And therein we start the flame war. Maybe I can summarize before it gets going. Compost is composted manure. Manure is raw animal dung. Compost should smell very fresh and have no diseases or pathogens left in it. Manure smells like manure and is teeming with disease and pathogenic microbes. Compost is never a problem assuming it was finished composting. Manure is seldom a problem even though your intuition (and your nose) tells you otherwise. When it is a problem, though, it's a big problem. Cholera, for example, can kill you before it gets diagnosed. Dysentery used to be a killer but is now just thought of as an upset stomach. Still it needs to be treated. So yes, you can use manure to make a tea. Would I? No, because it stinks and could cause a disease. That's just my preference.

30 gal or so then....that's small for a compost bin but I've done that same thing and it can work fine. It is probably too wet and if it smells bad it may be too high in nitrogen. You can dump it and let it dry out a bit or reload it layering with some dry browns. Keep in mind you need much more browns by weight, about 3:1 (dry weight that is so it's hard to guesstimate if it's wet). But dog food being high in protein is a high grade Green so use plenty of browns. It will right itself and you will get compost.

Valerie, is your stuff anything like this stuff? No, it's not like kefir grains. It is more simple thing. And easy to make. To avoid long errors with ratios, 100 g of rye flour and 1 liter of water is all what necessary. Put in bottle and let it sit 2 days closed under the lid. Shake it occasionally. It's like milk in color. But the process going there is really complex. Each time when it start the process of evolution (and co-evolution) begin. Natural yests in rye flour are aerobic. From generation to generation the yeasts cells become more and more "anaerobic". In the end (after 2 days) there will be lacto-bacterias and yeasts. Traditionally lacto-bacterias are anaerobic in science and yeasts are aerobic. So, from traditional point of view it is a mixture of aerobic and anaerobic organismes living together. Paradox! The solution of this paradox I've already explained. So, it's white, acidic, sour smell, nice taste, no alcohol.

Yes, read Kimmsr's link to the Soil Food Web Primer. That was the first comprehensive explanation of how soil really works. Before that it was only speculation about the soil microbes. Until the 1990s only a dozen could be grown in the laboratories. Then DNA testing showed there were tens of thousands of microbes. Later DNA testing shows 100,000 species of microbes. The microbes we're talking about are bacteria, fungi, microarthropods (teensy insects), and protozoa. Normally in Nature, plants and animals die on the surface of the soil. The surface of the soil is filled with microbes which only decompose stuff that falls on the surface. They are specialists and do not work underground. Some of the stuff that dies on the ground washes into the soil - blood for instance. Just under the surface are other microbe species that handle this specialty. Furthermore, the upper level species do biological things analogous to peeing, pooping, sweating, shedding, spitting, etc. There are other specialist microbes which decompose the byproducts of other biological processes. There are still other specialist microbes which process the biological byproducts of the byproduct specialists. The food chain in the soil is so complicated it is referred to as the Soil Food Web. The key to starting the process going is to supply real food to the surface of the soil, not buried under the surface. Somewhere in that food web a product is produced which is plant food. It takes about 3 full weeks from the time you apply fertilizer to the surface for the plant food microbes to have produced enough. Then the grass greens up and becomes dense. Most of us do not care to slaughter animals and spread their remains over the surface of the soil, so we opt for ground up grains. Corn (sort of popular), wheat (hardly popular at all), alfalfa (very popular), soybean meal (very popular), cottonseed meal (not very popular), and any other ground up nut, bean, or seed containing protein makes a good fertilizer for the soil microbes. Even used coffee grounds make a fertilizer. You can get them in gold, 30-pound bags at Starbucks. Regarding livestock rotation: there is a different school of thought that is taking hold in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and in parts of Mexico and elsewhere around the world. Rather than two, three, or four pastures, farmers and ranchers are going with 15 to 30 different pastures. Animals are let in only after the grass has fully matured. That might mean gone fully to seed. Grass gone to seed has traditionally been thought of as inedible, but when the animals come in hungry, it disappears. Depending on how fast the rest of the pastures are growing the animals might be left in one pasture until the grass is gone. If the grass is growing fast, they will be pulled when the next pasture is ready. When you have 15 to 30 pastures to choose from, it can be complicated. The idea is to keep the animals completely off the pastures while the forage is regrowing. The rest of this program suggests you only put into the system what benefits the biology of the system. One thing that is recognized as harmful to the system is deworming medicines. Ivermec is the main name brand but there are others. Dewormers are poisonous to dung beetles. If farmers would stick to treating only the wormy animals, then it might not affect large population of dung beetles. But farmers are being told to prevent worms by treating all the animals every month - thus increasing the sales of dewormers. Once you go to routine monthly injections, all the dung beetles will die out. When you stop with the deworming, some of the animals go to the slaughter house early because they have parasites, but not all get them. Once you have culled the herd of all the parasite prone animals, you have better genetics and will continue to breed healthier animals. Also once you stop with the dewormers, the dung beetles return. One Central Texas rancher reported seeing the early morning sky black with clouds of dung beetles flying in. Another one has documented the speed with which his manure is processed by the beetles. He took pictures from the time the cow's tail went up until the manure pat was gone. He used an irrigation flag to locate the pat. The total time it took until there was nothing but a wet spot was 24 hours. And he has noticed that when his animals leave one pasture to move into another, 24 hours later there are no piles of manure to be found. Where does the manure go? If you're still reading you know the answer. It gets buried by the dung beetles. Those beetles dig a hole up to 3/4 inch across and 6 to 10 feet deep. When it rains, and even when it pours for days on end, these ranchers report they have zero erosion and no runoff. While neighboring ranches spend tens of thousands to rebuild their washed out roads, the ranches with the dung beetles don't have those costs. So they don't have the cost of the dewormer meds; don't have to buy the manure shredders and spreaders; don't have to pay to house, insure, and repair that equipment; and don't have to repair their roads from the weather. In addition they don't have to irrigate their pastures because several feet of rain can be captured in the dung beetle holes during one thunderstorm. If you had several hundred beetle holes per square yard, you could dump 4 inches per hour on that and not see runoff. How long can you sustain this approach to rotation? One rancher I talked to has been doing it for 20 years. He has the cost of his animals down to about $15 per animal because he no longer buys seed, fertilizer, medicine, herbicide, insecticide, dewormers, hormones, or supplemental feed. Even in Texas with the periodic droughts we've had, he has been increasing his stocking density until he's running about double what his neighbors are doing. Their expenses keep climbing and his keep going down. Their land keeps deteriorating and his keeps improving. The last thing he got rid of was cowboys. Rather than having a 3,000 acre ranch, he has pastures that are only 50 acres. With 300 cow/calf pairs on 50 acres, when the grass is gone, the mamas have learned to line up to move into the next pasture. There is no need for a round up because all the animals are lined up right in front of you.