Is there a good reason why I shouldn't just...burn it?

I'm think I'm probably never going to compost.  Not really into it, don't really care.  Understand all the reasons one would, and understand why some would say that I should.

Also, I don't care that I don't care so I'm not likely to ever care.

We spent a year and a half just tossing our kitchen scraps out onto various spots on our land and letting nature take its course.  Then I put some worm towers about 40cm into the soil for us to empty our scrap bucket into thinking at least I could move the nutrients closer to where I want them long term.  With the addition of an extra step it seems the kitchen waste scrap bin gets emptied less and less frequently...a key indicator that this ain't the right system for us either.

So I'm on the hunt for something that meets our needs and deals effectively with our kitchen waste (that also isn't composting).

Now, all that said, the only appliance we have to cook on indoors is a wood stove.  We have a fire every day, just long enough to boil the kettle in the morning so we can make some coffee.  Is there any solid reason why I shouldn't just, you know, throw my kitchen scraps in there and then spread the ash over my property instead?

Like, plants and/or bacteria will sort out the vitamins, and what nitrogen is in our food scraps will easily be recovered/replaced with some intentional nitrogen farming (various legumes and an azolla pond).  So I need to treat the minerals as gold, but is a fire that's a few hundred degrees actually going to change the nature of inorganic minerals in such a way that they become less than ideal?

Legit, I don't know and I'd love someone to check my logic.

Why shouldn't I just...you know...burn it?

Fun question - wood ash and charcoal are great soil amendments. I'm sure an expert can answer this better than me, but I'll do a little looky looky while I post.

First (edited to add) I'm going to use wood ash as a reference point because we can look at lots of numbers, even though wood is not vegetable scraps (end edit). Wood ash is a pretty well known substance with a lot of variability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_ash
There's a lot of stuff left in wood ash - Wikipedia gives us this list:
   Carbon (C) — 5–30%.
   Calcium (Ca) — 7–33%
   Potassium (K) — 3–4%
   Magnesium (Mg) — 1–2%
   Manganese (Mn) — 0.3–1.3%
   Phosphorus (P) — 0.3–1.4%
   Sodium (Na) — 0.2–0.5%.

As well as other trace elements:
   Fe 1.6-55 ‰
   Si 6-170 ‰
   Al 1.2-45 ‰
   Mn 1-20 ‰
   As 0.6-50 ppm
   Cd 0.18-60 ppm
   Pb 2-500 ppm
   Cr 12-280 ppm
   Ni 10-140 ppm
   V 1.8-120 ppm

So what burns away? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_fuel

Well, smoke is apparently largely water vapor (So Hydrogen and Oxygen) and CO2 (so Carbon and more Oxygen). Otherwise it appears that the rest of what is burning away is a huge variety of organic compounds (mostly Carbon and Hydrogen, ala hydrocarbons).

What speaks out to me about this though is the fact that organic chemistry, the chemistry of organic compounds, is one of the more complex and interesting fields. So while I know almost nothing about it, my ignorant imagination sees those organic compounds as probably being extremely valuable components to biological processes both helpful and harmful.

So my very brief research into this question (less than 5 minutes) makes me think that by burning it you're simplifying the scraps into constituent elements and removing a lot of the complex and interesting components. Also you're removing energy quickly as opposed to keeping it on your property longer, stored in a more stable form.

I was just learning that one of the goals in permaculture design is to try to keep energy on the site for as long as possible before letting entropy have it. So there's that.

Bio char is a cool thing too though, and I think you can get bio char from burning just about any recently living thing including vegetable scraps.

Thomas,

The best place for the kitchen scraps is the stomach of a pig - get a medium size, non-rooting breed and soon you will ask your neighbors for more kitchen scraps.

Thomas Crow wrote:We spent a year and a half just tossing our kitchen scraps out onto various spots on our land and letting nature take its course.

You had a system that was working for you, why not just go back to it?

The reasons I wouldn't burn it are: 1. veggie scraps are mostly water and water doesn't burn very well.
2. what isn't water, is mostly carbon. Much of the worlds land is short on carbon, and burning it will likely turn that carbon into CO2 which currently is on the high side also.

I suppose there is some risk that just dumping it in different spots will allow it to turn into methane which we also don't want, but I suspect that more likely, birds, small mammals, amphibians, reptiles, insects, earthworms and microbes will eat those scraps and turn it into their respective version of poop. Who cares if that poop is spread all over your land, or the neighbors land, or public land - it's still likely being spread far and wide enough so as not to be a health threat, and I expect Mother Nature appreciates the gifts.  

