butchering wastes/dead bird disposal

Forgive me for hijacking the chicken forums as this is general critter question I have but....

The biggest question in my mind is what do you do with the wastes from butchering or from die offs, particularly ones where the fear is diseased animals?

The answer is hermetia illucens, or more commonly known as the black soldier fly. With a good colony they will eat like monsters. And in the end you get maggots you can feed to fish, chickens, ducks, etc...

If you think the birds were diseased, would these larva not pass along the disease? Surely you cannot just leave the carcasses out and let the insects feed on them? I could imagine things getting pretty icky out there if you have a pig or a goat go.

If you do what I said and research them you would have found the answers to your questions. But.....

The larvae "throw up on themselves" as they leave the bin and sterilize themselves. That's not including the pathogen suppression that goes on in the bin. These things come out of the bin clean enough for you to eat let alone a chicken.

Do some research there is so much information on them.

I put all skins with feathers (I skin, not pluck), feet, wings, guts and head in my garden covered with a layer of either sheep poo and old hay or chicken poo and bedding or garden soil or wood chips and with a small cairn of rocks on top to keep the raccoons from digging it up. Seems to compost quite rapidly. I butcher one chicken every week or so, and I'm able to put a new "grave" in a different spot, so I just move the rocks from one place to another. Eventually I might have a more formal way of composting these items, but for now this is easy.

I'm in thorough agreement about the soldier flies, and I had great luck with them in Georgia. I even fed them humanure and poisonous mushrooms. But I've had trouble with them here in CA...winter too cold, so I have to buy in new ones each spring and there are several months of the year when there are none....including the best tiimes to "do" poultry and other meat. What I did before I knew about soldier flies was direct burial, usually in spots where I knew I'd be planting trees at some point. This is also what I did with humanure for years.

I have always fed offal to my catfish. I know of no disease that will cross between cold blooded and warm blooded. And besides, since I would have no problem eating a catfish I caught in the wild, I can't see why I should mind eating one from my pound where I know what they have been eating.

The idea is to have the waste go through something that won't transmit disease. Chicken to chicken, bad. Chicken to larva to Chicken shouldn't be a problem. Chicken to fish, also not a problem.

And fish to chicken, again, not a problem.

If you got a nice size compost pile, just put it in the middle... Should be gone in no time.

feathers also decompose quickly? Who knew not I, i thought there was be lots of flies and unwanted things

I find that a large enough hot pile can take care of whole bird deadstock without issue. The microbes make quick work of the organic material and turn it into something that can be utilized for plants in the future.

I agree Timothy. A good, hot compost pile (for example from humanure and kitchen scraps) will take care of smaller animal corpses.
I dig into the pile a bit and cover the corpse again afterwards. Everything disappears within weeks.
Jenkins also writes about that in the humanure handbook.
And my permaculture teacher talked about composting an entire goat.

We have a place in an out of the way corner of our 60 acres we call `The Dump`.

That is where vultures and other wildlife clean up our butchering leftovers.

I have a few spots that I also use.  Somehow that stuff always goes missing.

In an urban setting, a compost pile would work great.  

Burying also works great like with trench composting.

Whenever possible, I also use my regular compost set up, but with a few extra steps:

1. I will try to put a layer of fine sawdust under the bird to soak and slow any "juice" from the decomposition.
2. If I have some handy, I will add below and above, some biochar so any microbes will have good housing.
3. I use it as a good excuse to remove some bedding from one of my duck houses - nothing like a good layer of duck shit to disguise the smell of decomp and discourage the local coons from digging up the corpse!

If for some reason, we're having to bury more or larger livestock than usual, I will dig a hole near where we want to plant a tree. I will use lots of fine woody material or dry leaves at the bottom to again, soak up anything I don't want in my water table, I will try to add a layer of active compost that already has worms and microbes at work, then add the corpse, then top with similar mixed with dirt. There's a reason one of my apple trees is called "Marguerite's Apple", and another one is called, "Bilbo's Apple". There are people who would suggest that to really protect your water table, this whole process should be a mound on top of the soil, rather than a hole. However, we have a surplus of rats, coons, and off-leash dogs which make that approach less than ideal, so I settle for not planting too deep and in places where the the water should run down a slope, rather than sinking deeper.

