On May 30, 4:18*pm, Brooklyn1 Gravesend1 wrote:
On Mon, 30 May 2011 12:26:58 -0700 (PDT), Chris

wrote:
In all the books and papers I have read, it seems that the only reason
to avoid adding meat scraps to a compost pile is to not attract
unwanted critters like possums and raccoons. Is this the case? Or is
there a biological reason not to add animal matter to a compost pile?

Meat takes about ten times as long as vegetable matter to compost and
during all that time ROTTING MEAT STINKS. *My composter is too great a
distance from neighbors for them to smell it but still I don't want to
smell rotting meat either. *Meat composts far more efficiently inside
carnivores, I feed meat scraps to crows and other carrion eaters who
in return fertilize my property. *I save larger quantities of meat
trimmings in my freezer for feeding birds during winter.

While I am not disputing you (since I never composted any animal
product except egg shells) I really would like to see some kind of
evidence instead of bald assertion. I spent many years as a field
biologist, and while I realize there are lots of scavengers out there,
if it took 10 times as long for animal products (excluding bone, which
probably takes even longer) it seems to me that when I was humping the
national forests and wildlife refuges, I should have been ankle deep
in unrotted animal carcasses.

Now, I am not talking about tossing whole turkeys into the compost. I
am talking a few steak or burger scraps here and there.

Decomposition, like any other chemical reaction, depends mainly on two
things: temperature and surface area. The higher the temperature (to a
degree, pardon the pun) the faster it goes. The smaller the item (with
its higher relative surface area on which bacteria and fungi can work)
the faster it goes.

Chris