Compost

One of the local cities has a composting facility where they compost locally generated agricultural residues, landscape waste and untreated lumber.  It's a pretty cool place with piles and piles of compost in various stages of decomposition.

The only real downside is that the compost isn't finished and doesn't have any structure.  It's low in moisture, so it's dusty and flies everywhere and gets all over everything.  I do what I can to get it home and into a bin as quickly as possible, watering it as I go, to reduce airborne particles and to keep it from sticking to everything and getting all over my home, body and yard.

 
There's a lot of carbon in it and the nitrogen isn't fully decomposed, so it requires some finishing.  There's also a lot of acidic material included in the feedstock that they use, so it requires some softening, via oyster shell.  In order to finish the decomposition, we also add some nutrients, to ensure that the bacteria have all the resources necessary to do their job.  This is also the point where we add the mineral rock powder, since the bacteria utilize different trace elements which may not be present in the original feedstock to form different parts of their biological networks.  We also inoculate with lactic bacteria at this point for several different reasons.

Once the moisture levels are stabilized and all the nutrients are mixed in, it immediately begins to heat up.  It only takes a week or so to start settling down so that it can be used in the worm farm.