30 gallons of food waste a day

Hi!
I collect about 30 gallons of food waste from restaurants each day. It fills my huge rotating composter in two days. I'm a lazy composter, so the rest I throw on my 1/4 acre empty property and let the chickens have at it. Sometimes I cover it with something like soil or mulch and just let it be. Is there any part of this "plan" that won't work?

It depends on what you mean by "work". The short answer is "No". I wish I had access to as much.

I guess I'm hoping I'm not making a mistake by piling up loads of compostable material each day. Like some day it'll just smell bad and take over. It's really good material, BTW - it's unbelievable what restaurants throw away in their food prep process (perfectly good lettuce, etc.).

Is it all vegetables and fruits?

I toss around lots of scraps that contain meat and bones. Most creatures that come for this are birds. I've never seen a rat at my place. If it were to attract rats, I would immediately stop. I always toss anything containing bones and meat around my snake breeding grounds. I figure that if rodents are attracted, some of them will be eaten.

If you have lots of area, spread out and don't let too much pile up in one area. Whenever I have waste that might become gooey, I put it where there's lots of wood waste or leaves.

Dale Hodgins wrote:I toss around lots of scraps that contain meat and bones. Most creatures that come for this are birds. I've never seen a rat at my place. If it were to attract rats, I would immediately stop. I always toss anything containing bones and meat around my snake breeding grounds. I figure that if rodents are attracted, some of them will be eaten.

If you have lots of area, spread out and don't let too much pile up in one area. Whenever I have waste that might become gooey, I put it where there's lots of wood waste or leaves.

I do as well. My point is that if you have large quantities of meat, grease, etc, that could cause a problem, as well as large piles of nothing but fruits and vegetables. My suggestion would be the same as yours: spread it out enough that you don't get a stinking slimy anaerobic mess.

That's a lot of food. It's too bad you can't "process" that food by sending it through the digestive tract of a chicken first. That would be the quickest way to "compost" it --- turn those restaurant scraps into eggs and high nitrogen chicken poop. If you had a chicken tractor, you could move it weekly, and just dump the food scraps in with the girls. They would eat most of it, poop it out all over the ground, and prepare a new patch of ground fro planting weekly. Win, win, win.

Another way to convert those restaurant scraps into eatable food for chickens or fish is with a black soldier fly bin. It's composting on steroids Those little beasties eat food scraps like crazy, and then the birds go crazy in eating the soldier fly larva. Everyone is happy. If you're not familiar with black soldier fly, investigate them on the Google or YouTube. It would take a massive BSF bin to absorb that volume of food scraps, but they multiple quickly, and it would covert that much food waste into several pounds of soldier fly larva every day once your colony had grown large enough.

Todd Parr wrote:Is it all vegetables and fruits?

Belated response - yes it is all vegetables and fruit, some onion and garlic.

Marco Banks wrote: It would take a massive BSF bin to absorb that volume of food scraps, but they multiple quickly, and it would covert that much food waste into several pounds of soldier fly larva every day once your colony had grown large enough.

Wow - that sounds amazing - I'm definitely going to look into soldier fly larva.

My husband told me this morning he's pretty much done with having all the restaurant scraps and wants to pare down to just one restaurant. It's still a lot of food waste! I'll look into those larva!

Todd Parr wrote: My suggestion would be the same as yours: spread it out enough that you don't get a stinking slimy anaerobic mess.

Encouraging! Thank you all so much for the responses (my first time posting