Jay Angler wrote:

Thomas Crow wrote:We spent a year and a half just tossing our kitchen scraps out onto various spots on our land and letting nature take its course.

You had a system that was working for you, why not just go back to it?

You know when someone asks the right question at the right time and it's a punch to the chest...but in a good way?

This right here is what I needed to hear.  We had a system that was working for us, why not just go back to it...we got too many other systems to implement, and create and imagine.  Why continue looking for a complicated way to do a job that was already getting done before I decided to complicate it in the first place?

Like really, cheers for that.

Thomas Crow wrote:Like really, cheers for that.

Merry Christmas and Happy Summer Solstice (where you are) for thanking me for being my usual blunt self! Glad to be of help!

We have been where we live since 2013.

I have given my vegetable scrapes to the wildlife since we moved here.

I don't know what happens to it as the scraps just disappear.

I quit now that we have a cat since I don't want her eating it.

Now I dehydrate all my veggie scraps.

Jay Angler wrote:
2. what isn't water, is mostly carbon. Much of the worlds land is short on carbon, and burning it will likely turn that carbon into CO2 which currently is on the high side also.

The type of carbon that is found in ash and charcoal does not decompose any further, therefore store more carbon then non burnt material, no matter their placement. For non burnt OM not to decompose you need say a peat bog, otherwise 100 percent of it will turn to co2 or some form of gas. So as far as long term storage of carbon, burning is the only option. I always knew this as a fact, I have even found charcoal, buried at my location from previous owners, but all the intel on internet is referring to cremation, but it does state clearly for that situation is ash doesn’t biodegrade, that situation certainly applicable to other forms of ash.

I have a long list of why to burn mostly dealing with sanitation and formation of low pressure

Could you get some chickens?

ALL our compostable material goes into the chicken run. If it is edible, they eat it. If it isn't edible, it slow composts in their run. We empty it every day, simply by taking the pail up to the chickens each morning. It never sits in the kitchen for more than 24 hours.

All the garden waste also goes in their run.

Thomas, if it works to just spread it around, then I think that's great.  If it starts to cause issues with varmints you could potentially bury it in places.  I think I saw a video of David the Good just burying food scraps all around.  I'm out of time this morning, otherwise I'd look for it.

Another option might be to use the food scraps to feed a methane digester that could in turn cook your coffee every morning, then spread the liquid fertilizer across your land.  The SolarC3ities website has plans ranging from 5 gallon buckets to IBC totes depending on how much food you want to process.  

Just a generic response to all mostly because figuring out how to quote people individually seems real hard - cheers for the input.  Defo just going to go back to spreading our food scraps around.  

Chickens and/or Pigs: At the moment we've only got a dog and so far she's pretty good at figuring out what she should and shouldn't eat, except of course bones but we pressure cook those long enough that they're safe for her.  We're getting ducks and geese in the next week or two.  No chickens, no pigs - don't have the space or the work for them to perform to justify keeping them, nor do I feel like we could free range either and containing them in some capacity means I need to A - understand their behaviour better and decide if containing them is right for us, B - again have some work for them to perform on an ongoing basis, and C - start the project that is to build a method of containment and bump it up in front of the other projects on the list that all feel time sensitive.  While I could certainly use some pigs to help gley a pond, after that work is done I have no need for them so could just borrow some from the rare breeds guy that lives in the valley.

Varmints: aren't an issue here - in the way that they're such an issue there's no not having them without building a fence that would cost more than the property itself - kinda literally.  In the chillier parts of the year I'll catch 3 or so mice/night indoors and we're only in a bus.  Too many introduced species with no predators and the dog only seems to be interested in catching rabbits and possums.  

Cats: are not an option for us - much as I love 'em.  They are easily the biggest non-human cause of decline in native NZ species but no one wants to talk seriously about it since A) almost everyone everywhere loves cats, and B) part of kiwi culture is to neither keep cats indoors, nor keep a bell on their collar to warn birds.  I know plenty of people who trap/hunt other predators and even feral cats but have one or two of their own who "only kill some introduced birds occasionally".  Cats kill for fun - a fact, not a judgment.  This just isn't the right context </rant>

Biodigester: Have thought seriously about a biodigester for our blackwater - if I do that, I'll investigate using a 12v macerating pump as an insinkerator and send that straight to the digester - I doubt seriously that I'll want to use the electricity for a 240v, especially in the three weeks in winter where I've historically had to use the generator every 2-3 days (hopefully different this year).  My understanding is that it isn't the right solution for only kitchen scraps as by themselves they do have the nutrient level to create any meaningful biogas.  That said, one project I hope to get to this summer is to renovate the bus during which we'll add a single LPG burner hidden in a bench top somewhere that may inspire the biodigester, but for the moment I'm planning on Anna Edey's flush toilet worm farm (http://www.solvivagreenlight.com/green-clean-wastewater-management-with-flush-toilets/).  My apologies if I've misattributed the genius of the system, but I don't think I have...

