Colt Knight: 00:26
Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am your host, Extension professor, and state livestock specialist, Dr. Colt Knight, of Maine. And I am joined by a longtime friend of mine, Mark King, from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. Is that correct?
Mark King: 00:41
Yes, sir.
Colt Knight: 00:41
I don’t know what your actual title is.
Mark King: 00:43
I’m an organics management specialist. Organic management specialist.
Colt Knight: 00:48
Yes, sir. And what, pray tell, is that?
Mark King: 00:50
That means that any material that’s discarded as a waste material that’s organic, I end up processing it in some way or teaching others how to do it.
Colt Knight: 01:00
Okay. And so that’s actually why I invited you on the podcast today because for our listeners that know Mark, they will know that he is one of the top composting gurus around. And Mark and his other associates always help me out every year with the Maine meat cutting school, and they teach folks how to compost carcasses after they cut them up, which is a really important skill, I think, especially in today’s world where you can’t get onto the rendering trucks anymore like we used to. A lot of the parts of the animal that used to be valuable are no longer valuable, like hides. And so what do you do with that stuff?
Mark King: 01:42
We just put it in a pile and help it all break down.
Colt Knight: 01:45
And compost it.
Mark King: 01:46
Yes,
Colt Knight: 01:46
sir. And after listening to Mark over the years, I’ve started my own compost pile here on my farm, and it’s been really beneficial because now if I have a dead pig or something, I can put it at the bottom of that compost pile, and then it just disappears. Absolutely. A little bit of time, and then I’ve got plenty of new fresh dirt for my raised bed gardens. So, Mark, I don’t wanna take away the thunder of what you do there, but could I ask you, how did you get involved with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection?
Mark King: 02:19
Believe it or not, when I left grad school in 1988, I actually had a program at U Maine to work with one of the professors, Dr. William Glance, to work with bats. And Governor McKernan at the time caused a state shutdown and took away my research assistantship, and I joined state government. And very shortly after being in state government, a job came open at the Maine DEP, and I went ahead and took that job, and that led me to managing solid waste through biosolids, doing a lot of biosolids application. After a while of doing that, I wasn’t real fond, and I became the compost guy for the department.
Colt Knight: 02:59
And so you’re originally from Maine?
Mark King: 03:01
I am. I grew up in Winthrop, and I currently live in New Sharon. Okay.
Colt Knight: 03:06
Are you involved in agriculture, or do you directly or just indirectly through the DEP?
Mark King: 03:13
Well, one of the cool things is that at the DEP, once I started composting, I joined a team called the Maine Compost Team, which includes members from the Department of Agriculture, University of Maine Cooperative Extension, and the DEP itself. And we started doing projects in the early nineties, and they were very beneficial. And I just continued the relationship. In ’97, we developed the Maine Compost School, and I’ve been with the group ever since. So it came by just the need. But right now, I spend a lot of time working with the Department of Agriculture because there’s lots of projects on farms that need our assistance.
Colt Knight: 03:51
So we’ve got a lot of things to talk about today. You’ve got a current composting school that you run. Is it one time a year here in
Mark King: 03:58
Maine? Twice.
Colt Knight: 03:59
Twice here in Maine, and then you help with other schools across the country.
Mark King: 04:03
Yes.
Colt Knight: 04:04
You’ve got a new project that you’re excited about. We wanna talk about that.
Mark King: 04:07
Okay.
Colt Knight: 04:08
But maybe we should just start from the beginning and talk about how composting is a valuable tool for everyone, from just kitchen scraps on up to farm waste.
Mark King: 04:20
Sure. One of the most important things is that material belongs in a nutrient cycle system as opposed to in the landfill. So whenever we can, we get communities and other entities to take those organic scraps that would come from their kitchen or from festivals or meals and try to direct them towards higher and better uses. And one of the best higher and better uses, aside from feeding it to people that are hungry or feeding animals, is to compost it.
