If you're up on the news from Denmark, you know that supposedly a mutated strain of Covid-19 through mink farms has infected 12 Danes

         We Americans seldom think about mink farms while we're eating pastured pork sausage and pastured eggs for breakfast, but in Denmark, mink furs are the nation's third largest agricultural commodity.

         The country sells more than 15 million mink furs per year to folks who apparently haven't embraced the faux fur narrative.  Lest you miss the obvious, harvesting these furs is different than harvesting wool.  Minks don't lose their fur and then grow another one next year.  It's different than an elk shedding antlers, if you get my drift.

           That means the country routinely handles more than 15 million carcasses a year.  And with this latest disease, the country culled its entire mink population--some 10,000 metric tons.  If a tractor trailer holds 40 metric tons, this represents 250 tractor trailer loads.

            To say this has created a disposal problem would be the understatement of the year.  Apparently they've been burying them in mass graves, but as the bodies decompose the released gases make the carcasses lighter and millions are floating up through the soil.  Local newspapers call them "zombie mink" according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. 

             Officials are looking at other disposal methods:  incineration or storing them in big slurry tanks.  Amazingly, no credible voice has suggested what is to me the most obvious method:  composting.  Carcass composting is done worldwide and is now so common that even the USDA and Food Safety Inspection Service endorse it for slaughter offal and mortalities.

             Surely Denmark has plenty of trees that could be chipped to provide the carbon for the nitrogenous mink carcasses.  As the compost heats, it naturally sanitizes everything through biological activity and temperature.  On our farm, we compost offal and mortalities all the time with wood chips we generate from forestry work.  It's a perfect symbiosis and the end product is gold to the soil.  This compost brings on clover better than planting seed.  It's wonderful.

             The WSJ article concludes with this simple sentence: " . . . mink have been shown to be one of the animals most susceptible to Covid-19, partly because they are farmed in big numbers in close proximity with one another."  When will officialdom ever connect the dots to factory farming and disease?  Have we not established that link well enough to stop all factory farming?

             Why do you think officials won't embrace composting for these mink carcasses?

Photo credit The Local dk