Dehydrating veggie scraps:  There was a period of time, when we were on-grid in a rental years ago, where we dehydrated all our veggie scraps then whizzed them up for a few seconds and used the resultant as, basically, a powdered stock so we could squeeze all the nutrients out of everything.  We just don't have the weather (or battery capacity) to use any kind of dehydrator year round in this iteration.  One of my goals is to use appropriate technology to increase generation, not storage, so while we'll take the pressure off of watching our every amp-hour in winter, we'll likely never have that capacity again - at least not during the darker months.

I think that covers everything.  Again, cheers for all the responses - defo gonna just go back to throwing it all around the joint.  It was working for us before I decided to go and make things more complicated.

I burned wood for maybe 20 years, tried to keep the wood stove burning as much as possible all winter. The stove was in the kitchen a natural place to drop a bone. I also had pigs; but never fed them any meat scraps. For much of those years I didn't have a dog or the pigs. So a lot of bones went into the wood stove. The alternative was putting them into the compost where the critters would dig it up and come back again for what else they learned was in the pile. I also threw a lot of egg shells into the stove.

I also kept some cattle so we had a lot more bones than what the average family might have.

But I do agree that while you get a lot of nutrients out of ash you lose a lot of organic matter that we can use in our soil.

Thomas, biogas from food is actually magnitudes more efficient than dung.  That learning is what won the Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI) the Ashton Award.  Checkout this 5min video on the ARTI design here.  If you can keep the small digester warm, the 40 liter (10.5 gallon) Solar Cities pickle barrel digester can produce around 3-5min of burn time a day on 1 liter of food waste, which may be enough to boil water in a Kelly Kettle.

Burton Sparks wrote:Thomas, biogas from food is actually magnitudes more efficient than dung.  That learning is what won the Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI) the Ashton Award.  Checkout this 5min video on the ARTI design here.  If you can keep the small digester warm, the 40 liter (10.5 gallon) Solar Cities pickle barrel digester can produce around 3-5min of burn time a day on 1 liter of food waste, which may be enough to boil water in a Kelly Kettle.

Will definitely check out those resources.  Thanks for that.  Chuffed that this is my learning for today.

Jay Angler wrote:

Thomas Crow wrote:We spent a year and a half just tossing our kitchen scraps out onto various spots on our land and letting nature take its course.

You had a system that was working for you, why not just go back to it?

Yep, this.^

You have to focus on what achieves your goals. As long as it doesn't bring in problematic animals, dump it on a pile and let natural decomposers make compost. Slow composting is a natural process; I do it extensively. And it's a helluva lot better than burying it in a landfill. My 2c.

Burton Sparks wrote:Thomas, biogas from food is actually magnitudes more efficient than dung.

Anything that's high in carbon and hydrogen. Biogas according to one source is made up of " 50–85% CH4 (methane); 20–35% CO2; H2, N2 and H2S form the rest (Pastorek et al. 2004)." It's the methane we're looking for. Years ago I read a local document about it and chicken manure which is considered "too hot" for the garden, isn't recommended for biogas production. However, horse poop which tends to be high in hay, so long as it's not contaminated with urine, was a better option. So it doesn't just have to be "food", but any chopped up high carbon material mixed with water. It's used in some countries to process humanure, but it works best if the urine is diverted, and they add a lot of veggie scraps to make it work. What it does, is render humanure less dangerous than it lying around in the open.  I've not pursued it further because it needs more warmth than I'd be able to manage easily in my climate with the volume of feedstock I'd be able to easily manage.

John Indaburgh wrote:

So a lot of bones went into the wood stove.

Yes, I burn a lot of bones, but they need a hot fire to burn completely so I generally end up with a questionable version of biochar. I never really know how well any particular piece has charred, but I have very heavy clay soil, so anything that lightens it is an asset, and charred bone bits fits the bill. I make some intentional biochar using a restaurant heating tray with a lid placed on a hot bed of coals in the wood stove. It doesn't do a large quantity, but it's enough to add some to garden beds as I'm building or top dressing them.  It does sequester carbon for a long time, along with supporting microorganisms.

I would really like the arrangement in a small place community growing things enough for food and materials, that respects the wildlife that much to leave it alone as much as reasonably possible. It is part of my own approach, while I would seek to live with what is most sustainable. Composting scraps is quite a sensible way to deal with them, with that.