For those who read some Chinese language, 18:27 of this video is helpful to establish a local probiotic culture for DLM For those who don't, I came across this video and wanna let you know how my plan is after learning from it. The video features a Chinese guy who did a permaculture farm focusing on organic pigs in DLM pens. His farm is at a climate comparable to South MN in winter but with less humidity, so he utilized the heat of DLM to warm his pig herds and harvesting his own probiotic culture to ferment the bedding has saved him a lot. He does so by burying steamed plain rice in soil with a shaded well-composted surrounding, and for a week he harvest enough culture in his 3-4 lb of rice to use for a whole winter to sustain his US$ 5 million worth of pig. His DLM beds are made of 2-3 ft of shredded rice hay and rice husk, and he mix the rice culture with wheat bran/brown sugar to propagate it before spreading it in the beds. I have some Chinese ancestry and steam rice is no rocket science to me. I am going to experiment this with my BYC flock by trying to obtain some culture this way in this coming April and see if it can heat up a 1 ft* 12 sqft DLM bed of pine shredding/ hardwood mulch/ 3rd crop hay/ shredded soy ink non-gloss paper. If it does well in this early spring, instead of building the forth small coop for my BYCs I m going to start a 100 sqft DLM bed of about 1.5 ft deep in my basement and keep all my layers inside when 2014 winter comes.
