EU drags its feet on one-year-old #manure proposal: The Commission will try to break the deadlock at a meeting with member state representatives in June, but farmer and industry lobbies – as well as some MEPs – are losing patience. https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/news/eu-drags-its-feet-on-one-year-old-manure-proposal/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=dlvr.it
Went to ACE Hardware for a couple of small items.
It's springtime, so they had potting soil and mulches. What caught my eye was a palette of bags of Steer Manure.
We will now get our bullshit at ACE.
Guaranteed to be better than the fascist bullshit from the government and the state media.
Oh, we have enough chicken shit from our own birds, 
.
Interesting article... So, ammonia found in humanure inhibits methane production. However, the addition of chicken feathers seems to be a workaround! I did not know that!
@BrambleBearGrrrauwling @Spr1g
How #biogas from human waste will lead to energy independence
Chicken feathers enhance the quality of biogas produced from human waste, allowing impoverished communities to generate their own power.
by Victoria Corless | Apr 14, 2022
"Accessible and affordable biogas
The solution they propose centers around the production of biogas, conventional sources of which include #FoodScraps, #wastewater, and animal #manure. But human waste could provide a viable, renewable source of energy, especially in regions of the world where energy supplies are unstable.
"'The shift into animal waste such as poultry droppings and cattle dung has huge prospects, but it is not sustainable in the long term as rural farmers depend on it,' said the researchers. 'The use of human excreta is the most available and sustainable due to the human population.'
"One challenge, however, is the ammonia naturally found in human waste, which inhibits the growth of #methane-producing bacteria and results in impure biogas with high levels of nitrogen. Chemical and microbial pretreatments are an option, but the team wanted to develop a truly sustainable and accessible solution to meet energy demands in impoverished regions.
"The trick, according to the study published recently in Global Challenges, is to combine the waste with powdered chicken feathers. The feathers are themselves useful in generating biogas, but only when pretreated to make them amenable to anaerobic digestion. Instead of adding an additional treatment step, the scientists let the microbes found naturally in human waste do all the work for them.
"In a laboratory-scale biodigestor, the team mixed together powdered chicken feathers and human waste in a 1:5 ratio and allowed the solution to incubate, measuring the quantity and quality of biogas produced over roughly two months. Compared to controls that contained no powdered chicken feathers, the biogas produced when the feathers were co-digested with the human waste contained, at minimum, 68% less nitrogen and 73% more methane.
“This experimentation means that there could be minimum nitrogen content with more microbes in the human excreta acting on the chicken feather as biotreatment,” said the authors. “The extensive effect of the microbes can be seen in the improved carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide content [of the biogas].'"
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/how-biogas-from-human-waste-will-lead-to-energy-independence/
It was a #compost kinda day here. I don’t manage to care much about picking up #manure in the winter, and now it’s time for spring cleaning!
The big compost pile is starting to bulge at the seams. It’s about 25 feet long on its longest side. I’m doing an experiment in the front, with old manure layered with old moldy hay. I need to set up the sprinkler there for an hour or so and get that whole pile really well watered.
All the books say that old manure isn’t as good for compost as nice fresh manure, but I still have a lot of it to process. It can hang out over here in the big cold pile for as long as it takes.
The two aerated bins have gotten weirdly in sync and they’re both slowly coming down out of their hot phase. Once they’re cool, I can empty the bins and use or stash the fine compost. The next batch will layer sunchokes in with manure and stall bedding - the contents of the aerated bins cook at 140° for weeks before it starts to decline.
The stuff that comes out of the aerated boxes is really lovely, generally quite fine textured, and bacterially cold, but it hasn’t had much time for fungal decomposition, which is why it’s so light colored. Fortunately, at that point it’s totally fine to use - it just needs another six months alone in the dark to grow loads of mycelium.
Anybody else doing #livestock #manure #composting on #compostodon ?
The World’s Farms Are Hooked on #Phosphorus. It’s a Problem
Half of the globe’s #crop productivity comes from a key fertilizer ingredient that’s nonrenewable—and literally washing away.
"The numbers for France and the Netherlands are no longer rising, because they’ve replaced some use of #phosphate rock with #manure"
