Just go ahead and type your chat, your comment or your question into the chat pod, and it'll go out to the speakers and the rest of the audience, and we will try to address your question as we go through the program.

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If you're in a full screen mode or if you wanna shrink it down to just a smaller screen of the presentation on your computer screen, you can do that by hitting the escape button on your keyboard to take it from full screen to a smaller screen.

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This webinar is being recorded as are all webinars in the Dairy Management Monday Webinar Series.

If you have to leave early, or if you wanna recommend today's program to a coworker or a colleague out there, just send them to the Penn State Extension website, and click on Webinars, and search for Dairy Management Monday and you should be able to find it pretty easily.

And we'll usually try to have it up there within the first couple days here after the airing of the webinar.

So without any further delay, I'll go ahead and I'll stop sharing my screen, and I will turn it over to Craig.

Are you there Craig?

- Thanks Mat, we're gonna hook up our shared screen here, so let me pull that up and we'll put that on slideshow view; how's that look?

- [Mat] Looks good!

- Okay, so what we'll do is I'll go through a number of slides on, we tried to title this Proper Composting, or Composting, Doing it Right, or something like that, and Mat will monitor the chat box, and we can stop for questions as we go.

And I'll give you a couple contact information first.

On the screen is my email jcw17@psu.edu.

And we do have a number of parts of this PowerPoint and some YouTube video on the same subject that is online.

So right now whether you do a regular search or you go to the Penn State Extension website, what I'd have you search under is proper animal disposal.

You might search under the words calf composting, and eventually you will find the Penn State composting website.

I also at the end of the presentation, I'll highlight some of my partner universities and some of the programs they're doing, and we'll show you their website addresses.

Just a couple housekeeping items here, we have a new claimer slide that we will show.

I will give you the preference that all of the upcoming recipe and recommendations for composting is endorsed by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, state vets, and is also endorsed by the United States Department of Agriculture Animal APHIS group.

So we'll just let you have that.

And if there's an opportunity where we can help you with doing composting right, we encourage you to give us a ring or an email and we have been able to do some site visits across the state and with our partners across the Northeast in the country here.

So there's two things we wanted to highlight.

One, there's been a term change called natural rendering or compost livestock mortality, and natural rendering kinda came out of the Cornell group and Jean Bonhotal up in Cornell.

And so we're gonna kinda do a little bit of housekeeping on Pennsylvania laws, and then we'll jump right into how to make sure you can do composting right.

And basically, Pennsylvania has four approved methods for livestock mortality.

And a number of these methods also work for butcher shop waste.

They work for roadkill deer disposal or even if someone's doing their own hunting and deer disposal, but just beware that not every method is approved in every state across the country.

So you do need to be aware of what's in your state.

So we're gonna talk mainly on Pennsylvania, and the disposal methods, the proper composting procedures.

And normally what happens is if someone's doing things wrong or not composting livestock mortality correctly at all, Department of Agriculture will get a call, and their regional vet or Ag techs will come out and have to do an inspection, and that's normally how the process will go in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania Agriculture's in charge of all disposal and they have participated with us a lot on these procedures and have agreed to these procedures.

They actually will hand out one of our handouts at their site visit, and we stay in tight communication with the Cornell Waste Management Institute, Maine Composting Team.

Oklahoma State University has a composting team and we've done some presentations for eXtension.

So there's a large group working across the country on this subject, and we try to compare our information all the time.

So in Pennsylvania, you have a dead normal disposal of animal, a dead domestic animal, whether that's a pig or chicken or cow or something like that, and you have really four options.

You have burial which is permitted in Pennsylvania and there're some recommendations on that.

Incineration is permitted in Pennsylvania, and there is some recommendations on that on the types of burners, not open air incineration.

Rendering is permitted and encouraged, and rendering has vastly gone away for most of our producers into Pennsylvania.

And that tends to leave us with composting, and we get into the discussions of proper composting.

And this is all taken care of in the Pennsylvania Dead Animal or Domestic Animal Act 100.

So in Pennsylvania, there's a number of options, but probably lately most of our people have been doing on-farm composting or bin composting, and there still are a number that are not following any of these.

