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Given the amount of land we all have/want it is a good idea to set aside a small area to compost as much waste as you can, rather than burn it. If you can re-use it on site compost keeps the fertility needed by your land to sustain you and your animals within your 'eco-system' for want of a better term. It keeps it cycling round benefiting you, instead of being lost - it was taught in schools, the carbon cycle, and it is linked to all the buzz word carbon footprint stuff we hear now, but don't let that put you off!

I don't know how practical storing and spreading 'muck' is and on what scale, but before farmers used to do that, animals were traditionally kept along side crops in rotation to maintain fertility naturally completing the cycle. My ideal way to manage land would be to move animals around enough that I can leave their fertilizer to do it's work feeding the pasture for the next rotation with minimal intervention by me. Feet up, kettle on, I wish

But if you have to collect up manure from field shelters, stalls and stables and the like, store it til it's composted a bit, even if you do nothing to it, within a year it will be sufficiently composted to handle again. If you can get hold of some field mushrooms, add them to the pile and with a bit of luck, next year you will have field mushrooms that you can sell at your farm gate.

Or you can follow the guidelines for a garden compost bin, mix dry stuff like card board and woody materials in even proportion with wet stuff like pig poo. And chuck in the chicken bedding. And don't forget that, thanks to a couple of real idiots, we can no longer feed our kitchen scraps to the pigs, chickens and other livestock, so add the left over vegetables and their peelings to the heap. Even pasta and rice composts quite nicely when mixed with all the other things in the heap. Quite a few places then sell the resultant compost by bagging it up in old feed sacks and popping them at the farm gate.

Poultry manure is a great activator to the composting process, as is your pee, and nettles, and you must have seen pelleted poultry manure in garden centres, so you know it's good stuff. Regarding your pee, have a couple of pee buckets around your site and then empty them onto the compost - it really is an excellent accelerator and will cost you nothing but a bit of time! One of our book owners actually has one on those toilet seats that the elderly take around with them (so that they can raise the height of ordinary toilets) and uses it on top of an orange builder's bucket so that it is comfortable for her to sit down!

I daresay there are some anal rules and regs making it difficult or impossible to re-use natures most valuable commodities like this, but on our small scale it should be manageable and should not offend anyone.

It's common sense to not put things like water courses in jeopardy, esp if you have your own drinking supply Unlike a place I saw with 10 stables-worth of muck heap trickling some sort of concentrated liquid into the wee stream feeding the ponds - it was killing the pond life, what idiots!

Bonfires? Well, speaking with my horticultural hat on, I would only recommend burning thorny or diseased material that presents a hazard if it were left on your farm, (after all you would not like finding prickles in the potting compost), perhaps the mouldy straw mentioned elsewhere, or trees if they were sick. But don't forget that you will need an exemption licence from the EA before lighting that match! Once you are left with a pile of ash, then and only then should it be added to the compost heap.

Otherwise, waste nothing!

I shred tree/hedge prunings, it makes great pathways, it's good for muddy areas on chicken runs and even on the floors of their sheds, and they absolutely LOVE it, just put a barrow load down and watch them scratch it all out for you.

If you don't need the end product on your land put it on Freecycle and let someone else come and collect it off you by the trailer load. If you have an outlet already selling plants and the like, sell it there in old feed bags, or as mentioned before, at the farm gate. You could even try selling it a local market or auction. Or grow worms in it and sell them if you believe the figures in the book.

But please, please don't waste it!!

Green rant over