Shoveling donkey poo
Most people when they visit our land ask me:
Why do you have donkeys? What do they give you?
I hate this question. I know it comes from ignorance or lack of imagination, it's a lot easier for people to understand why I keep chickens or even cats (even though they barely provide anything). I know it doesn't come from a bad place, but still.
Do they need to give me something for me to keep them? What about what I give them? Our three donkeys were rescued from terrible conditions or abandonment. The main reason we have them is to give them a good life. Spend half an hour hanging out with a donkey and I challenge you to tell me they don't give off unbeatable zen calm vibes.
The indirect benefit of keeping donkeys is that they poo a lot. They transform grass, tree prunings, straw, hay, alfalfa, carob pods, oats, carrots, into little nuggets of fertility. Every day after feeding them I scoop up a bucket full of donkey poo and put it in a pile1. Usually we have an actively composting pile (from the previous month) and a slow pile (from the current month). Every other day I turn the active pile with a shovel to get the driest parts (on the outside) to mix with the wettest parts (in the center/bottom). The actively composting part in the center of the pile gets pretty hot, I've measured 50 degrees C in the winter! You could heat up water passively with that (one day I will). After turning the pile I wet it with a hose. This composting process is a lot more effective during the winter because there's a lot less water evaporation. It's probably not worth the water in the summer.
All this work might seem heavy and dirty, but I don't experience it as such. For me it serves as hang out time with the donks, which as I said before gives me a lot of peace, and a functional strength workout. In cold winter mornings it's a great way to warm up. Also, donkey poo is not dirty nor smelly, it's quite dry and it has a faintly sweet and earthy smell. I love seeing the daily evolution of the composting process, the earthworms doing their thing, mushrooms growing and sometimes even undigested seeds sprouting into saplings. This last thing is something I'd like to encourage more, especially to grow carob trees, which donkeys eat like chocolate.
The result after a month of composting is a glorious pile of chemical-free fertiliser and organic matter which we logically use to grow food. Whenever we plant a new bed or tree, we mix the donkey manure with the existing soil and vermicompost, depending on the plants needs. It works great for us and saves us a lot of money and foreign, unknown chemical inputs.
We are not fully decoupled from petroleum based inputs, we still buy bales of straw/hay/alfalfa which are produced conventionally, harvested with diesel harvesters and grown using chemical fertilisers. But we are taking steps to becoming more self-sufficient in donkey feed. One thing we are starting to do this year is taking the donkeys to neighbours' land to graze their fields, since our land is not big nor convenient enough to do that all year. Also, as I understand it, donkeys are desert animals and is not good for them to eat fresh green grass every day.
From a material/economic point of view, the donkeys provide a great benefit to us, but honestly we don't see it or measure it in that transactional sense. To us the donkeys are part of the greater system that is our land, it's a symbiotic relationship that benefits all of us and improves our environment. They make us happy, hopefully we make them happy (they usually sound happy to see me) and they increase our resilience to unexpected external events. We are not planning on breeding them (our male is castrated) because there are enough rescue donkeys in the area for now.
💬 Thoughts? Email me a comment
We keep our shit together, I could write about our humanure compost pile, but you're not ready for it.↩