OT Dead stock

How do you guys dispose of your dead stock? I use a processing plant but they are very unreliable (3 weeks, 3 calls to get picked up), also expensive. 3 weeks is fine with me in the dead of winter but during summer there is not alot left to pickup. I dont beleve i have enough dead stock to keep a compost pile running, especialy in the dead of winter. Ive looked at incinerators but are very costly.

Anyboby come up with a good simple way to deal with dead stock??

Thanks for your thoughts.

I feed ‘em to the coyotes.

Allan

Did a hole and shut my mouth if it's in the summer. Like Allen, feed 'em to the coyotes in the winter.

In Pa the processors cant pick up any cow over 2 years old due to mad cow. Composting is the recommended method of disposal. They recommend 1 foot of high carbon material(wood chips,silage,manure) the animal, then another 1 foot of material.

Seems like mine always like to go off in the woods to pass on and I don't find them till there is not much left but bones.

Dave

Throw them over the fence into the neighbors field.

JUST KIDDING

We bury them.

I'm out of the business, but I was in it for 47 years; have buried my share of 'em.....backhoe or dozer.

We dig a big hole....try to find a sandy area....it digs easier....

Around here some of the livestock producers compost their dead using turkey litter from turkey nursery buildings for the compost pile. They just bury the dead in the pile of litter and it composts. A couple of ten wheeler truck loads will compost a lot of dead stock.

We have a ton of turkey buildings around here so the litter is more available here than in other areas. I don't know what else might work but it's a good method and a rendering truck never comes on the premises. Jim

If you've got nosey neighbours, you best bury the evidence and shutup.
If not... coyotes work pretty good. Then shoot the coyotes when they get out of hand...

Rod

Out here in western ND we don't get many but they end up in the tree rows, along with all the car killed deer. Get eaten by fox, badger, cougar, coyote, barn cats, hawks, eagles, the odd wolf ect. No chance it will upset the neighbors. The closet one is 2 miles away and he does the same thing. Living in these wide open spaces does have some things going for it.

We use a compost pile for this purpose. We also get all the offal back from the slaughterhouse when we take hogs in and we compost that, too. Never had anything large like a cow die, so not sure how we would handle that.

Christopher

Around here in Wisconsin, we call up one of a couple different mink farms and they come get them SAME DAY.

Not sure of the going rates as of late, but I think it was $20 last time we had a cow picked up. Not sure if they charge for calves or not, can't remember and (knock on wood) we haven't lost a calf in a while.

Donovan from Wisconsin

Compost them. Kind of hard if you don"t have enough in the winter though. Almost have to have 1 a week in the winter. Cover them with whatever the local law is. In about 3 years go and dig it out and spread it.Doesn"t take anything to keep a pile going. Add to it as the animals die.

I build a bovine-sized funeral pyre (a.k.a. brush pile) and burn em up.

How does anybody cope with the odor of a ripe and bloated animal? Anything deceased here gets buried or hauled to the dump before it's too late.
I can't even field dress a fresh deer or moose without gaging a time or two.

I had cows go through the ice in a pond once. It was May before the ground dried up enough to get a tractor to the pond to pull them out to cremate them. I can't even begin to describe how hard it was do deal with that smell. I should have figured out where to get that cream that pathologists/coroners put under their nose.

In Oregon you are required to bury or dispose of the body within 24 hrs. You can't bury one within 1/4 mile of any water, that is almost impossible out here.
Walt

Vicks Vapor Rub works pretty good. (I have a cousin the drives a "meat" wagon for tyson and he keeps a small jar in the truck in case his AC goes out in the summer or when he has to hook up to a trailor that has been left out a little too long in August.)

Dave

Once when I was a kid, lightning hit a tree on our ranch in the middle of Summer. Unfortunately there were cows bedded down under that tree and if I remember correctly, it killed 7 adults and a couple of calves. We missed the cattle the next morning and found them after searching for a couple of hours. By that time there was only one thing to do: call the rendering company.

The rendering company sent a truck with a hoist out the next day and we had to drag the carcasses out of the trees with a tractor. They were already starting to stink pretty bad--not a pleasant job at all. I don't think I could have worked for that rendering company!

My Dad felt fortunate that we didn't have to pay for the carcass disposal, but it sure took away any profit our cattle business would have had for that year, and probably for a couple of years after. I don't know if the rendering company would have come out for just one animal without charging us.

Over the years we occasionally had an animal die, and we usually just dragged them out to a gully far from the buildings for the coyotes and magpies to take care of them. At that time there were no neighbors for at least half a mile, so we didn't worry about the odor bothering anyone.

I still live on a corner of what was our ranch, but my Dad subdivided the property, so now the neighbors are a lot closer. A couple of times deer have been hit on the road and I have started smelling them at my house. So I have used the tractor to move the dead animals to where I am much less likely to constantly smell them since the wind usually blows more or less the same direction. The coyotes and magpies are still doing their jobs, and so far, my neighbors have never said anything to me about my pulling the carcasses where I did. Hopefully the odor doesn't hit their living area much.

Some posters have suggested cremating the carcass. In my area, I am guessing that would get me in trouble from the clean air people. Burning dead animals is specifically prohibited in the burning ordinances. If nothing else, if they caught me, the would probably revoke my woodland burning permit.

I liked things better when we were allowed to do more or less what we wanted on our land, as long as it didn't cause damage to other people's property. But these days, with the much greater population in our rural-becoming-suburbia area, many things we used to do all the time I would not even consider doing now. But so far, dragging dead animals down country still is working as a solution to a smelly problem. Just don't make the neighbors mad at you...good luck!