Horses, Chickens & Elephants.
Winter work is crap. Literally! We partner with the local zoo and every week collect a large truck load of elephant poop from two sweet Pachyderms named Emily and Ruth. We retrieve their manure all year long. It used to go to the dump. What a waste!
In February we clean out a large pile of horse manure from the mounted police unit at a local beach. We remove about 15 truckloads. We also remove manure from several local horse stables.
Our own chickens help too. We shovel out their coops every 6 weeks but in the winter we move all the composted manure from our large compost pile and spread it on our fields.
We use guidelines that are recommended by organic regulators. For crops that grow above the ground manure can be spread on the fields 90 days from harvest. For crops that grow along the ground the manure can be spread on the fields 120 days before harvest. Manure collected after those deadlines is composted in an area specific for that use.
The fields are alive! Using this natural fertilizer is much more labor intensive that using petroleum based chemicals, but the manure feeds the organisms important to the plants that we grow, creating nutrients that thrive in our rich soil. This is sustainable farming! I can see the improvement in the earth with each year that goes by.
Ten thousand years of history show how animals and plants work together to provide what is needed to produce sustainable farming systems. While we can’t keep elephants on the farm we can use their contribution to grow higher quality produce, and more of it. The community also avoids having their dump filled up with something that is useful.
This is our joy in how we farm.
