Saw Dust Uses

[SLawyer Dave]

Just wondering what all of you people are using your saw dust for.

I have found it to be a great bedding material for the chicken coop and nesting boxes.  The saw dust mixed with the chicken waste then makes a nice compost for the garden.  I gather and keep the saw dust in a dry 55 gallon barrel.

[MikeON]

I use it for fuel for boiling maple sap. 

[WDH]

I use mine to make piles  :D.

[Magicman]

I leave mine for the customer to make piles.   :D

[WV Sawmiller]

Dave,

   Most of my customers reserve a bag or barrel full for shop sweeping. Use it to soak up oil spill sand such. I'm thinking of taking a few feed sacks full to flea markets this summer and see if I can get rid of there. Mostly I just use as fill in low spots or burn it along with my slab piles.

[pabst79]

 Dave, I was just talking to my wife yesterday about whether sawdust would make good bedding in the nesting boxes, so it works well eh? I usually use it for floor sweeping compound, except for the cherry sawdust that my neighbor brings me, that's strictly for the smoker  digin_2.

[OneWithWood]

If the sawdust is not well rotted it will strip nitrogen from the soil as it decomposes.  I would not recommend new sawdust for bedding.

[gww]

Sawdust is good to have around if you have an out house .
gww

[Gary_C]

Sawdust from green wood has too much moisture to be used for bedding. It harbors too much bacteria. Depending on the source, it also can have too many fines that can cause respiratory problems in some animals.

Typically the shavings and chips that are used for animal bedding are kiln dried, screened to eliminate fines, compressed and bagged.

It can be composted but you have to turn/aerate it frequently to get it to decompose. The EPA says if you spill less than 5 gallons of oil, you can mix some organic material (sawdust) in with the soil and it will decompose the oil.

[WH_Conley]

I save some Cedar sawdust to put in a tub for the Chickens to dust in. The Cedar will run the Chicken Lice off. When I clean out the Chicken house the manure goes to the sawdust pile where it gets stirred occasionally. That all goes in a long pile on the lower end of the farm. When good rich dirt is needed just go to the oldest end of the pile.

[Ron Wenrich]

I guess we better tell the farmers in our area not to use it for bedding.  They've been using it for years.  We deliver by the trailerload.  It gets used for dairy and for chickens.  They spread it on the fields, and turn it under after its used.  It can strip nitrogen from the soil, but that is primarily if there is no manure or other organic material with it.  That should help to offset the effect. 

I use sawdust as a bedding material in my hydroponics.  Seems to work okay.

[Roxie]

No one would want to use sawdust after Cowboy Bob is done with it.   :

He does have farmers fighting over his particular used sawdust. 

[SLawyer Dave]

I never thought about it being too fine.  Given I like to keep a sharp chain on my saw, generally the "dust" is pretty good size, so I don't think I will have much of a problem, but I could see the issue with real fine stuff. 

One of the problems with chicken manure is that it tends to be too high in nitrogen unless you compost it.  It will burn the roots of seedlings.  So I generally dump the nesting material into the manure and then spread it together in the garden as a top dressing.  While it may strip some nitrogen, the manure seems to more than make up for it, at least in my experience.

[Sixacresand]

People come by and see my trailer loaded with fresh sawdust and say "wow".  I ask them if they want some and they say "no".  I plan to mix some with chicken manure to experiment if I can compost it.  I have found that if you put a thick layer under the fence, it will keep the weeds down.  Other than that, dump it in the woods.

[69bronco]

Been using in the garden for years. I lay it down 4-5" thick between the rows to hold down weeds and hold in moisture. In the fall I till it in, soil tests fine.

[Peter Drouin]

I trade it for cow pooo, Load for load with my 1 ton.

[r.man]

Very few processes have true waste byproducts. I hear of producers that consider something a waste product in one area when it is being sold by others in the same area. I tend to think that the person involved either can't be bothered with marketing or doesn't want to put the product into the format that it can be sold in. I realize that this is a generalization but I have seen it happen at least three times locally where a byproduct was being given away until the person producing it noticed its popularity and started charging a fee that added up to a sizable amount over the course of a year.

[Magicman]

 

 
Here sawdust is being bagged for composting.  There are about 6 more bags beside the building in the background.

[NWP]

I sell the sawdust from my processor by the dump trailer load to a woman that uses it for compost and some bedding. She takes all that I produce and she is only about 5 minutes from my wood yard. Not a big moneymaker but it gets rid of it, puts a few bucks in my pocket, and she's happy to get it

[Gary_C]

When Using Green Sawdust, Take These Precautions to Minimize Risk

It's particularly troublesome with dairy cows but high bacteria counts can be trouble for any animal.

