The Rural Voice, 1992-11, Page 34near the end of the war. After the
war, he took his father's advice and
enrolled at the Ontario Agricultural
College's mature student program.
By 1967 he'd become a professional
engineer and a professor at the
University of Guelph.
He began experimenting with
composting in the late 1960s, at one
point wrapping a garbage can with
insulation and injecting air into the
organic waste inside by using a
pump. Another experiment loaded
materials into a hopper at the top of a
large cylinder, fitted
with an aerating
pump as well as
internal paddles for
turning the comp-
osting waste.
By studying the
rate at which the
waste was trans-
formed into compost,
Pos was able to draw
several conclusions
from his lab ex-
periments. Chief
among them was that
the most efficient
breakdown of organic
material occurred
when the mass was
aerated, mixed, agit-
ated and moved.
Those four principles
are involved in the
new Hcnsall project.
Working for the university and
private clients from the 1960s
through the 1980s, he was involved
in a number of projects to compost
everything from lakc-wecd to poultry
manure (at the Guelph Research
Station and for a client in Boston),
cattle manure for a New Dundee
feedlot and other organic waste from
the university grounds.
In 1989 the University of
Minnesota contracted Pos to design
their composting system and LH
Resources Management was hired to
build the equipment that would turn
the compost. That brought Chris Lee
into the picture.
livestock operations.
In a different crowd, however,
he's known as an international calibre
motocross rider, with two sons who
have also made a name for
themselves in motorcycle racing
circles across the continent. In
August, the Lee family hosted the
Trans -Canada Motocross Champ-
ionship at their farm, just behind the
LH Resources manufacturing plant
east of Walton.
Chris Lee is also interested in rural
development and has been part of
in turn influence the culture where
these projects take place and they
also leave a monument to it.
"You do the same thing every time
you sell a line of thinking, an
approach. I think it's both a challenge
and a responsibility — so you'd
better have good ideas. You have to
be accountable.
"The other aspect I find interesting
is that manufacturing as an economic
activity in a rural community is
significant because so much of it is
internal economics. In the case of our
Manurigators,
we're exporting
equipment but im-
porting capital.
These are dollars
that came from the
U.S. or other parts
of Canada, and that
has a disprop-
ortionate impact on
our community in
terms of services,
labour and so on."
The Hensall
Compost
Facility is a
huge blue, barn -
like building loc-
ated south east of
Hensall on the
border of Tuck-
ersmith and Us -
borne townships. Outside the
building, waiting to be composted, is
a mountain of screenings from the
Hensall elevators, towering higher
than the building.
Inside the building are three
concrete channels, looking like waist -
deep bunker silos. Each is 15 feet
wide and 100 feet long. In the bottom
of each channel is tubing through
which air is pumped from a low-
pressure, high-volume blower in the
nearby fan room so that the
composting materials will have a
plenty of oxygen, and also will be
kept cool enough that the bacteria
necessary for the composting process
aren't killed off.
A large front-end loader takes the
screenings to a tub grinder where it is
ground up. The material is then put in
a wetting pit to increase the moisture
content from the 10-30 per cent it
might contain when it comes from the
elevators, to the 55-60 per cent it
Chris Lee shows details of the compost processor outside his Walton plant.
Chris Lee is perhaps best known
in the farming community as
owner and general manager of
LH Resources, which produces
manure irrigation equipment that has
become a familiar sight on Ontario
30 THE RURAL VOICE
many conferences on the subject.
He's done a lot of thinking on
development ideas.
"What I find intriguing about what
we're doing is two -fold," he says.
"One thing is the impact that you
have when you propagate ideas —
whether Manurigators or composting
equipment. To some degree, we've
shaped the way that people farm.
Those ideaes generated behind my
barn 10 years ago have implications
today, not only on farmers'
equipment but on their management.
"The first time it occurred to me
was when I was in Nebraska at a
meeting of the American Society of
Agricultural Engineers. They worked
on projects all over the world —
Egypt, Asia, the Middle East, Africa,
South America — and had built
dams, hydro -electric plants ... If you
ever really looked at it, equipment
reflects the society that generates it,
in style and execution. These things