Rodolfo's Abono

After the Environmental Health Workshops and my bucket latrine demonstration, many of the community members are responsive to the idea of composting latrines.  But you never really know how convinced they actually are, because often times most people just say YES to you because they may be intimidated.  Since it would take a year to show results of my humanure composting, I thought I would introduce the idea of composting cow manure which takes about 6 months.

My host brother Rodolfo is working really hard to get a coffee farm going and I suggested to him that we should make a compost pile.  We went up river where to a cow pasture outside of the Comarcá to collect buckets of cow manure.  I brought the rice hulls that I had so it wouldn't smell too bad on the boat ride back.

The next day we walked the very heavy buckets of cow manure into the jungle and started a small compost pile.  We started by digging into the ground about 18".  The pile is made by the layering of chopped grass/leaves, cow manure, and rice hulls, over and over again.  This should be the right combination of organic material for the composting process to initiate.

We have been going back every 3 weeks to mix the pile, and hopefully we will have some compost to plant by November!  I'm excited that Rodolfo worked with me on this.  Many people in the community would see this as waste of time, but he took the initiative to try something new, and I respect that.