Today I called Stoyan, the chef cook of the Kovatsj Farm Restaurant, situated in the Strandzha Nature Park, Bulgaria, to ask about some "Scheisse". He has about 200 buffaloes on his farm. The first thing he did when I visited him earlier this year to ask if he could roast a lamb for the tourists of our Shepherd Tour, he let us taste his fresh buffalo milk cheese to proof his culinary qualities.  Now I asked his cooperation in a composting project and inquired about the availability of the buffalo dung.

What is so interesting about composting?

Well, suppose compost was all around and plenty available, it can give you a marvelous highly productive substrate for making an organic vegetable garden anywhere you want, even on the worst soils and in the smallest places. See for example the lively discussions about so-called raised bed agriculture on one of the more than  600.000 google links: www.raisedbedgardeningtips.com.

Another interesting thing about compost is that is gives back humus content to the arable lands that is alarmingly decreasing everywhere in the world. The carbon molecule strings of humus are little wonders in maintaining water for the soil and offering a favorable living place for micro-organisms that help the plants in getting their food. Unfortunately, by tilling the land, and exposing it to water and wind, the humus content is mineralised, which makes the land even more sensitive to erosion. Besides erosion, this humus depletion contributes significantly to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere!

But the most intriguing about compost is the following. While it is expected that the costs of the fabrication of nitrogen in artificial fertilizer will rise enormously because of the high amount of energy that is needed, and given the fact that with the current use rate of phosphates its sources are depleted this century, we have to seriously ask ourselves if we have to return to compost as main nutrition for agricultural plants.

Now the secret: where to get those enormous amounts of compost?

Ofcourse we are pooing ourselves a lot. But unfortunately we do not really have influence on what people drop in the sewers. So in fact, besides the occasional emptying of car batteries, the sludge is polluted with medicines and hormones, impossible to remove, we really don’ t want to have in the food cycle. All the sludge in the world would even not be enough to maintain soil fertility.

The problem is that we need digesters that are able to eat things, that we cannot eat ourselves. Traditionally: cattle. Here we have a bit more control: we can use the compost of organic cattle, like Stoyan’s buffaloes. But unfortunately this is still not enough! And we don’ t want to have more cattle in the world. Burping cows are one of the largest contributors to the greenhouse effect.

Now I found something else. A lot of trees standing in the way and wood digesting bacteria!

The Strandhza Nature Park in Bulgaria has a lot of forest but also about 8000 ha of pastures. These meadows were once used by more than 100.000 sheep in a transhumance culture that flourished until the WWII. And before that by natural grazing animals. Since thousands of years the ecosystem adapted to this grazing regime, and as a result a type of flora developed, unique for Bulgaria, and Europe. But like elsewhere in Europe, intensive agriculture took over and the pastures are gradually overgrown by pioneer shrubs and forest.

In Eastern Europe, it is estimated that about 30% of the traditional agricultural land lay fallow. Nobody is interested to plant something, or to use the grass because the farming in isolated areas, on mountainous land turned to be not profitable for the small farmers and for the old collectives that are left on their own after the collapse of the communist system.

Our Shepherd Tour, walking with the shepherd in Bulgaria, an attempt to pay the shepherd by means of tourism, had a lot of difficulties to make progress because so many trees and sharp bushes stood in the way. Our shepherd casually notified me after one week walking that 4 of the 110 sheep, that we started off with, were missing. I suspect that some of them unfortunately could not escape from the raspberry bushes …

Taking biomass from abandoned lands in Europe is not worth the trouble for cattle breeding alone. But it seems that it is useful for other things: tourism, rare flora, sheep and dog genes, vultures and….compost!  

The pioneer in using woody biomass for making compost was Jean Pain, a forester in the south of France in the 60’s and 70’s. He had similar problems with abandoned land. In his case the dry bushes caught easily fire and destroyed 100’s of hectares of forest each year.
He discovered a method to digest wood chips by cutting them in little slices and put them in a huge pile. An old documentary describing the process has been put on you tube, a must see for compost freaks!
Jean Pain Method documentary part 1

Essentially it is not composting, but digesting. Composting transforms biomass mostly into CO2. Compost is the residue. Digesting can ideally transform 30% of the carbon content into biogas. And you end up with the same amount of compost. With a pile of 40 ton wood chips he produced sufficient methane gas for his household and to drive his 2CV for 18 months.

I say ideally, because with the legendary, open air  “Jean Pain Method”, considerable amounts of methane might escape into the atmosphere, something that we also nowadays try to avoid. So now there is a smart company who has built a concrete tank around the pile, connected some water tubes and computers, patented it and sells the technology as “BEKON Dry Fermentation”.

I will take the fancy brochure of this company to Stoyan and the mayors of the municipalities in Strandzha Nature Park, to impress them with the high tech opportunities for these deprived areas. But probably we will end up by building an old fashion compost pile with RebelFarmer volunteers next year. And hopefully we can borrow the tractor of the collective to get those nasty bushes out!

Nature Farming links
-EU Soil Thematic Strategy (2003): Nature and extent of soil erosion in Europe
-European Environment Agency (2004): High Value Nature Farmland, characteristics, trends and policy challenges
-Seminar presentations (2004): Abandoned lands in the new members states and candidate countries of the EU and the EU Common Agricultural Policy

Composting links
- The Cornell Institute Composting Homepage
- The Science and Engineering of Composting
- The Practical Handbook of Compost Engineering
- The Digestion Archives

Biogas links
- www.builditsolar.com
- www.sare.org

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