How To Make Bone Meal For Animals
December 28, 2011
Lindsay:
As the size of our creature herds increase, we face up several implications. One is the growing imperative to make good use of all of the animate being when the time comes to harvest. While arguably this is a philosophical underpinning to our approach to beast husbandry, when we take just one or two
large animals (such as a sheep or a goat) to harvest in a season, and that To Exercise list is never quite finished, saving the organs for nutrient, the fat for soaps and candles, the bones for bonemeal, the hides for leather, the intestinal lining for sausage casings and the skulls for crafts can become a task that involves a lot of labor without much total product.
In the recent past, nosotros have opted to utilize these products as food dense compost. Nevertheless, as the number of animals that are harvested seasonally increases, it behooves united states to make highest and best employ of these resource, especially as we approach a indicate on the efficiency curve where the labor invested produces a notable amount of product. With time, we volition exist documenting more than and more our approach to making use of these valuable, but oftentimes less pop, resource.
Here, I am going to talk briefly about our adventures in making bonemeal. The composition of bones could be described in ii basic categories: organic and inorganic. The primary purpose of making bonemeal is to capture the inorganic constituents--primarily hydroxyapetite-- and apply it as a soil subpoena. Calcium and phosphorus, both contained in hydroxyapetite, are essential nutrients for constitute growth. Phosphorus is required in relatively large quantities by plants, and is oftentimes a limiting factor in plant growth. Bones also contain, in smaller volumes, potassium, magnesium, manganese, boron, iron, zinc, sulphur, silica and selenium, all of which are also essential nutrients for constitute growth.
The process we are developing for making bonemeal currently looks like this:
- During the butcher process nosotros remove equally much meat every bit possible from the bones.
- The bones are then boiled, with vinegar, to brand a os broth or stew (the vinegar helps to excerpt the calcium into the broth so that we tin consume it directly). This process removes most of the flesh, connective tissue and bone marrow (the organic components of basic), however os marrow is the nearly probable to still be nowadays.
- The cooked and cleaned bones are then placed in the the solar dehydrator to thoroughly dry out out. Making os meal out of soaked through basic leads to glutinous goupiness that clogs up the hammer mill.
- Once nosotros have gathered a big plenty drove of dry bones, then we grind them up using the hammer mill. Andrew has placed a screen over the lesser of the hammer mill so that bone particles need to be quite small earlier passing through the screen.
- We and then gather up the bone materials and pass information technology through the hammer mill again, as in that location are e'er pieces that escape through the sides and are not as small-scale equally desired.
- Two passes through the hammer manufactory usually suffices. The bone meal is then scooped into a bucket and stored away for use every bit a soil amendment.
Dry out Bones Collected in a Bucket
In using the hammer manufacturing plant, we accept found a few tricks brand the piece of work more constructive and safer. The hammer mill has a tendency to fling any it is grinding everywhere--partially ground os bits come flying back out the intake shoot and "finished production" is flung in 90 degrees on all sides of directly down. To collect the finished production, Andrew has built a big plywood box that the hammer mill rests in and catches nearly of the bone that exits out the bottom. We also use an additional piece of plywood to cover the shoot, to foreclose bone bits from flying out the top and into our eyes. As well, bones need to be added to the hammer manufactory in relatively small increments. If also many are added at once, they get jammed and then all the basic have to be removed past manus before you tin can proceed. It's best to avoid this one all together.
Overall, this process works quite well. Even so it does rely on a gasoline powered engine. 1 option used by folks in the past to utilize the minerals in bones includes cooking the bones in fire, and then using the bone-char-ash mixture as a soil amendment. We have withal to experiment with this one, but it seems like a worthwhile endeavor.
Source: http://www.windward.org/notes/notes71/lindsay7124.htm
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