Colt Knight: 04:48
Yeah. And I’m an animal scientist, and so I always feel like cattle in particular get a bad rap for emitting greenhouse gases. But when we look at the grand scheme of things, livestock’s only responsible for, like, two and a half percent of greenhouse gases. And when it comes to nonindustrial stuff, food waste is by far the number one contributor
Mark King: 05:14
Absolutely.
Colt Knight: 05:14
To carbon emissions.
Mark King: 05:16
Yes. Especially when it’s not contained and processed in a beneficial way. Yeah. And that’s the reason why we wanna keep it out of a landfill because it produces methane and nitrous oxide, two of the most potent greenhouse gases. In a compost pile, all that comes out is carbon dioxide and water vapor.
Mark King: 05:35
And that’s really kind of why we like to see that material used in
Colt Knight: 05:38
a positive way. And so maybe for some of us that are a little naive, what exactly is compost?
Mark King: 05:44
Sure. Compost is the product of an organic decomposition process. Compost happens every single day whether we help it or not. For example, when an animal dies in the woods, it naturally starts to break down. Microorganisms in the soil will start to work on it, and that is, in essence, what composting is.
Mark King: 06:03
The only difference is that when we build a compost pile, we create the most optimal conditions to create it as fast as possible.
Colt Knight: 06:10
So we can take, you know, rotten organic matter or food scraps, animal carcasses, cardboard boxes, anything that’s made out of carbon. Right? Yes. Basically. And put it in a big pile under ideal conditions, and microorganisms will break it down into essentially what is just super high-quality soil.
Mark King: 06:34
That’s exactly true. That’s as simple as it is.
Colt Knight: 06:37
And what I think is really cool about that process is it eliminates a lot of different diseases, viruses, bacteria. You can actually kill it through this process. So you can take contaminated materials and make it less contaminated.
Mark King: 06:54
Absolutely true. And I’ve also used it for hydrocarbons when people have an oil tank outside their home and it spills on the ground. Uh-huh. We’ve actually composted that soil and gotten rid of the hydrocarbons through the process as well. Very good.
Colt Knight: 07:07
So if you don’t have a farm, is just kitchen scraps and stuff, is that not enough to fool with, or is there a way to compost that stuff on a small scale as well?
Mark King: 07:19
There is, absolutely. You can do it on a small scale. I have a system that I work with called lobster trap wire bins, and it’s basically, you go to a place like Brooks Trap Mill in Thomaston, and you buy 12 feet of their lobster trap wire that’s used to make lobster traps, form a cylinder, and you start packing that with a carbon source such as sawdust shavings or horse manure, then food, and you layer it. And when it reaches the top, you have a cubic yard of compost material, and that’s all you need to compost all through the winter.
Colt Knight: 07:51
So under ideal conditions, how long does it take to turn food waste into soil?
Mark King: 07:58
If it’s ideal and you’re constantly managing the pile by turning it, you can do that in six weeks. And then you want to, depending upon the use, if you wanna use it right away, it’s good for, like, corn and hay, something that can handle an aggressive material. If you let it cure for three months, it’s good for potting mixes in your greenhouse.
Colt Knight: 08:17
What if you’ve got something, say, like animal manure? Let’s say you got a horse barn. Yep. And you’ve got all your stable waste. How long does it take to compost that stuff? Same
Mark King: 08:29
thing. About six weeks. As a matter of fact, the horse manure is something we have a ton of in Maine, and it’s one of the most beneficial composting agents because it comes out of the stalls already about 140 degrees. So it will compost on its own. But when I’m dealing with mortalities, I love to use that to put the mortalities in because it helps break them down quickly.
Mark King: 08:51
So it’s one of our favorites. We call it a feedstock, a compost ingredient. It’s one of
Colt Knight: 08:56
our favorite ones to use. And I think why gardeners and things value horse manure so well is because it composts so well, and it makes really good fertilizer and soil to grow things in. But I was always amazed by horse manure because it’s been valuable throughout time. I mean, you can dry it and burn it. And then something that I thought was really cool, like, in colonial times when you were building log cabins and you’d put your chimney up, you would actually mix horse manure in with the mud and stuff to make the mortar.
