I built a couple of composting “bins” inside the chicken pasture over the past two days.  I had to do it in shifts because it is over 90 degrees now.  Summer has arrived. Or perhaps the hurricane that looks to make life difficult for New Orleans changed all the weather patterns.  In either case it’s blinking hot!  My water consumption goes hockey stick on days like these.

I put these composters in the pasture to help with fly control.  Zina has a relationship with a food bank near her office and she gets the leftover produce every week.  It’s a lot.  It’s not your garden variety table scraps.  It’s bushels of stuff.  With that much rotting vegetable matter and our own chicken manure, flies happen.  Outside the pasture there wasn’t much we could do.  With them in with the boy goats and layers, everyone gets a job.  The bucks can eat whatever vegetable matter they’d like, but the chickens are master composters.  They will get in there and scratch and peck and eat all manner of insect eggs and larvae.  It should drastically reduce our fly problem.  We had fly issues over by the donkey barn as well.  Why? Well, because donkeys crap a LOT.  When we got turkeys it dropped to practically nothing.  Voila!  We are an equal opportunity poultry employer!