MARYLANDHighway agency turns its roadkill compost into turfPublished: Friday, December 7, 2018
Deer are acting up for mating season — and while that means more collisions with motorists and more roadkill, for the Maryland State Highway Administration, it also means more compost. Spokesman Charlie Gischlar said the administration has been turning dead deer into compost since 2004, when the program started in Carroll County, Md. Now, there's a second facility in Frederick County that helps in the effort. The recipe is simple: deer carcasses, manure and wood chips. Let that decompose long enough, and you've got compost. Gary Felton, an associate professor and agricultural extension specialist with the University of Maryland for almost 25 years, said the deer concoction checks all the boxes of a good compost — but it suffers from two major problems. "Big bones don't decompose very fast, so you end up with big bones if you don't sift [the compost]," Felton said. "That's a common thing to do, but for the State Highway Administration, that means more money." And the second problem he listed is exactly what you'd imagine: "The concept that people have of 'yuck, that's a dead body.'" The deer compost naturally heats up to temperatures between 130 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit when the microbes in the mix are consuming carbon, Felton said, so the final product is pathogen-free. Even so, Gischlar said, the mix is only used to enrich native wildflowers near roads. Felton, who has advised the administration on their compost, said this year the mix was also extended to growing turf in medians and beside roads — and that even though it was safe to use on all plants, those two projects used up the State Highway Administration's supply of deer compost. There's no one place to find the number of deer struck by motorists in Maryland per year, but administration data show that between January and October of this year, its workers have responded to 9,800 reports of deer carcasses on state roads. Gischlar said the deer that are not composted are either buried or given to outside rendering companies. *— Savannah Williams, Capital News Service/Associated Press* _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