Mark King: 09:30
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 09:31
And the reason for that is a horse is a hindgut fermenter. So it chews its food up really fine. It goes through a single stomach. And then in the hindgut, it has an extra organ that people don’t have called a cecum, where microorganisms actually break down fibers and stuff. So horse manure has, like, these little short pieces of fiber in it.
Colt Knight: 09:55
It’s almost like fiberglass fibers in modern concrete. And that’s why you would put that in chimney mortar is because it would hold the bricks together because it was, like, fiberglass reinforcing the mortar. But instead of glass, it was actual fiber.
Mark King: 10:11
That’s pretty cool.
Colt Knight: 10:12
Yeah. So horse manure has been really valuable throughout time. But there’s other kinds of waste. Right? There’s dairy cattle, beef cattle, pigs, all those kinds of things.
Mark King: 10:23
You name it. Anything that was once alive can be composted.
Colt Knight: 10:27
Now is there any special rules when we’re doing pig compost because pigs are similar to humans?
Mark King: 10:34
Not really. Once again, the thing I find about pig compost is that pig manure tends to be really, really wet. Mhmm. So I like to firm it up with something like either sawdust shavings or some horse manure before I compost it. Because the whole idea is that you wanna have it be at least 50 to 55% solids in order to get the best compost blend.
Mark King: 10:57
But usually, especially in the summertime, I’ll start out with something a little wetter because it’s easier to dry a pile than it is to make it wet again. Because once a compost pile starts cooking, its outer layer becomes hydrophobic, and so water doesn’t penetrate very well. But if a pile starts out too wet, all you gotta do is turn it once or twice, and you can dry it out. So it’s just, I’d rather start out wetter than drier. Yeah.
Mark King: 11:21
Well, I mean, part
Colt Knight: 11:23
of the bacterial fermentation that breaks all that stuff down, they produce gas and heat. Right? Right. And so when we turn over compost piles, I often see there’s some gray, ashy-looking stuff in there. Now is that actual ash from burning up, or is that something else?
Mark King: 11:41
That’s what we call an actinomycete. It’s a, the best way to describe it is it’s a bacterium that has fungal growth to it, or it has hyphae. So it’s kind of an in-between. And what it does is it indicates that your pile’s working really well because it’s usually between a super active layer and a not-so-active layer, which, when you make a compost pile, the outside foot is always the most aerobic and active. Mhmm.
Mark King: 12:08
And you’ll usually see about a foot in, the actinomycetes forming around the core in the center. And so we use that as one of our indicators that everything’s going well.
Colt Knight: 12:17
Yeah. I like to use compost too. And in livestock production, we call it a compost bedded pack. Yes. Where you actually put six, eight inches of sawdust or something similar down. And then as the animals defecate and urinate on it, if you turn that over frequently, the bedding actually begins to compost.
Colt Knight: 12:40
Yes. And it breaks down the manure and the urine, and you don’t get any smells or anything, and it keeps the moisture under control. And then just over time, you just keep adding more and more. But you gotta keep turning it. Yes.
Colt Knight: 12:51
So that the microbes have access to all of it. But you can go all winter long without swapping out bedding. Absolutely. Do that correctly.
Mark King: 12:59
And in the spring, when you go to compost, if you clean that all out, that actually has biological activity. So it works as well as horse manure in making a compost blend.
Colt Knight: 13:10
And so that’s what I do here on my place is I use that compost bedded pack throughout the winter because it generates heat too, so you’re actually heating your barn from the ground up.
Mark King: 13:18
Yes.
Colt Knight: 13:19
Plus, it’s keeping it clean and tidy all winter long, and it’s reducing my labor because I’m not having to strip the pens every week and put new stuff in. But in the spring, when I do clean that out, I try to heed your teachings the best that I can and make myself a compost pile that I’ll use throughout the summer.
Mark King: 13:42
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 13:42
And then, hopefully by the next year. My timing doesn’t work out so good because my yard gets so wet in the spring and fall. I don’t have access to my compost pile like I’d like. But, usually, the next year, I’ll use that in my gardens or fix holes in the yard or what have you.
