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.