WHY COMPOST IS SO IMPORTANT AND WHAT’S SPECIAL ABOUT OUR BARN
You may drive by our little farm and seen that big red barn and think nothing of it. It looks like any other open metal building that houses animals, but there is something going on under the surface, literally. A couple years ago we invested in our farm and environment by building a 136-foot-long Compost Bedded Pack Barn. What happens is the cows have an open area to lay about which is started with 1 foot of sawdust. They have a separate area where they drink and eat called the scrape alley. They are free to meander in and out as they please during the cold months, enjoying a sunny, dry and wind free area to relax. Meanwhile, in the bedded pack full of sawdust, something magical happens. Cows create compost!
At first this may seem totally gross. Even as a farmer, who deals with poop every day, the thought of animals laying around in their excrement definitely turned me the wrong way. But the more I learned, the more enthralled I am with how these barns work. You can watch cows play and Mike spread sawdust in our latest winter barn video HERE.
There are several things the Compost barn does that I list here. When I’m done I hope you are equally fascinated as well.
1. Compost
Okay, duh. But how does this work exactly? Sawdust is added to the barn at first to start a nice cozy bed for the cows, and then subsequently over time to provide a carbon source for the microbes. What else do cows do? Poop and pee of course…anywhere. I have yet to see a toilet trained cow. Manure is a source of high nitrogen as well as many nutrients your plants need to grow properly. Microbes feed on the manure and sawdust and make the that into something a plant can use as energy. Meanwhile the heat from the microbes creates a dry comfortable area for cows. Once the bedded pack has been worked and composted, it can then be used to supplement a garden or lawn and fields. Some of the benefits to soil of this compost are:
- Supplies primary nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium as well as micronutrients
- Improves soil structure
- Increases the water-holding capacity of sandy soils
- Improves drainage in clay soils
- Promotes growth of beneficial organisms
Mike turns Poop to Gold in this video and brings some over to my garden area where I finish composting it before gardening season. Since cows are on the pack daily, I can’t add the compost quite yet!
2. Pathogen Killer!
Many dairy barns use compost barns for the convenience and ease of the dairy herd. What you might not know is that a properly maintained barn can reduce the bacteria count and prevent mastitis in the herd. Mastitis is an infection in the udder (people can get mastitis too) which is painful and affects the cow’s ability to make milk. We don’t have a dairy herd, but we do have calves feeding from mothers in the barn. It’s important for us to keep them and our adult herd healthy. Watch our calves being born HERE. By aerating the compost bed, it creates a higher heat, that makes the “bed” dry and creates and environment where good microbes can survive and bad will perish! Therefore, a well composted manure pile is safe for veggie gardens as well. Not only does the barn help by killing off pathogens but it keeps the cows from eating food off contaminated surfaces. They eat by putting their heads through to an outdoor area that separates the hay from the feces. That “scrape alley” where the cows stand is scraped using a tractor into a separate area away from cows and the compost bed. That fresh manure is also amazing but breaks down at a different rate and we wouldn’t want to mix it with the pack.
3. Saving the environment
In nature, animals eat freely and poop everywhere. Microbes break down their poop and make it bioavailable to plants which grow, and the cycle starts over again. On a farm however, there are certain drawbacks to having your cows outside all winter and spring, pooping wherever. It’s not a bad thing for them to go to the bathroom on the ground. The nutrient cycle still happens but as time goes on, the ground they frequent gets compacted. Often there is a “sacrifice area” given to the cattle in the winter so they don’t damage the fields which feed them for the rest of the year. We used to do that and it is not pretty. With the amount of water we get here and the constant traction from cows, the ground was almost permanently damaged. Enter the compost barn…
Instead of sacrificing a piece of earth, we now have a system to recycle nutrients from our animals while the ground rests. We know the cows are comfortable with optimal living conditions. While the earth is losing precious soil every year, I’m happy to know that we are in the business of creating soil here on our little piece of Devon Heaven (American Milking Devon Cattle humor).
Make sure to check out my timelapse of the Big Barn Build to see what goes into making this poop digesting giant.
Kelley