Compost # 2 - Application!

Over the last 18 months I've been rotating the chickens in a 5 x 5 metre pen, with full 'free ranging' on the weekends.  The rotation consists of 8 positions, in a 4 x 2 grid, covering an area of 10 x 20 metres, or 200 square metres, or about 1/20th of an acre.  I started composting when we got the chickens, see Compost # 1, and this evening I started to apply it to the chickens rotation area.

I spent about 45 minutes, applying 1 shovel load per square metre and then raking it to try to even it out, and covered 40 square metres in total.  Each shovel-load weighed about 2 kilogrammes, and lets assume (a big assumption at this stage!) that I perfectly hit the 'sweet spot' ratio of 1 part Nitrogen to 30 parts Carbon that Joel Salatin (www.polyfacefarm.com) refers to in Salad Bar Beef (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Salad-Bar-Beef-Allan-Nation/dp/096381091X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346017237&sr=8-1); and, then using Stackyard's (http://www.stackyard.com/news/2009/04/fertiliser/01_eblex_farmyard_manure.html) figure that there is 0.6kg of Nitrogen in a tonne of Farmyard Manure (FYM); and, then using Salatin's data that FYM is 18:1 Carbon:Nitrogen.  Not sure I've thought this totally through, but it seems to me that the Nitrogen content of my compost per tonne should therefore be:0.6x((18+1)/(30+1)) = 0.367 kg.

On a per-acre basis I've therefore applied:

(2kgs x 4050 sq.m x 0.367kg) / 1000 = 2.97kgs of Nitrogen.

Having a general read through the web a modern farmer might think of a 'light dressing' of nitrogen on his grassland as 50kg per acre!

The good news is that clover (of which, currently buried under tonnes of buttercups, we have plenty), also acts as a very efficient nitrogen fixer.  I'll be observing the effect of the compost on the experimental patch, and trying to calculate what we should do longer term as we start to keep grazing animals of our own in due course. 

In the meantime its back to the shovel!