Adding Meat or Dairy to the Compost Pile

 Bio Diversity in the Tidy Towns

Meat or dairy

Are you ever tempted to throw your meat and dairy waste into the compost? Have you had people shouting at you not to do it? I’m sure you have so I though a more scientific explanation would help make up your own mind. 

It can seem a bit frustrating that you can’t just compost meat and dairy, but you can, it’s just a question of balance and being careful.

It’s not that meat and dairy are hard to break down in compost bins, the issue is that it’s too easy for them to decompose. 

The main reservation is pests, mice and rats love a warm cost compost pile. There’s also the worry that disease causing bacteria growing in home compost. The solution is to get the pile up to a high enough temperature to kill the pathogens. Temperatures are all important for killing weed seeds too and we do struggle here sometimes for those temperatures to be reached. Situating the pile in full sun helps with this.

The main reason for the meat and dairy being a problem is how delicious the animal protein is to soil microbes. Composting is all about getting friendly soil bacteria to break things down for us, but we don’t need it to get too excited.

Good composting relies on the balance of two elements – Carbon and Nitrogen.

Carbon makes up the chemical foundation for almost all of life’s favourite molecules including proteins.

Proteins also contain a lot of nitrogen, which means that animal products, which are more densely packed than proteins than vegetables contain more nitrogen.

Experts have determined that the best ratio of carbon to nitrogen in compost is somewhere between 20:1 and 30:1 with vegetables being somewhere in the middle at 25:1. Something like a chicken carcass is 5:1 and when bacteria see all of that nutritious nitrogen in the compost they start to grow really fast, that uses up oxygen. When the bacteria use up all of the oxygen in the pile, that favours the growth of other bacteria that don’t need oxygen to live.

The pile switches to anaerobic, or oxygen free decomposition. The chemical products of that process are very smelly like hydrogen sulphide which smells like rotten eggs.

So, if you casually throw all of the leftover meat and dairy products into the compost, you’ll more than likely be left with a slimy putrefied mess instead of lovely sweet-smelling usable compost. Putrefied compost can actually contain chemicals that are toxic to plants although it can usually be salvaged by drying out and adding more green matter such as wood chips or paper products which contain a lot of lignin – a tough component of plant cell walls which doesn’t contain any nitrogen. Bacteria can still eat lignin packed materials but they just slow down the over enthusiastic microbes.

Scishow, an online science programme says that producing compost by the Bokashi method can help. This relies on an anaerobic process on purpose. You add cultures of friendly anaerobic bacteria instead of the poor, smelly ones. Once things like meat scraps have been treating the Bokashi way they can be added to the compost pile with less risk of the whole thing going stinky.

Tidy Towns Initiative

It’s never too early in the year to be thinking about and getting involved in the Tidy Towns Initiative. It can be a great motivator for getting every aspect of the garden ship shape and ready for the judges in late summer. As a past judge you can always tell a garden that’s been frantically tidied up just for the inspection, in some cases it can improve things of course as the unkempt look is quite popular now.

The Tidy towns Initiative we know, and love started its days differently to the UK. The UK Tidy Towns was set up after WW2 on the premise that it’d be great to get the towns and villages looking great again. It was, in reality used as a method of getting tax inspectors onto your property to be assessed to see if any tax avoidance was going off.

Here in the Republic it was started 37 years ago with no hidden agenda (That I know of) to get communities together, brighten the place up, take pride in your living space and of course to attract tourists.  Tidy Towns was originally linked to a single competition, first by Bord Fáilte, then the Irish Tourist Board, and now by the Department of Rural and Community Development.

Over the last few years there have been a lot of changes to the competition. More and more initiatives are concentrating on biodiversity and sustainable issues. The pollinator award is a good example and Buncrana hold the National Pollinator award for 2019 showing that we here in Inishowen take eco initiatives seriously.