[Ron Wenrich]

I read that before.  The farmers we sent to didn't have any problems.  I remember Penn State having a large dairy herd for the campus. I went to a mill and asked what they did with their sawdust.  They sent it to Penn State for their dairy bedding.   Penn State is a leading ag research college, and what they found was bark was more of a problem for mastitis.  We debarked our logs.  One thing about green dust, when its spread out, it dries quickly.  If you have a sanitary dairy barn, you shouldn't have problems.

[Gary_C]

Ron, Penn State's Dairy Operation has done and continues to do research on types of bedding including sawdust of all moisture contents to be used in dairy facilities. Here is their latest plan for BEDDING. And here is a Penn State Extension newsletter that discusses the question of bedding use. The New-Old Bedding Dilemma Incidentially one thing they do with green sawdust is to compost it first and the heat generated in the composting will actually sterilize and dry it for safer use.

While I have not been in the Penn State Dairy Facility, I used to know two of the dairy extension agents, now both retired at PSU. I have also been to the Cornell University Dairy Facility outside of Ithaca, NY and of course the University of Minnesota Dairy Facility in St. Paul. As far as I know, none of these universities recommends using green sawdust unless the farmer is prepared to intensively manage the bedding. In the one PSU tie stall barn where they do use sawdust as bedding but the back third of the stall is limed daily to keep down the bacteria.

The type of bedding used mostly in the new large free stall barns is sand but the issue with sand is it does not stay in place very well and can get into the manure holding facilities where it creates another problem.

[sandhills]

I've never worked at a dairy that used saw dust but we used sand and yes Gary it does move, the farmer I worked for only milked 100-120 head and he could cover a quarter of ground with a years worth of manure (and then some).  I also helped another guy a few times and he used small square bales of straw blown out through a little push behind processer, it's all labor intensive and requires lime no matter what you use, you still get mastitis  :-\.

[mesquite buckeye]

The nitrogen that gets tied up as sawdust decomposes is rereleased as the decomposition proceeds. There is only a temporary loss of nitrogen. It is a net zero deal, but you end up with an improved soil from the enhancement of the organic matter component. ;D

We use our sawdust to grow saguaros as part of our potting mix. Our mix is well drained and we fertilize heavily both in the irrigation water and with time release fertilizer. The fertilizer more than compensates for the decomp losses. ;D 8) 8) 8)

[WV Sawmiller]

   May be a little off track (Hey, what's unusual about that and at least it isn't sawdust burgers or other food yet) but it always amazed me how you could lift so much sawdust with a seed fork. I never understood the physics about why those tiny grains of sawdust didn't just slide out between the tines.

[Ford_man]

Sawmiller The saw dust feels sorry for you because you didn't go get a shovel. :D :D :D

[snowstorm]

i was talking with a guy in the trucking biz from the midwest a few yrs ago. he bought a huge sawdust pile from a saw mill that had closed many years ago. i dont recall how many hundereds of thousands of yards of sawdust he got. he sold every bit of it to miracle grow. he said miracle grow is mostly sawdust the older the better

[r.man]

There are two companies that I know of that buy old mill properties just for the accumulated sawdust. In the one case it was a reasonably modern operation that closed because the owner wanted to retire. Sawmill operations are marginal at best in our area so the buyer ended up being a scrap dealer who sold the property to a mulch company minus the metal. The sawdust is said to be 30 ft deep on 50 acres. Similar to buying a gravel pit and it looks like a gravel operation. This has been done in at least three old mill sites within a 100 mile radius of me.

[thecfarm]

I bought some miracle grow soil a few years back. And yes, it acted just like old sawdust. I was not happy. Won't buy anymore.

[Brad_bb]

Most of mine ends up on the burn pile. Two interesting uses I've seen are making a sawdust stove and using it to make starter logs using left over bacon grease and newspaper.  The dust needs to be dry though.  Spread it out in the summer and it will dry quickly enough.

[4x4American]

When Using Green Sawdust, Take These Precautions to Minimize Risk

It's particularly troublesome with dairy cows but high bacteria counts can be trouble for any animal.

That was a good read.  I told the farmer up the road about that how my sawdust could be conducive to mastitis, he's thinking he wants to try and mix it in with his kd sawdust to make it last longer.  The guy he gets his sawdust from comes quite a ways to deliver it

[redprospector]

I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with all of my sawdust off the new mills, but I guess I won't have to worry about it until I get a shed built...the wind keeps blowing it all over on the neighbors alfalfa field. Well, when it's blowing that direction anyway. Otherwise it blows it into the other neighbors trailer park. 
Oh well, at least half of my neighbors are happy. That's more than I could say when I was in town.  :D

[4x4American]

Thats about the only good thing about having neighbors close by.  You can throw your junk in their yard and not clutter up yours lol