One of our core values at our farm is stewardship of the earth. It is an inevitable fact of life that, as a commercial pheasant farm, we will produce some dead pheasants here. And the dead pheasants need to be disposed of in some manner.
Incinerating dead pheasants not only uses a lot of fuel (we’ve had both diesel burning incinerators and propane fired incinerators), but produces very sooty, smelly smoke. The idea of composting the dead pheasants has been discussed here over the years, but we never had a really good course or direction to actually start composting. Then a few years ago we heard about and saw a composter that looked like it would work for us.
We gave the job of checking out the composter to Ryan George. Ryan did the research, found the right size machine for our farm and did all the prep work. The composter arrived here a few weeks ago and Ryan hired a crane to hoist the machine onto the newly poured slab of concrete.
Brian Davis is now in charge of the actual operation of the machine. After some initial tweaking of the inputs (not only dead pheasants go into the machine, but biomass such as wood chips or straw go in also) the composter has now come up to heat (as high as 180 degrees) and is working.
Sometime soon we will have completed compost, which initially we will give away, but at some point we hope to be able to sell. Our incinerators have been shut down. The composter is a much superior way to dispose of our dead birds.