Hedgerow dumping and other practices are not permitted in Pennsylvania, so we encourage you to do a proper composting or proper burial.

This is a livestock mortality fact sheet that is put out by the Conservation Commission and the ombudsmans, and they have nice little fact sheets.

Most of these are available in the Conservation and NRCS offices, and they do a nice little three-page fact sheet on most of the procedures that we will talk about here today.

So by burial law, it must be outside of the 100-year flood plain, and we like to have it more than 200 feet away from any wet spots, ponds, streams, or water.

And you need to have this covered by a minimum of two foot of soil within the 48 hours.

And all composting or dead animal recommendations need to be done within two days or 48 hours.

So these are most of the issues with burial.

We do have problems in part of our state where we hit bedrock less than two feet, and we have parts of the state that are high seasonal water table.

And so there is sometimes some problems with burial in the state of Pennsylvania.

As we go into composting, some of these same rules apply where we like to select a site that's high and dry.

And if you can start with a well-drained high and dry site 200 feet from water, sinkholes or any normal streams, this is really the best place to start on your farm.

We like to have a two-foot bed of wood chips underneath this and there's a huge discrepancy on what a lot of people will call wood chips.

We like to call them less than two inches.

There might be a few pieces that are four or six inches long but we like to have a combination of small pieces and fines which is what the small grindings are along with some wood chips.

We don't like chunks and we don't really like what some people might call double-ground black mulch, something that's been treated.

It's more fresh utility wood chips, something that comes off like a power line trimming crew works really well.

And then we normally like to lay that two-foot bed.

We might use some old other organic matter from other piles that we've been working with, and then you'll lay your livestock right on that bed.

So this does work for whether small animals or large animals and you can actually on some small animals, even small piglets and chickens, you can make multiple layers.

And at that point, we would like a minimum of two foot underneath and we're gonna have two foot on top, but you can have one to two foot in between, and this is actually the beginning of an active pile because you have a lot of microbes that are in that material that you're already using.

On a large animal, depending on how you're going to lay that animal, and I'll show you some other slides here in a second, whether you lay that animal horizontal or lengthwise, horizontal or lengthwise of the pile, kinda depends on the size of the animal in the piles.

But as you notice in this graphic, we are starting the forming of a windrow, and that'll be very important when we get into the management of some of these piles.

So I really like to have what I call a preheated cover, and by preheated cover I mean that you already have some organic matter that is composting.

You might have wood chips that are pre-stored, corn silage mixed with some dry cow beddings, cleanings or bunk sweepings, something like that.

And this type of material will already be preheated up to 100 to 120 degrees, and as you can see the steam coming off of the preheated cover that we put here, it is a great way to jumpstart a pile.

The pile that's behind here is behind this skid steer is more of a hay pile, and if you can mix some hay in with your preheated cover, but the point is you got some activity already happening.

This is not nearly as important in July and June as it is in the wintertime when you're gonna be start building a pile and you might have a lot of cold material that's going into that pile.

But that's not a deal breaker as much as preheated piles and preheated cover makes the pile take off and work a lot quicker.

And then a second reminder, you cannot cheat on cover, and when we talk about two foot underneath and two foot on top, this is not the place to cheat.

If you're gonna have any problems with the pile, it'll normally come from your top cover being too thin, and that'll normally give you the most problems the quickest on an improper built pile.

So just don't cheat on the cover.

So let's take a look a little bit at this pile here.

We have our two foot of base underneath with some dry high-carbon material.

You could use old silage, sawdust.

You could use some bedding, dry cow bedding I call it, something that's been cleaned out of the dry cow pen but it's not been real wet and sloppy yet.

And if you are premixing this with some wood chips, that works great.

And then we put some of our pre-used compost or active compost right on top of the carcass.

Some of these materials, green sawdust works great, chopped straw.

Chopped hay does work better than long-stem hay.

And I really hate to stay away from hay or anything like that because it just doesn't break down as well.

You could add some other carbon.

Newsprint is not really a carbon.

Shredded newspaper that's in your bedding, that's okay.

Leaves don't work really well as a carbon source.

So really our carbon is chopped branches, chopped sawdust, this type of wood shavings is the best carbon, and then everything else that you add to it, you're adding to that carbon.

