songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
...
In my view whatever organic matter you can get locally and cheaply
(or free) is always superior to what you may buy or truck in.

if it is clean, sure. however, i'm wary
of taking anything from a farm these days.
things aren't the way they used to be.
animals are moved around a lot more now and
there are more resistant diseases.


To all those who say that it is essential to compost manure before
use, I ask why?

ever hear of E.coli O157:H7 ?


No but I am sure it's nasty

for children and elderly there is 6%
chance of kidney failure if infected. for
the rest of us it can mean bloody poo,
vomiting and other fun stuff.

this bacteria can be found in even healthy
animals with no obvious sign it is there short
of testing each pile of poo. it can take as
little as 100 bacteria to cause an infection
(in my opinion 1 is enough if you happen to
be really unlucky or are immunologically
under the weather).

Can you give me a reference for these statements?


and then there are the flesh eating staph
bacterias going around now too. a friend
lost his foot and it's very likely it came
from horse manure.


How would you know that?

i'm sticking to green manures and worm
composting of green manures, that's about all
the risk i want to take.


songbird

There are some very nasty bugs around: what chance they are found in
manure, what chance you catch them from it (assuming you are not eating the
stuff) and will composting kill every one? Once you discount the yuck
factor what is the real risk? I don't know the answer to any of those
questions. I have been handling horse for years and never got poisoning.
You can get some terrible bugs from supermarket lettuce, it seems to happen
in the USA every other week. We live in a soup of gazillions of microbes,
in our air, soil and water, and on our skin and every surface in our
dwellings. Life is a lottery that we all play.

David