If the animal is not diseased...we boil them up for our dogs. They love the treat!

My dogs eat raw, so it would be super simple for me and the scraps are relished.  My Aussie won't eat feathers, though.  Feathers can go in the compost and make a slow nitro release. Right now I buy frozen chicken backs and sternums from Azure Standard, and local beef and lamb organ meats.   I am looking forward to having birds again and yummy scraps!  Poultry offal would be a great supplement as well.

One thing that people often think of as a scrap - but is SO GOOD and worth trying if you haven't already... chicken foot broth.  The feet make the best broth by far.  I don't even bother with making any other type now because the chicken foot broth doesn't smell as strong as chicken broth made from other bones.  Foot broth is the only one my husband can stand now.   The broth is makes is so rich in gelatin!

I do it in a pressure cooker in two batches, for 20-25 minutes each.  So 1/2 gallon of water to 6-8 chicken feet, pressure cook 20 minutes.  Then pour off the broth and refill with another 1/2 gallon and repeat.  

The reason for the two batches off the same feet is that I've noticed it pulls a better broth off that way.  I've tried using a gallon of water and going longer, but there is a point at which the gelatin seems to break down and no longer thicken.  If overcooked, the broth stays watery even when cooled.  It's might be breaking down into collagen, but I can't tell and so I prefer to keep it at the set-able gelatin stage.

After the second pressure cooking, the bones will be soft and crumble under firm finger pressure.  There is still some collagen-rich joint tissue and skin left.  Then the whole mess, softened bone and all is a great dog meal, too.  This is the only time I feed my dogs cooked bones.  Otherwise only raw.

Treating them with Bokashi also expedites the decomposition process and reduces odors.
You can treat it for 2-4 weeks, then bury it and it should be pretty much soil in a few weeks after that.

Kim Goodwin wrote:One thing that people often think of as a scrap - but is SO GOOD and worth trying if you haven't already... chicken foot broth.  The feet make the best broth by far.  I don't even bother with making any other type now because the chicken foot broth doesn't smell as strong as chicken broth made from other bones.  Foot broth is the only one my husband can stand now.   The broth is makes is so rich in gelatin!

For sure! When I butcher chickens, I make sure to scald and peel the feet then set them aside. They end up in the chicken broth, with the chicken carcass after we roast and eat the chicken. Adding even 2 feet, from that bird we ate, makes a night and day difference in the amount of collagen in the broth.

I also vote for Black Soldier Fly larvae.  I am in CA and the BSF find my compost bin.  I built what I thought was going to be a worm bin for all our kitchen waste, to keep the waste... and hopefully the rodents... out of our compost bin.  Only yard waste goes into our compost bin now.  The 'worm' bin I built is actually a set of stacking bins, discarded fence board sides and mesh bottom, solid lid on top of stack.  The BSF found this setup also so I drilled ... less than 1/2" ?... holes in the side to make it easy for the BSF to get in.  Caught a rat in a snap trap and put it in the very active bin and the rat was unrecognizable the next day.  And the beautiful thing about this bin?  The BSF larvae crawl out the bottom (YES, they do NOT need a ramp of a particular angle to crawl out of the waste space) through the mesh and the chickens do their own scavenging of the larvae, no collection necessary on my part.  It is January in CA now and I've seen very few BSF larvae in this bin so I just add another bin on top if a bin gets full of kitchen waste.  I have 5 total, but have never needed to add the 5th one.  When the weather warms up again, the BSF will plow through the goodies in the bin in no time.  Not sure if you want offal sitting in a bin all winter until the BSF return, but by the time I'm done parting out a chicken for meals and stock, I wouldn't mind putting what is left into my bin until my BSF workers return.  Might be a different story if I were concerned about a sick animal.

Similar to what Kim suggested, our daughter puts all the scraps from butchering deer into a crockpot and cook it up to feed her dogs.