The high-nitrogen activator should typically be about 10% of the composting materials. These are typically animal wastes – I have used real chicken crap, pelletised chicken crap, and clover. With the chicken manure each time I have scored a fail, whereas the clover was a success.
I suspect the trouble is that it’s hard to mix a concentrated activator properly. For starters it’s not pleasant to do, which discourages it being turned in right. The pelletised stuff is easy to distribute evenly, but even then it seems to lead to localised action.
The pellets seem to go white, like dog crap used to go white when left on the footpath in the 1970s. This leads to a fast and furious burn on the composting front, but with no staying power
The clover was more evenly spread – somehow I need to find a way of spreading the others more evenly. Or maybe go for the urine, preferably from carnivorous humans (there is more N in protein). In Ben Easey’s Practical Organic Gardening (Faber, 1955) he says dilute this with water 1:20 which should make for a better distribution. So I’m going to steer clear of using crap, because I am a wuss and don’t like dealing with it and it’s too concentrated anyway. Clover or urine will be my activators of choice 😉
Joanne’s note Oct 2016: We subsequently (in later heaps) used pelleted chicken manure mixed with water and stirred into a slurry. It took a lot of water to do this! Poor old Richard has a very sensitive sense of small (tough on a small farm with animals!) so he had to leave the rest of the team to finish up building the heap when we started to add the slurry…
I believe I have read somewhere that if the temperature goes above 71 C it kills the thermophilic bacteria and they turn white. This would suggest that the pile should be turned more frequently, or the quantity of chicken pellets reduced as this seems to be raising the temperature too much.
One thing concerns me. Do you know what proportion of your original compost biomass has been lost to the atmosphere. With fast composting it can be 75% and 75% of the C and 75% of the N. And the CO2 will contribute to CO2 level rise and the N2O will be a 200x more effective greenhouse has than CO2 which is not what we want.
I think the fundamental problem with the chicken pellets is that they can’t be mixed properly – I guess if they were ground to a powder of dissolved this would be possible. So your hypothesis of localised heating is perfectly possible – they all the nearby plant material is consumed, it goes locally anaerobic and game over. Certainly I came to the conclusion this was 100% fail for me – the temperature profile couldn’t be sustained.
The principles of hot composting I got from Elaine Ingham’s work – her point 7 describes loss as gases if it goes wrong. In the course there is a N cycle diagram and she emphasises that it is important to keep the pile aerobic which should not lose the N to the atmosphere – the rough summary is that aerobic decomposition is fast enough to incorporate the N in the microbes, but I have to admit I did not follow this in detail, other than that it was extremely important not to lose the N because it’s hard to bind from the atmosphere through microbial action in the first place when the clover etc is growing.