They all break down, given enough time. Obviously bones don’t, but that’s about it. Smells are more of a mixed bag. Add too much of anything and it smells. Broccoli and cabbage have yielded worse smells than the small amounts of proteins/fats I’ve used. Large amounts of carbohydrates tend to yield more of a poop smell. Meats tend to generate a VERY faint rancid smell if they get too compacted. In my experience, as long as you mix these in with lots of other food products, a small amount of meat/fat isn’t going to hurt the overall environment of a bin the size of a VB24. If you were to try large amounts without other foods/grounds/bedding to dilute it, I think you’d probably see more of an issue, particularly with the fats. Obviously large amounts of grease/oil/fat will kill (suffocate?) your worms.

The type of materials you are adding can make a big difference though. If there are lots of tough resistant materials, there’s a decent chance some of those will end up coming out the bottom – especially if they were used as part of the initial bedding mix when first setting up the bin.

As for heating – yeah absolutely. It’s easy to forget how large these bins really are in comparison to a typical worm bin. Thankfully my basement is really cool these days, so temps in the VB48 have actually been fairly close to “ideal”.
————
KIM – I’m with you! I think it would almost be an embarassment (if I could feel the emotion after death – haha) if the “Compost Guy” ended up getting embalmed and all the rest of it. I think it’s going to be au naturel for me!

I’ve definitely heard about farm mortality composting – but I’ve never been tempted to go down that road at all myself. Again, I assumed it would still be a nasty, smelly situation. Now, I’m not so sure. I think some small-scale meat composting experiments may be on the horizon!
——-
JOHN – As mentioned earlier, if you are in doubt of the quality of vermicompost vermbins can produce just check out Joe’s update post. He was absolutely thrilled with the stuff that came out the bottom of his bin (he’s now getting ready for his second huge harvest in fact).

In my case – as mentioned in one of my “Beast” updates – my focus is definitely more on growing worms (and just generally having fun) than on producing vermicompost. So I’m not worrying about adding too much liquid etc etc.

Would be interesting to compare vermicomposts produced by a Worm Inn and a VermBin though!
8)

Out of curiosity…why would this system not come out with as good compost as the Worm Inn?

A couple years ago someone left a 5 gal bucket of smelly fish by our trashcan. I assumed they wanted us to compost them, so we did. Never saw any evidence of the fish again. I buried them deep within the bin, of course, so the neighborhood cats weren’t tempted.

There’s a farmer in Illinois that has such a large composting operation that other farmers bring their dead animals to him and he buries them deep in the mountains of compost he has on site and within a couple weeks they’re just a pile of bones.

So many ways we could solve the waste problem in this country.