Cornstalks can be used.

Cornstalks make a great carbon source if you can't get anything else, and anything that's chopped; chopped cornstalks works great.

Spoiled silage I would say even put in your preheated carbon pile but not spoilage silage by itself.

Silage tends to be low in carbon, and it will tend to be very wet and will not heat as well if it doesn't have enough of the carbon to help it with some of the hair pockets.

So we like something to be in about the 50% moisture range, and if it's too dry, we're not gonna get a lot of activity.

If it's too wet, we're gonna get some leachate and we're gonna get some foul odors but we can always add more carbon to a pile and dry it out.

And here's a pile on March of 2001.

This pile had been built in December, and you can see that it's active and it's melting the snow right off of the top of the pile.

So these piles will work all types of year.

When you get back into one of your piles and you open it up, and I'll show you what you might wanna look for, you'll see this white layer.

And this white layer is actually some of the microbes that have been killed off, and they are in the compost and the pile has reached to a certain temperature where it killed them off.

And if you can see this in your pile when you open up a pile, that's one of the indications that you've had a good heating and a good pile.

The other thing that happens is that the heat from the pile will try to go out the top, and if our pile is too wet, the heat cannot actually escape out the pile well enough and it is not being able to pull air into the pile.

And normally if we have a properly aerated pile that is not too wet, you'll have heat pulling off the top, and that vacuum will bring the air in from the sides.

And this is where a round pile does not work as well as a long windrow.

We talked earlier about you wanna make all your piles in windrows because one of the reasons is a 10-foot wide windrow will be able to pull air and pull fresh oxygen into the center, and a round pile will not be able to pull air into it, and as you normally build a pile that's round, it tends to get bigger and bigger, and you end up cutting off any air that's going into that pile.

So this is really the best version of a windrow.

I really like the six-month idea where you start at one end of the windrow.

Let's assume it's say January, and you build a windrow of all your mortality for the first six months, and then you come back down to the end of the windrow base and you build your July pile.

So you're starting your second six months, and you can now actually take your January as the arrow indicates, your January end of the first windrow.

And you can use that for some of your top cover for your second six-month windrow.

This is one of the ways you can get some of your turning in.

It also keeps you in a windrow mode so you don't build piles too round, and it also keeps you on top of where were you six months ago when you were doing some mortalities, and you can use that to do cover for the next six months.

So it's just a simple way to do some management of our windrows.

Also the other side about this is bones that have not broken down can be part of the next base.

You could use a turner; in this case, we don't always have turners or what we call compost turners on mortality piles, but there's no reason why you cannot use a turner.

But you can also turn these piles with a front-end loader.

So just if you could do one of those second major goals is make sure you build all your windrows, your mortality compost piles in windrows, and that'll keep you in a much better position of knowing where your piles were six months ago and be able to reuse them.

So here we are; we started bringing in some carbon.

Everything is size-neutral here.

If we're doing a whole chicken barn or a large disaster setting, we're just gonna bring in a lot more carbon, but there's no reason why a farmer can't capture some carbon throughout the year, whether the tree trucks are coming through your area or whether you make a purchase of some carbon, and that carbon will stick around and you can use that for several years.

You do not need to spread that every year, so it's a wise investment to have some carbon on the farm.

The second thing we've talked about on some farms is the time that you're cleaning out those dry cow pens is not the time to spread that on the fields.

I would rather you stockpile at least six months of dry cow pens or dry material, some silage, cleanings, and maybe some bunk cleanings from the milking barn.

Or any time you're cleaning out feed bunks, keep a supply of that around because that makes a great mixture for your preheated compost and for building your base.

Real quick, everybody has pretty much agreed that we wanna reach temperatures from 100 to 135, and we know that 135 for three days kills just about all of the pathogens that we're normally concerned about.

So normally a mortality composting timeframe is about six months, and we want you to reach 130 to 135 degrees for three days sometime in that composting time.

It will always reheat and speed up if you turn it, but you do not have to always turn mortality composting.

One of the projects that we did is we used some HOBO data readers.

These are temperature loggers, and we would put these in piles.