Mark King: 13:59
Cool. And I will tell you that this is anecdotal, and you probably know better than I. But one farmer who uses the bedded pack told me that his incidence of mastitis has decreased rapidly because he’s using a bedded pack.
Colt Knight: 14:13
Yeah. It really keeps the bacterial load down, I think, or the harmful bacterial load. I’m sure if you looked at all bacteria, it might be pretty high just because of the good bacteria that are breaking down the bedded pack. But, no, I’ve never had any negative instances using a bedded pack. Cool.
Colt Knight: 14:31
Now some people don’t do it right. You know, they don’t wanna turn it over, and then you can get some nasty places. But if you do the work of turning it over pretty frequently, it works great. Awesome. And I’ve seen some bigger outfits use it, and they actually have, like, a tiller attachment on a skid steer, and they just drive through the barn.
Colt Knight: 14:51
Yeah. And if they get a lot of animals in the barn, they might do it once or twice a day.
Mark King: 14:54
The Wright Farm in Clinton actually does that. Yeah. And they’re very good at it.
Colt Knight: 15:00
My chicken coop, I only have to do it, like, once a week. And that seems to be plenty. The pigs, for the most part, will do it themselves. Oh, because they’re rooters. Except for where they go to the bathroom, and you’ll have to turn that over because they don’t wanna get near that.
Mark King: 15:15
Okay.
Colt Knight: 15:15
But the rest of it, they turn over pretty good. Cool. So tell us about the big compost school that you do twice a year here in Maine. Sure. And how people can get involved with that if they like to.
Mark King: 15:30
Absolutely. So back in 1997, I was a regulator, and I had a lot of facilities I was managing through composting with licenses. And I was finding they weren’t doing a very good job. And similarly, my colleague, Bill Seakins, over at the Department of Agriculture, was having some trouble with farmers too. So we set up in a classroom up at the University of Maine in Orono, and we designed this five-day program, which we started in June 1997, and it’s been going strong ever since.
Mark King: 16:02
Basically, the program starts out teaching you the basics of composting, and then we get into how to build a pile, how to monitor a pile, and then how to treat a pile if it has trouble. We do recipes. We teach siting. We teach compost utilization. I have a colleague now from U Maine.
Mark King: 16:19
His name is Nick Rowley, who actually teaches the compost utilization piece of the school. And the benefit is that for five days, you may start out knowing nothing. You leave actually having the competency to be able to run your own facility. And so we run it twice a year, once in June, once in October. And we’ve graduated over a thousand students from all the U.S. and 42 countries around the world since our inception in ’97.
Colt Knight: 16:47
Yeah. It’s a big deal. There’s a waiting list usually to get into
Mark King: 16:49
that. Yep.
Colt Knight: 16:50
And so if folks wanna get on that waiting list, how do you go about doing that?
Mark King: 16:55
So we have a website. It’s www.composting.org.
Colt Knight: 17:01
And we’ll put that in the show notes so you don’t have to memorize.
Mark King: 17:03
And my colleague, Sandy Moody, is in charge of registration. She’s a very lovely lady. She helps guide people through the process. The cost is $800 for the five-day program, which is the cheapest in the country, and we don’t anticipate raising that price anytime in the near future because we’re all about a small class size. We’ve decided we’re gonna do about 16 students, and we believe that’s the best for one-on-one interaction with the professors.
Mark King: 17:31
And halfway through the week, on Wednesday, we actually have hired a limousine bus, and we take you on a tour of compost sites so you can actually meet people in the field doing the work.
Colt Knight: 17:42
See it happening in real time. Yeah. And I really like what you’re doing because it’s not just theoretical. It’s not just classroom learning. They’re out there in compost piles.
Colt Knight: 17:52
Yes. You’ve got different media out there. I remember, and I know when you come and do it at my meat cutting school, you actually bring a whole, like, 20 buckets of different stuff. And you say, all right. What’s this good for?
Colt Knight: 18:05
What’s that good for? And they actually have to apply the knowledge they learn. They actually have to build piles of compost, and then you go see actual piles of compost. Yes.
