2017 letter from Bill Weaver, owner of Archway Land, LLC
Thanks for your inquiry regarding our experience with the earth flow system. You can get a good idea of what our farm operation is about by going to www.archwayequestrian.com My wife and I own the farm while an LLC owned by three very professional ladies run the horse care and training program here. In respect to the earth flow system, we installed it in April of this year as part of our commitment to be good stewards of the environment and qualified for a grant from our local conservation district for about $22,000 to offset part of the costs. For over three years we as the owners and the trainers as the operators had intensely studied all the composting systems that might possibly meet our needs and finally selected the earth flow as the most suitable. Its creator, manufacturer and installer Green Mountain Technologies is coincidentally also like us located in the Seattle area.
Our goal was to install a system that would enable us to compost the horse stall waste and then reuse it in its composted form as clean bedding thereby reducing and even eliminating the need and expense of both hauling off the used bedding and bringing in new traditional bedding which in the case of a show barn like ours consists of quite expensive, course sawdust from lumber mills. Our composter has been up and running for over three months and so far we are meeting our goals. As you are no doubt aware, the composting process reduces the volume of the material being composted by about 30% so it still is necessary to bring in some new, coarse sawdust to mix with the compost before putting the mixture back in the stalls. This supplementation has the benefit of both producing the necessary volume of new stall bedding for us as well as keeping the mixture from becoming too fine or dusty as the same material is recycled for the fourth time or more.
As far as long term reliability and maintenance are concerned our installation is too recent for us to speak very meaningly on that subject. What I can say from my experience in the first several months of operation is that all indications so far are positive. We had no more than what I would say were normal bugs following start up. Chain adjustment and some bad shaft bearings were the only problems we encountered and they were promptly remedied by the CEO and founder of the company himself who came to our facility and worked with us, which as farmers is exactly the kind of hands on education we crave about our equipment so that we have the knowledge and skills to keep our production going ourselves if no one is around to help us.
Regarding the quality of the end product, we are very pleased as it exceeds our expectations. For re-use in the stalls we require the end product be of a certain consistency and moisture content and be free of pathogens, while hopefully retaining healthy minerals since the horses necessarily ingest some of it from their stall floors. Our latest laboratory test results on the product show those requirements are being met and our barn farrier and vet are pleased with the resulting impact on our horses' health and hooves. Our neighbor to the east of us runs a successful large landscaping company and we have been fortunate that he likes the laboratory analysis of the product (close to neutral ph and lots of nitrogen and organic material) so we have been giving him some of our excess production to use but in the longer term hope to sell the excess (spot wholesale price of compost meeting EPA standards has been over $30 a cubic yard in our region last time I checked).
To sum up, our experience has been so far so good. I am glad to see Green Mountain strongly interested in the equine area as I believe their auger system produces the right result for stall material re-use. Michael Bryan-Brown their founder and CEO has been fully responsive to us and is a pleasure to work with from putting together a purchase order to handing Crescent wrenches back and forth as we tuned up the installation together.
Which brings me to my last point which I believe you will appreciate as a properly proud member of our armed forces. These machines are not toys and they are required to reprocess tons of material on a continuous basis with little tolerance by their owners for unexpected outages or extended downtime. Buying and operating one requires a degree of mechanical and electrical skill and attention well beyond that of a normal homeowner who just got, for example, a new washing machine to run and maintain. They need to be carefully monitored and checked on a daily basis and subjected to a rigorously enforced maintenance schedule just like the long haul driver/owner of a big rig does if you expect to get performance out of them. They are not an install and forget item! - Bill Weaver Owner of Archway Land, LLC
To Michael Bryan-Brown from Bill Weaver | June 30, 2024
Re: Using Composted Stall Waste to Re-bed Stalls
You have asked me to summarize our farm's experience with composting horse stall waste using our EarthFlow GMT composter and then re-using it as supplemental new bedding. Before doing so, it is appropriate to put our experience in proper context as our farm's
objectives and operations differ appreciably from others. Of course there are many different types of horse stall bedding - straw, sawdust, paper, wood chips, synthetic products and so forth. Our experience in composting stall waste with our EarthFlow composter has only been with large flake, wood chip stall waste.Our geographical location is in the soggy Puget Sound region of Washington which means that it is necessary for us to control the moisture content of the compost to be put back in stalls to keep it dry enough to be absorptive but damp enough to avoid it becoming dusty. To accomplish that balance, our Earthflow composter is supplemented at the backend with a gas heated drying house where we can modulate the moisture content of what goes back into stalls. Finally, we have never done a cost/benefit analysis of re-using stall waste as bedding in its composted form because we would be composting in spite of the benefits of such re-use.
Our farm is only ten years old and was built to our local conservation district standards that require that no waste product can be spread on our pastures or other grounds unless it it is first composted and pathogen free. With that background, here is what we have learned:
- Composted wood chips can only be used as "supplemental" bedding. New wood chip bedding still needs to be purchased because the composting process reduces the volume and absorptive capacity of the original wood chip bedding by at least 50%.
- Wood chip bedding can only be composted and re-used once. It becomes too fine and dusty to be used in stalls if the recycling process is tried a second time.
- Moisture correct, composted bedding which has been recycled only one time makes good bedding and works from a practical standpoint. But in a high end barn like ours it does not easily meet with horse professionals' or our clients' acceptance simply because of its color and their mistaken belief that compost is just another form of dirt. The barn owner has to decide whether being practical or yielding to horse peoples' misperceptions is more important to achieving an overall successful operation. Bill Weaver Owner of Archway Land, LLC June 30, 2024
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