Composting material

In the meantime in the Culinary Arts we have been saving LOTS of kitchen scraps for several months now. We have been keeping them in a 40 gallon trashcan, but finally filled that up a few weeks ago, so we split the scraps into two 40 gallon trashcans. When we went out as a class to inspect the compost it smelled awful and made people gag.  It's would seem as though our compost has turned anaerobic due to lack of air, lack of movement or rotation, and having such a high moisture content. We added some leaves and some twigs to help dry it out, but obviously not enough. When we transfer some of the food scraps to the barrels the landscaping class will add some more dry material such as Peat moss and dried pine needles. Once in the barrels, the mixture should get proper air flow, reach the optimum temperature, and start to break down quickly. At least that is the plan! While turning the material we have in the trashcans I realized that we have some very large pieces of product in there and we need to be more careful in the future to break larger scraps down into smaller more manageable pieces.