Mark King: 18:14
You
Colt Knight: 18:14
tear into it with loaders and shovels and get to see what’s happening from the outside all the way down to the inside. And I think that’s really important.
Mark King: 18:23
Absolutely. The hands-on parts are what we get the best sort of evaluations on. We do, usually, about midway through the week. We have five piles that we build. One is too wet.
Mark King: 18:36
One is too dry. One has got too much nitrogen. One has too much carbon. And one is what we call Goldilocks, the perfect pile. And we let the students go through each of the piles using the skills that we’ve taught them.
Mark King: 18:49
And then at the end, when we do the reveal of what’s what, we have them tell us why they think it’s what they think it is, and then we tell them what it is. And in most cases, we usually have about 80 to 90% of the students get them all correct. And that just makes us feel good that they absorbed the information well.
Colt Knight: 19:08
Yeah. Very good. Now let’s say if you don’t have the $800 or the five days to dedicate to this school, you guys are planning a new smaller school geared towards, is it livestock producers?
Mark King: 19:22
Livestock producers and farmers. We’re gonna try to do a one-day program, and we’re gonna do it through a sliding scale. I really like that model the university uses. So we’re gonna develop it. It’s gonna actually be at a farm where they have a classroom.
Mark King: 19:39
The whole exercise, everything is gonna be on that farm. And so it’s gonna be a great opportunity for farmers to sit around a big table with other farmers, and we hope for really great interactions.
Colt Knight: 19:51
Yep. And we love interactions here. Mark came over to my house where you might hear some wind noise or some chickens crowing or my wife wrangling a baby in the background. We’re actually sitting around a table in the middle of my field here at my farm. We made a big plate of ribs and barbecue chicken.
Mark King: 20:11
Now we’re just
Colt Knight: 20:12
we’re just enjoying taking a rest and talking about compost.
Mark King: 20:17
So, absolutely. I do wanna mention the other program that I’m doing with the Maine Resource Recovery Association. This past year’s legislative session, they passed a bill which, starting 07/01/2030, we’re gonna start, on a large scale, banning food scraps from landfill. And it’s gonna start with generators at two tons a week, and then two years later, one ton a week, and eventually, it may get down to residents. So I’ve been tasked with developing capacity in the state of Maine prior to 2030.
Mark King: 20:51
And so what I’ve done is what’s called a Maine Master Community Composter class. If you go to mrra.net, which is Maine Resource Recovery Association, on their page, there’s a thing called the Food Recovery Council. If you click onto that, the program is the Maine Master Community Compost. It consists of four webinars that are all free, five demonstration videos that are all free, a 50-question quiz, which you can take that’s also free. And then if you wish to become certified, it’s like a train-the-trainer, you could be a teacher of this process.
Mark King: 21:27
You can apply for the certification, which is $100, and you end up getting a three-foot thermometer, a bunch of educational material, and a USB drive that includes a class on community composting that you can teach others. So we’re also looking to develop a certificate that you can just get if you don’t want to be a teacher, and that’ll be less money. So I’m trying to just create capacity, and this is a way to have some legacy.
Colt Knight: 21:54
And so I know you’re the compost guy, and you do a lot with compost. But if we’re talking about all food waste and everything, which is one of the top contributors to carbon emissions, are there other technologies that we’re looking into or utilizing that can process that waste?
Mark King: 22:14
There is a whole ton of things out there. The first thing that we do is we have a hierarchy that we developed in 2016. The first thing we wanna do is not create it in the first place. So I go through communities and do waste audits of their different businesses and help them find ways not to generate waste. Like, for example, just because you can get a deal at Costco on 50 things of this, don’t do it because you’re not gonna be able to use it all. Mhmm.
Mark King: 22:38
And it expires. The next thing is that if you do have food, especially like this lovely lunch we had today, if it’s still hot, get it to a homeless shelter so they can enjoy it as well. Yeah. Instead of having it become waste. If that doesn’t work, what gets beyond that can go to animals. Then we look at composting, but the other biggie is digestion.
