Compost and Antibiotic Resistance

Compost! It's not exactly my latest and greatest discovery, but the fact that the county landfill sells composting bins at about an 80% discount is a recent and great discovery.  Along with the compost bins, they also give out books on composting that are full of hints about how to make compost more rapidly.  Basically, it all comes down to making the compost pile a better place for microbes to live.  Microbes aren't really picky so the suggestions are things like making sure that there is water in the composting materials, and turning the heap regularly, and adding pre-made compost (which is full of microbes) to the heap.  Composting is great for lots of reasons...it is a cheap way of improving garden soil.  It's a good way of getting rid of grass clippings and leaves.  It encourages worms to come to your garden.  It reduces the amount of waste sent to landfills.    I also recently found a report that composting cattle manure reduces the amount of antimicrobials present in it.  Runoff of antibiotics from agricultural operations is a major source of antibiotics in the environment and probably contributes significantly to the occurrence of resistance.  Composting manure for a month under the right conditions (adding straw to it) can reduce the amount of antibiotics present by >90%!  That's huge!  I don't have any cows, but I almost wish I did.  I do have a couple of composting bins happily incubating lots of bacteria right now.  I bet you wish you did too!