The Benefits of Bokashi for Pets

Bokashi bran can help dogs, cats, and other animal companions live healthier, chemical-free lives and reduce their carbon paw prints. I would never have discovered bokashi if it weren’t for our tuxedo cat, Max.

We live in a suburban subdivision on what was once high, arid prairie southeast of Denver. For years I’ve successfully composted Max’s used pine pellet (animal bedding) litter along with food scraps in a trench. Composting requires two parts nitrogen/green/food scraps to one part carbon/brown/litter sawdust. I stored the green and the brown outdoors in separate buckets.

While the smell of the litter was easy to contain, stockpiling food scraps in warm weather had a high ick factor. When I opened a “ripe” food bucket, the smell was overwhelming. Plus the rotting green waste attracted flies. And my neighbor’s back door is just yards away.

While searching for natural solutions, I ran across an age-old practice so effective, I can’t believe that I’d passed it by for years just because of its odd-sounding name – bokashi. After throwing together my first batch of bran mix, my storage problems were solved and I was hooked. Thanks, Max!

Fermenting Versus Rotting

Bokashi bran ferments waste instead of letting it rot into putrid blobs. When you cover banana peels, tough asparagus stems and filters full of coffee grounds covered with bran they keep their shapes but morph into “food zombies” – Bizaro Superman images of themselves covered with white fuzzy mold.

Happily, the scraps no longer emit greenhouse gasses, so they no longer stink and attract flies. But they are degraded on the inside and compost in my trench much more quickly. I haven’t had problems with vermin, and I’ve run across reports that waste processed using bokashi bran repels rodents investigating compost piles.

Bokashi is simply pickling – anaerobic digestion on steroids. Cheeses, beer, wine, and sauerkraut are among the many foods that are produced through a similar manipulation of good, aggressive microbes that thrive in airless environments. The process is clean and high speed. The uber-microbes in the mix leave a mildly acidic scent.

Making and using bokashi bran is not complicated and the learning curve is a fairly short one. I’ve included a recipe below for the mix below. You’ll find pages of online posts explaining how bokashi bran can eliminate costly and environmentally unfriendly products, including fertilizers, drain cleaners, and septic sanitizers. But bokashi is especially helpful if you have pets, notably in the areas of odor elimination, probiotics, and diverting the waste they generate from landfills.

Cleaning Around Pets

If you’re using grain, paper, or wood-based litter, sprinkle a palm-full of the fermented grain into the litterbox before adding new litter. Your pet will stir up the bokashi and help activate its odor-fighting properties. The mix will also deodorize the bag or container holding the used litter. Beneficial microbes in bokashi bran don’t just cover odors, they actually suppress microbes that emit foul smells.

A little bokashi bran rubbed into a cat or dog beds will keep it smelling clean. Give your dog a good outdoor brushing while adding a bit of bokashi to freshen his or her coat. The fermented bran won’t hurt pets. It contains microbes that are all found in us and all around us in nature. Sprinkle the bran on the floor before vacuuming to eliminate pet odor on carpeting and in the vacuum bag.

Bokashi bran keeps gerbil, hamster, rabbit, and guinea pig cages fresh and speeds up composting the bedding. Want to perk up your koi? With a little research, you can find out how to clean your pond using straight EM or bokashi mud balls.

Probiotic for Healthy Digestion

We all know how good bacteria help the gut. Many bokashi enthusiasts add fermented bran to their bread and cereal. EM has a long history in animal husbandry. For generations, savvy farmers and ranchers have been helping to boost their livestock’s health by fermenting their feed or adding bokashi grain to their animals’ diets. I haven’t tried this yet with Max simply because I don’t dare ramp up his finicky threshold. But mix a bit with your dog’s favorite menu item, and chances are good that he or she will wolf it down.

If you compost using worms, then it’s not a stretch to say that red wigglers are your pets. Worms love scraps that have been pickled with bokashi and churn out more vermicompost and liquid feed/tea faster than they do with traditional food.

Bokashi Bran Recipe

Start with a mixture consisting of essential microorganisms (EM), a sugar source, grain, and water. You can buy the finished mix online or you make do it yourself. There are many bokashi mix recipes, but here’s a simple one. You can modify these portions to produce smaller or larger quantities.  I make 10 lb. each summer and use it year-round.

To make 10 lbs. of bokashi – thoroughly mix the following:

  • 4 Tbsp. EM-1
  • 4 Tbsp. molasses
  • 10 cups water
  • 10 lbs. bran

You can buy a bottle of EM-1 online, the molasses at the grocery store, and a 40-lb. bag of bran at a local feed supply store. The ingredients are inexpensive considering the bulk supply of bokashi they provide. I started by mixing five pounds of bokashi by hand in a clean cat litter bucket. It was fun! Kids would especially get a kick out of working this spongy material with a muffin dough fragrance. Cats rarely come when called, but Max always shows up when he smells fresh bokashi.

