Is that why you guys screen? You just don't want it to have the chance of leaving unbroken down stuff in there and just to have it more bioavailable, smaller means more surface area?

Yeah, good question.

Our stuff is, when I say it's 100% finished, because we go through the thermophilic phase, so we have that portion where you're between 131 and 160 for 15 days.

We generally exceed that, but which is great in terms of what's going on, but so our stuff is actually completely processed.

And then as it goes through the breakdown period, when it comes out of a bacterial phase, which is that phase where it's hot, and starts to cool down, and then the breakdown happens, you get to a point where once the temps are 80 degrees, 90 degrees, even 100, you get, you get other biology that comes up into our compost piles, and we just let them sit when they get to that phase.

We're screening because you still will always have certain amounts of, of some wood particulate that might be on the crust of the, of the windrows, and since they're long windrows, we're screening that to make sure we're screening everything out.

And the other thing too is as you're doing the turning process, we try to not disturb the windrows too much, so we do our, we use our compost turner to turn, and you'll get stuff.

If you look at the lifespan of compost going from zero to day when it's deemed finish, how much of that is turned aerobic, and then how much of that is just letting that pile, quote, "cure", letting the fungi get in there, not just to break it down, but also because that's what you're trying to do with compost, you're trying to get bacteria and fungi to breed out, so you're inoculating your soil?

Would it be financially beneficial for you to take conventional manure if you could? Can you get more of that cheaper than you can organic manures?

Yeah, typically how that works is for companies that they get paid tipping fees to take stuff away from organic, I mean from conventional farms.

And then you get that product for free.

Whereas the way we work it is we, on our farm in Oregon, We're across the street from an organic valley dairy and one down the street from us.

And what we do is we supply them with wood chips that we buy from the Forest Service that they use in the loafing sheds for the cows to sleep on.

It's comfortable.

It drops the incidence of mastitis with the cows.

Do you think all animal manures are created equal? Would you derive any benefit from getting other organic manures blended in?

Do you think that's a pretty widespread problem with a lot of municipal compost? Would you bet that most of that, not most, but some of that compost is going to have persistent herbicide in it and you're probably going to have problems if you bring that onto your property?

Absolutely.

And when you're researching, you look at stuff, of course, people that have said, I bought a truckload in and I had this compost, I got a dump truckload and I was so excited to spread it around my yard.

And then all of a sudden you start to see different types of disease come that you never had before.

You start to see in some of your food crops where stuff doesn't grow, seeds don't germinate, all kinds of stuff.

I've heard a lot of horror stories.

And not everybody, not every place is a bad composting place.

Do you think in the beginning... subpar compost is better than no compost or better than less compost or you're better off spending money and using less