I'm gonna show you a few slides on the project, and we could document the temperatures that we got in some of our composting piles.

And we use these oftentimes in large disasters just to secure the temperature readings that we're looking for.

So here was a pile that we were building.

We're gonna have a cow and a heifer, and we know that we were gonna preload this pile with pre-composted material that was already 154 degrees before we had even built the pile.

So this is a great example of having material on-hand that is ready to go.

We processed these animals for this composting project, and we ended up putting one of the data loggers inside the animal, one on the front leg, one on the rear leg, and then one was our static air temperature.

So in this case I have four temperatures that I can read.

Number one was gonna be in the body.

Number two is the front leg; number three was the rear leg, and then we had an air temperature reading.

And as you can see here, the top line, number one is where we were getting 140 to 145 degrees in the cavity of the carcass, and both the front and rear legs, both reached up to 120 to 140 degrees across 337 data points here.

So real quick here you might only do your calf piles maybe with composting, and maybe you do have a rendering service or something that you have available to your farm for large cows.

I encourage you, you wanna make sure that you have two foot of base underneath.

Load that pile with preheated compost carbon material, and just do not cheat on the cover.

And then make sure you have two foot on top.

When you get ready to put your next carcass down, you can dig out a divot on the end of this pile, and then that's the beginning of your windrow.

And then you can just work your windrow right on back from where you started that very beginning of that pile.

There are just a couple other options.

Some farms we have in Pennsylvania are using incinerators.

The modern incinerators now have a secondary burner on the flue gas, and there has been some value in using incinerators, a little bit less management some people say as compared to monitoring a composting pile and having somebody do the composting pile originally.

One of the down sides is that incinerators do require fuel oil to run them, and some of the data has shown that after three carcasses, you must clean out the incinerator because you will not have room for any more carcasses.

So there is some management concerns to running the incinerators, but if that is an option you're interested in, that has been a good option on some farms that we have been in contact with.

This is what the secondary flue burner looks like, and pretty much all of the modern incinerators and the regulations are now requiring a secondary burner.

There has been some interesting work done on in-vessel composting or drum composting.

There's a picture here on the left is the Rotoposter out of the Lancaster County area.

And the picture in the center is a unit out of the Wisconsin Michigan area, and most of the Rotoposter or in-vessel composters still require secondary composting.

And they move material through them and it is related to feed rate, and then we encourage them to have secondary windrow piles or bin structure to do finish composting on these.

And so those are some choices.

And then there's been a lot of work done recently on some compost grinding and air systems, and this means that we now particle-size the carcass and mix it or premix it with the carbon.

What we're doing in a static windrow is we're laying the carcass and covering it with carbon and then it's not really mixed until we do one bit of turning or the carcass completely breaks down.

So in the grinding method or the grinding system, we are grinding the carcass with our carbon, can be fresh or reused carbon, and then it is mixed into a windrow or bin structure.

And in some types, in this case advanced composting, provides and uses an air system which is an air bin structure for keeping that composting going and having enough air and oxygen in to do a rapid compost.

So there's been a great deal of work on this, and it's another technology that's been coming along here and used in a lot of the hog barns down in the southern region.

So one final reminder, if you try to look in the state law, feeding coyotes and buzzards is not a legal option for carcass disposal in Pennsylvania.

We still know that sometimes there is some windrow composting going on, and normally this is probably one of the number one reasons someone will get a visit from the Department of Agriculture or your state vet, but it is not an option.

While we do know that and we acknowledge that roadkill deer are picked up and taken to the landfills, and in some places they may be composted much like in New York state has a composting system for their roadkill deer, but we do know that's part of the natural cycle of deer once they get off the road.

If they're not near the road and they're not picked up, they're probably gonna be consumed by buzzards or coyotes.

But that is not an option in Pennsylvania for our domestic carcass disposal.

A couple of websites that we have here, and if you would search composting animal mortalities or some of our mortality composting guidelines, we do have a number of fact sheets.

And if you would do a YouTube search on proper animal mortality disposal, we did a nice video along with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture on a actual building of a pile when we were up at the Ag Progress Days Site.

