every five days or so, the pile is turned further down the hoop-house.

Maturation:

As the mixture of ingredients reaches the end of our feed houses, the mix begins to look homogeneous
—food scraps are no longer identifiable, temperatures have been above 131º for at least 15 days, and
the pile has shrunk greatly in volume. The materials are now ready to begin maturing outside of the
house. This completes the process of “tracking,” meeting the regulatory requirements defining compost
within the National Organic Program (NOP). Though a pile can be called compost, legally, after fifteen
days of sustained temperatures above 131º, this is really just the beginning of a several-month aging
process which provides our final products with the characteristics we expect of them. The final product
has a fine, moist, dark, stable, and odor-free consistency. It is rich in humus, free of any viable seeds, full
of life—both bacterial and fungal—and is ready to provide living plants with everything they need to
grow rapidly and with full health. Before selling our mature manure compost, we add a small amount of
the highest quality horticultural-grade Canadian sphagnum peat moss to aid in the screening, packing,
shipping, and spreading of the final product. This further stabilizes the material and makes for a very
manageable consistency

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