Mark King: 22:59
We have a facility in Exeter, Maine, which is the largest one, I believe, in New England. They’ve got about 4,000,000 gallons of capacity to compost organics or to digest organics, and they take everything. And they travel as far as down into Massachusetts and some of the lower states. They’re called AgriCycle.
Colt Knight: 23:19
Those methane digesters, we call them methane digesters, but they’re not actually digesting methane. Right. They’re actually producing methane.
Mark King: 23:26
That’s right.
Colt Knight: 23:27
But they’ll take, and these are becoming more and more widespread in large dairies and large swine operations across the country. They actually take the animal manure, put it in a covered pit, and then let the microorganisms digest that. And then one of the byproducts of that is methane gas. Yes. And they actually harvest the methane gas, use it to run a generator to create electricity.
Colt Knight: 23:55
And so in a lot of places in the country, if they have a large enough dairy or a large enough swine operation or a beef cattle operation, they’re actually generating all the electricity they need for the farm plus putting it back onto the grid. And so I think that’s a really cool alternative technology.
Mark King: 24:13
Yes.
Colt Knight: 24:13
But those things don’t actually run that great on pure animal manure.
Mark King: 24:19
That’s right.
Colt Knight: 24:19
So they actually get dump trucks of food waste from grocery stores, cardboard boxes. I mean, anything that’s carbon-based, they’ll put in there. But it’s a real dance with the chemistry. Right?
Mark King: 24:32
Big time.
Colt Knight: 24:33
Because you can kill the microbes if you shock it with too much of this or that. So you kinda have to balance it. So they almost have to have, like, a full-time chemist on staff to manage those things sometimes to keep them running right. And then a full-time mechanic crew to keep all the
Mark King: 24:47
That’s right.
Colt Knight: 24:47
Generators and stuff. They’re not without their peccadilloes, but they are really remarkable technology, I think.
Mark King: 24:54
And these guys are going crazy too because right now, there’s a huge demand just for the fuel that comes out, the gas. So they’re piping that into Irving up in Northern Maine, and Flood’s Farm over in Clinton is putting theirs into the natural gas system as well. And they’re finding that they generate some electricity for the farm and nearby homes, but they also are selling the gas itself. So it’s pretty special.
Colt Knight: 25:21
We got to do a tour in Iowa in 2023. We went to a community, and they’re not Amish. I forgot the name of theirs, but way back when, they kinda branched off from the same religion.
Mark King: 25:33
Is it Mennonite?
Colt Knight: 25:34
Or No. They do not shun technology. They actually invented things like the microwave and a lot of modern dishwashing equipment. And I wish I could remember their name, but I can’t. Wow.
Colt Knight: 25:43
But they have a big feedlot that’s under a monoslope
Mark King: 25:46
Yep.
Colt Knight: 25:47
Over slats. And they collect all the beef cattle waste, kinda like a big pig operation. Wow. And they have a methane digester, and they run the entire valley, the entire community. Electricity is generated from that beef cattle feedlot.
Mark King: 26:03
That’s pretty cool. And that’s the stuff we need.
Colt Knight: 26:06
Yeah. It’s pretty cool.
Mark King: 26:07
And more of that.
Colt Knight: 26:08
I mean, that’s large-scale
Mark King: 26:09
utilization, not just farm-wide utilization.
Colt Knight: 26:13
But you can put all kinds of things in those digesters. I mean, you can put dead animals. Yep.
Mark King: 26:18
They don’t like clamshells for some reason. I guess they don’t get a lot of energy out of those. But one of the things that they take that surprises me is propylene glycol. Yep. The deicing for airplane wings.
Mark King: 26:30
All of that for the major airports ends up going to that facility. And I guess the microbes love it.
Colt Knight: 26:36
Mhmm. And I was thinking that there was a second one built at the other large dairy in Maine here recently, and I don’t know if it’s online yet or not. But they were
Mark King: 26:45
Well, there’s one at Exeter, and then there’s one at Flood’s Farm in Clinton.
Colt Knight: 26:48
That’s what I was thinking.
