Things could be so easy, but for some reason people like to make it difficult. I truly believe (I’ve done enough work on this so I know), there could be an urban farm up and running within a year if only there was an outbreak of logic in the world.
Anyway, I think we can say it was a bit wintry during January. The snow was one of the delaying aspects, but if you ever dislike snow you need to stop and re-evaluate what you‘re doing. Go build a snowman while you do it.
With the snow and frozen ground stopping work on most of our plans, we’ve had time for some casual tinkering around the place and pondered new ideas. It’s also freed up time to catch up on paperwork – or rather sort out the paperwork into piles to be caught up with later.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of legislation and information there is, right down to what you can do legally with your animal manure - just dumping it is a no no, even on your own land.
You have to look on manure as a useful bi-product, if not necessarily a financial boon. Otherwise it’s just a pile of problems waiting for an Environmental Health visit.
Despite what you’d think (seeing as they’re all mostly eating grass) different animals produce manure that’s useful in different ways.
- Chicken manure (and all poultry) is very rich with nitrogen, potassium, and potash. A little too rich perhaps, so it has to be composted before being used or it'll 'burn' the plants.
- Cow manure is the most common to use in gardens, basically because it’s far less nutritious and therefore can be used earlier. Having said that it improves the structure of soil no end and so is far better in the long run than any chemical fertilizer.
- Horse manure is more problematic as it can contain a lot of weed seed, but as it needs to be rotted down anyway they’re usually long dead by the time you use it. It’s half as rich as chicken poo, but is packed with far more nitrogen than that of cows.
- Rabbits, yes rabbits, produce poo that’s ideal for flowers and fruit, but you may have to get to it before the rabbits do themselves.
- Sheep manure is much like horse, but with an extra kick of potash. It’s also much dryer and easier to handle, but we’ll come back to sheep another time.
It’s not as simple as just dumping it around the plants you’ll eat of course, you need to compost it so the heat can kill any harmful bacteria. There are added problems with manure from intensive farms using hormones or overdosing with antibiotics, as they can build up in the soil, plants, and ultimately ourselves – so the source is always worth knowing about.
I’d be letting down my old university lecturers if I didn’t mention anaerobic digesters here of course.
It’s a technology that’s been around for a long time (I studied working examples more than 15 years ago), but it finally seems to be taking off.
Basically you fill a large airtight tank with dung and other green waste. The tank acts like a giant stomach, slowly heating and letting the bacteria digest the collected waste. Just like our own stomachs, methane is produced and piped away, but unlike with us it’s then burned, and used to generate electricity.
While this is happening liquid seeps to the bottom and is also piped away. There can be quite a lot of this, but it’s great liquid fertilizer packed with nitrogen and phosphorus. Exactly what plants want.
Eventually the waste in the tank will stop producing methane, cool, and the tank can then be opened. It will have lost it’s smell and look just like soil, ready to be used as a replacement for peat in gardens.
Is there anything wrong with this system?
Other than the problems of hormone and antibiotic build up I mentioned before, the main worry is the ever-present temptation to overstretch things for a fast buck.
It would be very easy to expand operations, bringing in continual fleets of lorries loaded with waste from distant places, each paying nicely for dealing with their waste - but that would defeat much of the benefit and I’m not sure I’d want to live nearby.
Small locally based digesters though, using locally produced waste to create electricity for nearby communities makes far more sense with no fuss and little downside. Hang on though, that would be logical - never going to happen.
We're bound to come back to manure at some point, it does tend to crop up a lot.
Around the end of the month there was an obvious dip in our egg production on a isolated couple of days. As one of us was working in the trees those days, we know why. The cameras come up with some funny pictures too.
You know what we’ve forgotten? The good news!
After a little stumbling with the paperwork the Northamptonshire Community Foundation have awarded us a grant from their Grassroots Grants Fund for various pieces of equipment and supplies. We’re very grateful to them for that as it means we can finally move on and expand what we already do. Much work on the farm over the coming year then, and even more behind the scenes.
We may write a little piece on grants at some point, and there’s some exciting events away from our site that we want to mention, but not right now, those piles of paper won’t sort themselves.
Jamie, Liz, and Paul
