Expert Insight

• Composting instructions from extension services typically warn against composting meat, bones and dairy products to avoid attracting vermin. In an exception to this pattern, the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension notes that red meat and bones can be carefully added to a well-controlled compost pile designed to avoid attracting vermin, pests and insects to the decomposing materials. A well-controlled pile features carefully buried scraps in materials that will nullify the odors and speed decomposition.
  
  

Home Systems

• Mary Appelhof, author of "Worms Eat My Garbage," describes tips on how to compost meat scraps in a worm bin or regular compost pile. Meat contains nitrogen, a valuable potential plant nutrient, as do vegetable scraps. To balance the nitrogen in the meat during the composting process, you need sources of carbon. Bury the meat scraps in a carbon source such as sawdust, wood chips or shredded paper in your worm bin or compost pile. Exercise caution in adding meat to a worm bin, Appelhof recommends, to avoid putrefying the bin or overheating as thermophilic microorganisms get to work. Appelhof quotes State University of New York soil biologist Daniel Dindal as recommending chopping and grinding the meat and bones to reduce decomposition time. Dindal notes that thorough mixing with the carbon materials proves successful even in outdoor piles.
  
  

Farm Systems

• Large-scale meat composting of restaurant waste or butcher scraps involves blending the meats with leaves or wood chips as sources of carbon in windrows, elongated piles of organic matter 8 to 12 feet wide and 6 to 8 feet tall. Home composters can borrow from research on large-scale systems, which make it a rule to bury the meat scraps under at least 12 inches of carbon materials and to leave them undisturbed for the first two months. The Texas Cooperative Extension, in a monograph on disposing of large animal carcasses, describes possible carbon materials including small wood shavings, rotten hay bales, peanut hulls and other brown-colored crop residues. Mix water into the compost pile every couple of months to counter drying caused by high interior temperatures.
  
  

Benefits

• It's wasteful to place meat products in a landfill; the beneficial nitrogen contained in the scraps becomes lost to plants that could use the element as part of the energy cycle. Composting avoids this interruption of the decomposition-renewal pattern. Further, meat-processing businesses faced with high costs of byproduct disposal report successful savings achieved by composting inedible byproducts into a material that could be used by plant growers as a soil amendment.