Applying Biochar to the Garden

Back in February, we made THIS POST to show how we were making biochar for the garden.  You can click on the link to learn how we do it and why we do it.  It is very beneficial for your soil.  Today I want to tell you how we inoculate the biochar and apply this to the soil.

A quick recap.  We start a big fire going with all the sticks and branches in the yard.  I did this back in February on a very cold day so it was NICE to stand by the fire and warm up.  Except, just when the fire is burning good and there is gray ash on all the sticks, you do the unthinkable on a freezing cold day.  You drag a water hose and completely put the fire out!

This stops the burning process and keeps it from turning to just ash.  When the coals are cool, I shovel them into a big tub.  I'll use a shovel to chop up the coals into 'nickel-sized' cubes.

I regret to inform you that I don't have photos of the next steps in the process.  I think I can describe it, though, but you'll have to use your imagination.  Now that I have a big tub of what is essentially homemade charcoal, it is time to inoculate it.  The microscopic holes in the charcoal needs to be charged with good bacteria to enrich your soil.

In order to do that, I'll grab a five gallon bucket of cow manure and scoop it on top of the biochar.  Then, I'll fill the tub with water and stir.  The biochar and cow manure mixture makes a slurry.  Now, we just let time pass.  I let the mixture sit in the sun and ferment for two weeks.  At the end of two weeks, I'll get my shovel and dig a trench about five inches deep between each garden row.  I scoop up the bacteria charged biochar and shovel it into the trench and then cover it back up.

Then, we plant rows on either side of the inoculated biochar trenches.  The plants will grow and their roots will extend and will feed on the the biochar.  I call it beneficial bacteria 'condominiums.'  We'll do this on alternating rows each year until the entire garden is seeded with it.

It is a long process and, to be honest, I'm not sure how you'd do this on a large scale.  But it works in our garden.  Biochar, amending the soil with tons of organic matter, incorporating compost, and earthworm population growth has definitely made our soil more healthy and rich with each passing year.  It was once compacted and had no earthworms, but has really changed.

Treating Annie's Hooves

Goats on our farm present us with an on-going problem each year, particularly in the summer - hoof rot.  You can see it coming on as they tend to begin limping and then, a day or two later, won't even place any weight on the foot.  You can also smell it.  It is an infection and it smells pretty doggone bad.  Goats have cloven hooves that must be kept trimmed.  Even when trimmed, a bacteria (or two) will get between the hooves and before you know it, foot rot has set in.  The bacteria lives in the soil and the animals pick it up in the pasture.  Foot rot is even contagious.

So we treat their feet.  It is not a pleasant job as it is hot in the barn, but it must be done.  We coax the goat into the stanchion and close the head gate.  We'll put some ration for the goats to eat on as this distracts them.  The stanchion isolates the goat and just makes things more manageable during the treatment. 

We've tried commercial products like Hoof 'n Heel, but have recently switched to purchasing Copper Sulfate crystals.  We mix 1 cup of water to a teaspoon of copper sulfate.  We then give the affected goat a foot bath.  The easiest way we've found is to pour the copper sulfate solution into a tall plastic cup.  We have a bunch of these that we caught at parades.  They are the perfect size for it.  Then we hold the goat's leg up and dunk the entire hoof into the copper sulfate solution so that the hoof is submerged.

We'll hold the foot in the solution for as long as we can.  Then we move on to the next hoof and repeat.  Finally, when we are done, we pour the remaining solution over the hooves.  We release the goat, but following treatment, we leave them in the barn overnight where the ground is dry.

It is pretty amazing how copper sulfate works.  When the goat comes in, sometimes they are putting no weight at all on the foot.  The following morning after treatment, they are walking around like nothing ever happened.  The only problem is that once your animals contract hoof rot, it seems you find yourself treating over and over and over again.

Treating Hoof Rot on Annie, The Nubian Goat

We started noticing that Annie, our Nubian dairy goat was limping.  After closer inspection, we could smell a powerful stench.  Yep, you guessed it, foot rot.  Foot rot is a condition that goats and cows get between their hooves.  It is caused by bacteria and high temperatures and humidity causes the skin between the hooves to crack and then the bacteria infect the foot.  Moist, warm conditions make a perfect environment for the bacteria to grow and that is exactly what we have.  Hoof rot makes the animal feel really bad.  They stop walking and spend a lot of time sitting down because their feet hurt.  Therefore they don't eat and become skinny and sickly.

Annie exhibited all of these symptoms and ALL of her feet were infected.  Tricia was very concerned about her.  We quarantined her in the barn as we didn't want her out walking in the ankle deep mud.  Tricia brought clippers out to the barn and began clipping privet and other browse from the woods in back to feed her.  At first she wasn't eating very much.  We drenched her with a molasses/water solution to get her rumen active.  Then we mixed up a 10% solution of copper sulfate with water along with two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar and gave her foot baths for 10-15 minutes a night.  The ACV is supposed to increase absorption.

There is likely a much easier way to give the foot baths, but we normally choose the most difficult way, unfortunately.  Tricia mixed up the copper sulfate solution with apple cider vinegar and poured it into a yogurt container.  Then we put her in the goat stanchion and hobbled her legs to the side with a lead rope. 