Tie the finished mixture in a tightly closed plastic bag so that it ferments, keep it in a dark lidded container for a month and voila – nice bokashi mix! You can use this freshly fermented bran for the next couple of weeks or air dry it, which will enable you to store it in an air-tight container for many months. To air-dry, simply spread the fresh, sandy-colored mix on a tarp for a few hours until it becomes a dark and grainy to the touch. You’ll want to do this on a warm, windless day.

Turning Pet Waste into Fertilizer

Give EM an airless hang-out and they quickly break down pet waste into carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and fundamental biology – nutrient-dense components that rejuvenate soil. This is why bokashi is a good option for recycling pet waste, even when you don’t have the space or the inclination to compost.

If you want a quick, space-saving, pet waste bokashi system, search online for commercial products that make it easy. Prefab containers with their pre-mixed cultures – usually EM-inoculated bagged grains – are more-or-less pricey, so consider your specific needs and return on investment.

An advantage of commercial kits is that they provide step-by-step instructions that will keep you out of trouble and get the job done. There are product lines that specifically address using bokashi to upcycle pet waste. One company offers a special pet waste accelerant concentrate and another features a mixture called “Dookashi.”

A highly promoted system for odorless fermenting features two stackable, 3 ½- gallon plastic buckets. Simply fill the top bucket with water and deposit pet waste while the full bucket on the bottom completes the cycle. Thirty pounds of dog waste can be finished in a single week. So it would take one average dog more than a month to fill a bucket. The bottom bucket “rests” before it is finished and ready for burial as a fertilizer for ornamental plants.

You can also try do-it-yourself methods that require some time and effort but little investment if you make your own bokashi bran. Here are three approaches that can be used for pet waste or any other organic waste

Bokashi Soup, Stew, or Lasagna

  1. “Bokashi soup”/submerge method (indoors or out):  Fill an airtight container to the half mark with a water containing bokashi mixture. Add waste. Cover and repeat. When the container is almost full, stop adding waste and wait for the degradation to finish. Pour residual fermented waste water – now liquid fertilizer – into a hole or trench, mix with soil, cover with additional soil.
  2. “Bokashi stew”/dry method (indoors or out):  Start with an airtight container. Put a divider in the bottom of the bucket (bokashi using this method doesn’t like to be sitting in its own liquid). Any perforated divider with a few inches of space in the bottom will work. A spigot on the bottom will enable you to drain off the tea (leachate). Add layers of waste covered with bokashi mix. Cover and repeat until full. Stop adding waste and wait for cycle completion. Use finished solid as a fertilizer. Siphon off tea and dilute with water (1:100) to use as a liquid/spray fertilizer.
  3. “Bokashi lasagna”/dry method (outdoors): Place any container with an open bottom on bare ground or make an enclosure on bare ground. Add a layer of waste covered with bokashi mix. Add 2-3 inches of dirt. Repeat until full. Stop adding waste and wait for cycle completion.

Whichever option you try, let the bokashi residue “rest” before using it as fertilizer for new plants. Fresh residue may be too strong to support root development and uptake, although it is useful as a starter for compost piles. Use carnivore waste residue to fertilize only non-edible plants. The material might contain stubborn pathogens that could contaminate fruits, vegetables, and herbs during harvesting.

Cold weather can temporarily stop outdoor bokashi recycling operations. You can ferment indoors – minimum 40° (4° C) optimum 70-100° F (21 and 38° C) – but you will need to eventually work a good bit of the residue into workable soil. So if you want the process to continue in a timely way, prepare a storage system that allows your project to function when temperatures dip.

Working with bokashi bran is like cooking – once you get the basics down, variations are as endless as your imagination. Invest a little time to explore this intriguing portal to pet sustainability.

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By Rose Seemann

Rose Seemann is the owner and operator of EnviroWagg, a Colorado company dedicated to collecting and composting canine waste into safe, nutrient-rich garden soil. She is author of The Pet Poo Handbook: How to Recycle and Compost Pet Waste. Rose was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. where she cut her baby teeth on the romance of recycling. Her granddad, a Croatian immigrant who worked long hours at the South Side J&L Steel Works, maintained an urban farm to help feed his family. Leftovers were buried in the gardens, a rotating smorgasbord for bushes, edibles, and flowering plants. Wherever she lived, whatever her circumstances, she followed her granddad's lead and left the soil richer than she found it. "It's always a privilege to give back to the earth."