Mark King: 26:49
And that’s the one that Angus King’s son was involved in.
Colt Knight: 26:52
Gotcha.
Mark King: 26:53
Yep.
Colt Knight: 26:53
We used to have one on campus, and I think it blew up.
Mark King: 26:56
Well, you know, what’s really funny is John Chalmers helped to keep that going back in the day, and he actually was there when we first
Colt Knight: 27:03
started kind of ahead of the curve on that
Mark King: 27:05
one. Yeah. You are. Yeah. You are.
Mark King: 27:07
There’s a lot of cool things at Witter Farm. They used to have a big carousel milking. Mhmm. They had all kinds of cool
Colt Knight: 27:13
stuff there. Yeah. Now it’s fully transitioned into robot milking
Mark King: 27:16
Oh my God. As of last year. Wow. Well, that’s interesting. Yep.
Mark King: 27:20
That’s pretty cool. We saw that when we were out in Wisconsin. Yeah. The robots are taking over. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 27:26
Yeah. And it’s just a labor issue. You just don’t have the people to milk cows. No. No. Like we used to.
Mark King: 27:33
Well, we were over in Detroit the other day. I worked with Mark Hedrick from Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, and we were doing a farm management plan review. And we were in the stalls, and there was this thing that drove around scraping manure. Yep. And the guy told me it was a robot manure scraper similar to a Roomba.
Colt Knight: 27:51
Yeah. I believe Dr. Pereira just had a workshop showcasing one of those here in Maine.
Mark King: 27:57
That must have been the same place because they’re the only ones.
Colt Knight: 27:59
She either just had it or it’s coming up here in a week or two.
Mark King: 28:02
It’s the coolest thing. One of the employees rode on it to set up the pattern. Yep. And then after that, it just comes on each day and does the pattern, and it goes back to its charging station and plugs in.
Colt Knight: 28:14
Yeah. The technology in agriculture is becoming amazing. I just submitted a $5,000,000 grant for virtual fencing. Oh. So if we are funded on that grant, I’m gonna have about $250,000 to help producers here in Maine set up their own virtual fencing systems on cattle.
Mark King: 28:36
That’s cool.
Colt Knight: 28:37
So keep us in mind if you’re wanting to be a beta tester. Yeah. Nice. On getting free virtual fencing. So it’s a five-year project. So
Mark King: 28:47
Does that involve, like, collars that
Colt Knight: 28:50
Yeah. It’s a new collar. The company’s name is Halter, but they’re not halters. They’re collars. Okay. But these are really cool, because previous generations of these collars, they had a big battery, and that’s how they worked.
Colt Knight: 29:05
And they just shot a signal to, like, a local tower on the farm. Yeah. And then the tower relayed the information to you. This new generation actually has a solar charger on top that will keep the batteries charged. Wow.
Colt Knight: 29:19
And they are satellite-equipped, so you no longer have to have these transmission locations. It goes straight to the satellite and then straight to your cell phone. Wow. And you don’t have to buy the equipment. It’s just a subscription fee.
Colt Knight: 29:34
That’s pretty cool. So I was not a big proponent of virtual fencing when it first came out because it didn’t work that great. And it’s getting pretty good now. I wouldn’t say it solves all the problems. It’s just a tool in the toolbox, as they say. But it’s getting to be a pretty good tool, I think.
Mark King: 29:56
Yeah. Neat. That’s pretty cool.
Colt Knight: 29:59
So we’re always looking forward to seeing the new technologies that emerge. But is there anything else that you needed to plug or mention on composting or your upcoming schools? Or
Mark King: 30:09
Jeez. I don’t think so. The October session, we still have room. So if people wanna go to www.composting.org, hook up with Sandy. We’ll get you involved.
Mark King: 30:19
Okay.
Colt Knight: 30:20
And we’ll put all that stuff in the show notes. Cool. And if our listeners have questions, comments, concerns, or they just wanna because it’s just episodes, feel free to email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu. And that will conclude today’s episode. Thank you.
Colt Knight: 30:44
Thanks, Mark.
Mark King: 30:45
Hey. That was awesome.