Montgomery County officials are considering turning deer carcasses into compost in an effort to cut in half the nearly $150,000 spent on carcass disposal each year.
“We are only in the initial stages, but it’s definitely something we’re considering,” said Capt. Michael Wahl, director of the county’s animal services division. “We still need to research more into site requirements, permit requirements and those issues.”
Hunters in Montgomery are responsible for their deer, which typically land on a dinner table or donated to Farmers and Hunters Feeding the Hungry, a nonprofit that gives the meat to the homeless.
Otherwise, removal and disposal of dead deer from county roads costs nearly $50 a body and accounts for about 85 percent of Montgomery’s animal removal costs, according to figures provided by Wahl.
Composting the dead animals would reduce the total cost per deer to about $25, according to the Cornell Waste Management Institute, a research arm of Cornell University that studies large-scale composting.
The county’s current system for handling dead deer involves road removal and transport to a walk-in freezer in Gaithersburg, where carcasses are stored for up to a month. The process cost the county about $89,200 in fiscal 2008, Wahl said.
Once a month, Wahl Valley Proteins, a contracted company from Virginia that is unrelated to Capt. Wahl, picks up the frozen carcasses and delivers them to a processing plant in Winchester. There, the deer are rendered into feed for domestic animals — which cost the county $54,000 in fiscal 2008.
Composting the deer would eliminate several steps, leaving manpower as the major cost. After removal from the road, carcasses would be tossed into a compost pile — separate from Montgomery’s existing garbage composts — and covered with a mixture of wood chips and manure. Microbes would break down the bodies within six months and turn them into usable soil within a year, according to CWMI.
In Virginia, officials decided against composting because of limited space.
“We looked into composting,” said Joan Morris, spokeswoman for Virginia’s Department of Transportation, which handles deer disposal for the state. “But we do not have the space at our area headquarters to compost.”
Instead, VDOT hires contractors to cart the dead deer off to a landfill, she said. VDOT did not provide information on the cost of Virginia’s deer-carcass management.