• Yes, she kicked a lot and carried on, but we dunked her feet in the cup of copper sulfate solution and held her feet submerged in the solution for between 10 - 15 minutes.  Opportunistic mosquitoes swarmed and bit us menacingly as we held her feed down with both hands.  Unable to swat the mosquitoes, we resorted to blowing them off of each other as sweat trickled down our noses.  Each night we repeated the process, but on different feet.  All this for a smelly goat.  You've GOAT to be kidding me, right?

Each night we would trudge out to the barn and repeat the process and we'd sprinkle lime down on the floor of the barn.  Over the course of 3-4 days, we're seeing great results!  Annie's feet don't have a foul odor any longer, she's no longer limping and she's begun eating again with great vigor and is even being bossy again to Oreo, our La Mancha goat.  Thank God Annie is back to her normal self again.

Bill to allow Sale of Raw Milk in Louisiana Dies in Senate Committee

As you might recall from a blog post back on April 26th that you can re-read by clicking here, proponents of Raw Milk Sales have been testifying before the House and Senate committees of the Louisiana legislature. Louisiana is one of 10 states where it is illegal to sell raw milk.  Tricia and Benjamin were able to attend the House committee hearings and take part in a real-life home school civics lesson up-close and personal.  It passed and now was to go before the Senate Health & Welfare Committee for deliberation.

Well, the vote was taken and it failed.  You can read more about it from this article from the Advocate, a Baton Rouge newspaper: Senate Committee rejects raw milk sale.  The vote was 1 to 4 against passage and therefore the bill died in Senate committee.  From the article:

State Agriculture and Forestry Commissioner Mike Strain predicted people would get sick from drinking raw milk. He said the health risk is 150 times greater than drinking pasteurized milk.  “We are charged, you and I, with public health, protection of public health,” Strain said.

Commissioner Strain is a veterinarian and certainly understands the risks from bad bacteria much more than I do.  However, there are 0 deaths from drinking raw milk in the last decade.  On the other hand, according to this link, there are about 32 cases of people becoming sick each year from eating raw oysters, with half of those cases resulting in death.  Yet the sale of raw oysters is legal.  Hmmm...

Here is a gallon of our delicious raw milk in our refrigerator.  It has a big head of thick cream on top that can be skimmed off to make butter or used in coffee, or whipped and put on top of fresh fruit.  Note the thermometer at the bottom left to ensure the refrigerator stays at the correct temperature.

The Cream always rises to the top!

One only needs to look at the news right now regarding the Ground Beef e coli recall in which they are recalling 2 million pounds (wow!) of ground beef, to see that problems can and do occur in even the 'safest' and most heavily regulated food industries.  If improper food handling techniques are employed and/or the process has sanitation problems, harmful bacteria can be present in raw milk, including Listeria, salmonella, e. coli, brucella, and campylobacter.  These can give you food borne illnesses.

Since we drink the milk, we always want to be at the very top of our game and are constantly looking at our process.  One thing we had never done was have our milk tested.  We went to our local veterinarian whose office is about a mile from our farm. He knows our animals and makes farm calls to our place when needed. He assured us that the "fermentation vat" of the cows will ward off the bad bacteria and a cow that is eating good grass versus grain in a feedlot is going to have healthy rumen activity and good bacteria.  It is the good bacteria that keeps the bad from growing.  It's also important as an extra safeguard to give the cows pro-biotics to ensure the growth of healthy bacteria in the cows' gut.

Delicious Milk from pastured Jersey cows

Being curious, we asked him if we could have the milk of each of our cows tested.  He said it would cost $60.  Unfortunately, Daisy and Rosie aren't covered on our Blue Cross Blue Shield Plan.  He wrote out an order and we took two separate samples of sealed cups containing Daisy's milk in one and Rosie's milk in the other.  We took those samples to our local hospital that has a lab where they grow cultures to see what types of bacteria grow.  We called after 24 hours to get the results and nothing had grown at that time.

A week later the reports came back - one for each cow.  Each test result was identical:

Coagulate negative Staph isolated

Gram Positive Rods isolated

No Pathenogenic organisms noted

Now I probably slept through some of my biology classes so I contacted a good friend whose wife works in the very lab that tested the milk.  I asked him to get a translation from his wife on the test results.

Test results are in

Interpretation of lab results is as follows:  Two kinds of microorganisms were detected.  These are both normal flora found on the skin and neither one would be a cause for concern.  The test did not indicate any type of infection at all.  He also said that she said, "Bottom line is you have nothing to worry about.  I do know that if you leave a agar plate laying around long enough exposed to nothing but the air, eventually something is going to grow on it; bacteria are everywhere.  You know the two most bacteria infested spots in your house?  The counter next to the kitchen sink and the sponge you use to wash dishes; not the toilet seat like most people think."

Very interesting!

Back to the Raw Milk Bill, I think proponents will try again during the next legislative session.  From the Advocate article:
“Good legislation sometimes takes time,” state Sen. Fred Mills, R-St. Martinville, told disappointed raw milk supporters as they gathered their belongings and left the committee room.

It is a little perplexing to me that something that used to be so commonplace is now a health risk.  The reason it is more dangerous now is that after the Industrial Revolution animals began to be raised in 'factories' (feedlots), standing in their feces instead of out on green grass.  These animals, due to confinement, tended to get sick and had to be treated with antibiotics and other medicine.  The milk from all the cows was commingled and the safest thing to do was boil it to kill any pathogens.

But animals raised in green pastures and milked/bottled in a clean environment provide a safe, delicious, and healthy product - one I'm proud to serve to my family. Cheers!