composting with goat poop?

I know I've read posts about this before, but I can't remember where or what threads. We know somebody who has goats and lots of goat poop to share. We have a wood shop and have lots of sawdust to compost. So I'm hoping we can be of benefit to each other. Are there any possible problems with this idea? Any questions I need to ask the goat farmers?

As long as the goats are eating an organic diet (grass, trees, hair, rocks, etc.) then the manure should be fine.

One of the nice things about goat manure, is that it's a little like rabbit in that it doesn't seem to get quite so hot when composting - at least it never did when my family had goats. We could put rabbit and goat manure directly on the ground near the plants and they would thrive like you would not believe.

I'm guessing that the sawdust you are wanting to trade is natural wood, with no pressure treating or anything like that. If so, it would also make a good bed for goats (which they will eat - I swear they will eat anything if given a chance).

Thanks for your answer Hastur. I haven't asked them yet what the goats eat, though there are certainly plenty of rocks for them to choose from.:) The people in the family eat organic when they can.:)

The wood is not pressure treated or anything. But if it makes good bedding for the goats I'm surprised that they haven't asked for it for that already. I'll talk to them about that. Is it a problem if it has walnut mixed in with it? Walnut is supposed to be poisonous to horses.

It's interesting that goat poop doesn't get hot. The wife told me that her DH is burning it as part of the composting process. I thought that was strange, but I know nothing about the subject. Why would he burn it first?

BTW what part of Houston do you live in? I grew up in Bellaire.

I'm not sure about burning the manure before composting. All I know was that when I lived with my folks in Maine, we would take the manure and put it right where the plants might want a bit of a boost - with the corn, for example after we learned how much the raccoons enjoyed stealing the fish parts when we burried those. It never burned the plants and was pleasant to work with - relatively: it is manure after all.

We used to use sawdust as a bedding for the goats, and alternate it with hay. They would eat some of the sawdust, and of course would eat the hay too, but we would lay it in thick and then they wouldn't eat any after the first day or two when they had a chance to defecate into it.

The only poison I ever found that goats could not tolerate was wet oak leaves. We had a goat escape and eat a bunch of wet oak leaves once, and she swelled up like you would not believe before the guy across the street told us to give her turpentine to drink to reduce the swelling and neutralize the poison (yes, it worked although the goat got drunk from it - weirdest thing you ever saw). This doesn't mean that walnut is neccessarily good - just not something we found that hurt them.

I'm actually surprised they can't eat oak leaves--they can eat tin cans and poison ivy so I figured nothing could hurt them! LOL

You're telling me!

Our goats ate:

- The whitewash from the bucket
- Whitewash off the side of the shed
- Tarpaper off the side of the other shed
- Shingles from the roof of the house (one of them escaped and somehow got up there)
- My hair (hence the comment about hair being part of their organic diet)
- My blue jeans
- The belt from the lawnmower
- A pile of gravel (there was a flower on it but still!)
- An entire row of lettuce
- The fabric seats of the car (there's a long story there)
- My mothers wash

When they talk about pigs being natures garbage cans I have to laugh.

Well I've never had goats or any other livestock, but I've always heard about how they'll eat anything. It's pretty funny that they couldn't eat wet oak leaves. I guess there could have been a fungus or something growing on them. This maybe really gross, but what did the poop look like after they ate stuff like shingles, tarpaper, and lawnmower belts?

The guy I was going to get the poop from says he's burning it because somebody told him that he has to do that to kill the seeds the goats ate. Hastur did you have a weed problem when you were using goat poop? Did you keep them in a barn or anything like that, or did you let them roam outside and eat weeds?

Hastur - thank you for the great laugh!

Glad to make you laugh! I laugh too nowadays. At the time, though, it was all incomprehensible screaming followed by threatening the animals with the stewpot.

Silverfluter: Actually, yes, we did find a difference in the manure after they had gotten through making a meal out of something they should not have been eating. It smelled .. odd. Usually, we would just scoop it up and toss it in the woods so that it didn't get mixed in with the garden.

As an aside: I live near Stafford/Sugarland more or less at the corner of 59 and Beltway 8. Used to live just off Bellaire, though.

I just thought of something. Would they eat sawdust if they knew we wanted them to? That might be a faster way to compost it.:) Or would it not be good for them?

My brother lives in Sugarland now. Houston has changed so much.

Well, they will eat some of the sawdust if you put it down to help as a bedding. But they stop eating it once they soil it.

If they eat enough of those tar shingles or siding look for 1500 degree burnable pellets. LOL

Burning any manure to kill weed seed is a weird report. Burning would kill all the biological goodies you hope to add for soil building. As to weeds I can assure you that you will have weeds no matter what kind of fertilizer you use including the man made stuff I do not use. Grabbing a hoe handle is the only cure for weeds....or the practice of heavy mulching will emulate what Mother Nature does in Her permanently mulched mountains from sea to shining sea (if left alone to do Her thing).

I don't even want to think about the combustibility of the goat poo we used to occasionally get. *shudder*

I'm with Docgipe: Mulch the snot out of stuff and don't burn the manure. I'm not sure why it is being burned, either.

It may be a throw back from real cowboy days...........in the dry Western Plains dried cow and buffalo chips made excellent fuel. I'm not sure I would like to do baked tatters in the coals of dried coal chips. I have seen the above cooking demonstrated. The fire settles down to a nearly light gas like flame somewhat like charcoal when it is in its early stages of settling down for the cooking fire. There was no manuer odor. I never saw the cowboy chef toss a cow or buffalo chip coal in the coffee pot to settle the coffee grounds. I suspect all of the biological matter in dried animal chips is sun cured by the hot soil surface and natural sun beating down on them.

Ok. Well I'll ask him not to burn some poop and save it for me. Thanks for your answers. Any more advice is certainly welcome though.