Some of our other university partners, Cornell has their Cornell Waste Management Institute or CWMI, and they have a excellent fact sheet on their composting of roadkill deer, and if you cannot find that, I encourage you to try and get ahold of me at jcw17, and I can get you a copy of that.

They have an excellent fact sheet and composting website.

And then Maine has an excellent composting website, University of Maine, and Maine has been hosting composting schools for the past 17 to 18 years, and they have been hosting a number of the carcass schools, carcass composting schools for USDA and has an excellent program up there.

Maine has expanded into some of the larger composting sites along with some of the food waste composting, so I encourage you to take a look at any of their information.

So I'll kinda turn it back over to Mat here if you have any questions, and then we can kinda open it up from there.

- [Mat] All right, thank you Craig.

As Craig said, if you have any questions, please go ahead and let us know, comments.

We've still got plenty of time left in today's program, so go ahead and use that chat pod if you have any questions there.

- One of the, while we're checking on that, one of the biggest issues we have seen with some of our farms especially our beef farms is if a beef farm is doing a lot of grazing and has a low housing requirement, they tend to be a farm that does not have a lot of carbon on the farm, and so that has been where we've kind of talked about it might be valuable for them to purchase some sawdust carbon wood chips, but also if they ever do a clean-out of their pen or if they're gonna do, it all depends on how we did with our round bale feeding.

Sometimes our round bale feeding is not a good material, but sometimes a material like that that we can get dried out and pre-composted can work.

So normally a beef farm has problem of no carbon, and the carbon that they might have has been too wet and too soupy, and that is we've found vastly different than on a dairy farm where we're doing constant corn silage feeding, we might have bunk sweepings all the time in a dry cow pen, tend to find that on a dairy farm we have a fair amount of carbon that we can use, and it's always good to stockpile that for when you might need it.

- [Mat] All right, still not seeing any comments coming through.

Craig, you wanna go ahead and stop sharing your screen there? - Oh yeah.

I'm sorry about that.

- [Mat] That's all right, and then I will put up a few closing slides but if people do have comments or something comes to mind here as I'm kinda going through the closing slides, go ahead and bring those up.

But if not, we'll get done a little bit early here today.

Just a second, let me share.

All right, is that coming through there with the?

- Yep, that's showing up now.

- [Mat] All right, so yeah if you do have any questions that do come up later, if you think about after we sign off for today, you can go ahead, and this has got Craig's email is up there on the screen again.

If you have any general questions about this Dairy Management Monday Webinar Series, that's also up there.

You can contact myself about that, so I'm Mat Haan there, the one on the side there.

So contact and feel free to reach out to either of us if you have any questions.

For some future webinars coming up, we'll be back in January with Dairy Management Monday topic.

Lisa Holden from Penn State Department of Animal Science will be talking about facilitating dairy teams: tips, tricks, and to dos on January 27th.

And then in February, we'll have Ginger Fenton and Sam Robinson, also Penn State Extension talk about considerations for on-farm processing.

A couple of other series going on, Technology Tuesday, in January we'll have a presentation on renewable energy and agriculture update.

That'll be January 14th, and then February, Principles of Manure Management will be covered in February for the Technology Tuesday Webinar Series.

If you have any Spanish-speaking employees on your farms, Penn State is also running a series of webinars in Spanish on dairy management, so the next one of those will be January 13th.

Colostrum Management Practices will be covered, and so if you're interested in that check out the Penn State Extension website for additional details on that.

And with that, let me see if anything else has come through here.

There on my chat pod again, yeah, so no other comments have come through, so thank you for joining us.

If you do wanna go back and watch any of today's program, we will have it up on the website in a couple days from now as long as everything goes all right.

And you will, once we close out today's webinar, you should receive, a screen should pop up there with a evaluation for today's program.

So please take a couple minutes to complete that.

And I will thank Craig for his presentation, and we'll sign off for today.

And everybody have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and we'll hope to see you back here after the first of the year, so thank you very much!

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Mortality Compost, Let's Do It Right! The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

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Recorded Dec 16, 2019

This free webinar is part of a Dairy Management Mondays series geared toward dairy producers, employees, and agribusiness professionals. Mortality compost, Let's do it right! was recorded on December 16, 2019.

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