Cynthia: I wanna know, do you, are you actually tasting that compost?

Tomo: Uh..no.

Cynthia: A little, a little bit too much ammonia in that one.

I'm just Kidding.

Tomo: Yeah.

That, that's gross.

Tomo: The great thing about a chicken tractor is you can keep your chickens from eating what you don't want them to eat.

You can put them in spots where you need them to clear out.

Cynthia: Before we go into it, quick shout out to our sponsored Merit Medical.

I know what you're thinking.

Here's Cynthia again with her chicken, but guess what?

This isn't my chicken and this isn't my backyard.

So Belinda and I are gonna tell you right now to make sure you hit that subscribe button and to turn on those notifications so that you can get all those amazing videos from us here at Modern Garner.

I am in southeastern Utah in Helper with Helper Homegrown.

And they are doing something incredible.

They're going to show us or tell us their dirty little secret and how they're making the best compost available to their community.

I am here with Tomo, with Helper Homegrown.

And tell me how you've gotten the community involved in Helper Homegrown.

Tomo: So my partner and Christie and I, we started this community composting program.

And so we have a drop off location at the gate.

Our neighbors and friends, you know, bring over their household compost.

We collect food scraps from local restaurants and we feed it to our chickens.

We put in the chicken pen, they eat what they like and turn that into manure.

We collect everything they didn't eat and the manure and combine it with different materials like the spent beer grains from the brewery here, and then let the, let them go.

Microbes do the rest.

- So tell me about what an actual chicken tractor is.

Is it a coop?

- The idea of a chicken tractor?

Is that it's doing what a tractor would do.

So they're mowing by eating all the weeds.

And they're digging into the soil looking for insects and different seeds to eat.

And so they're mixing in their own manure into the soil.

We've got two different kind of chicken tractors.

We've got the stationary one, and that's based off of this permaculture teacher Geoff Lawton, out of Australia's idea of a "chicken tractor on steroids" where you put organic material under their roosting area, most of their poop lands there.

We take that, mix it with food scraps and other like weeds or other manure that we have collected and then put it all into piles to start to compost.

- And then you have a second method that you do where you're moving chickens often.

So - Then we use these portable chicken tractors and move them just about every day.

So you're trying to make it light enough that you can move it by yourself.

And so there eating weeds.

The great thing about a chicken tractor is you can keep your chickens from eating what you don't want them to eat.

You can put them in spots where you need them to clear out and they clear it out really well.

- Okay.

There is something else very unique about your chickens and what they eat, especially their diet that is a little different that people may not be familiar with, which is you get a lot of your compost from a brewery or what will become compost from a - Brewery.

Yeah.

So Helper Beer just started, they're really committed to sustainability.

They save their food scraps for us.

We feed that to the chickens and compost it.

And then we take all of their spent beer grains and there's, so there's different things we can do with them.

With that one, you can feed it directly to chickens and, you know, that should not be more than 20% of their diet, but that helps, you know, and they love the variety.

And then we take the spent beer grains, mix it with wood chips.

Okay.

And just the two, layering the two, two parts, beer grains to one part wood chips creates really quick, well, it's not the quickest, but - It's quicker than general comity.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

It, it does really well to break down.

And so we have piles of that, you know, those are like the longer, less maintenance to piles.

Okay.

And then we mix it directly with our chicken tractor on steroids material.

- So Tomo, give me just a little bit more detail about the composting piles that you've made.

How, how easy are they really?

Do you have to do anything to 'em?

- Yeah, that's actually a, a labor intensive process.

Okay.

So ideally you're looking for like one third manure, one third browns and one third greens.

Those browns could be organic material like hay or straw.

What could be wood chips.

It could be, you know, shredded paper or cardboard.

The greens could be just like mowed up weeds.

It could be fresher waste, like food scraps would be considered a green.

It's like very rich, nitrogen rich material.

Okay.

So we use the spent beer grains as the greens in that combination.

And so when you get the proportions right, the pile will start cooking and heat up very well.

And so you need the compost to get to 120 degrees at least.

'cause then it's breaking down pathogens and any seeds that were in there, weed seeds.

And so we make a pile and then monitor the temperature, you know, observe it.

If it smells like ammonia, that means that it's probably too wet and creating anaerobic environment.

So then we need to dry it out or add more browns.

And so it's kinda like cooking.

You know, you put all the ingredients in your pot, but then you have to taste it and watch it, smell it.

- Tomo, thank you so much for showing what you are doing here in Helper Utah to not only teach the community about composting, but also being, having them get involved with you.

This is incredible.

- Oh, you're so welcome.

- If you wanna learn more about composting, we actually have an awesome video for you.

Watch with Wasatch Community Gardens.

So click here and go check it out.