Abstract: An experiment was conducted with mixed materials of chicken excrement and wheat straw to study the changes of temperature, enzyme, and number of microorganisms during an aeration composting process in a static state. Results showed that the temperature was lower at the bottom while higher at middle and top positions of the device. The temperature of the organic materials in the device rose from the ambient temperature to 50℃ by 7-8 h, and that maintained above 50℃ lasted 198-483 h. The time duration of high-temperature was in agreement with the requirement standard of killing the pathogenic microorganism. When the temperature was up to about 55℃ at the high-temperature stages, the activity of the cellulose enzymes reached a maximum value of 0.457 mg glucose/(g·24h), the sucrose enzyme reached a maximum of 87.836 mg glucose/(g·24h), and the dehydrogenase reached 21.62 μl H＋/(g·24h). The urea enzyme activity was peaked at a value of 0.932 mg NH3/(g·24h). At the later composting stage when temperature became declined, the activity of polyphenol oxidase enzyme reached its maximum of 6.23 mg gallicin/(g·2h). The highest bacterium number was found to be 2.51 1012CFU/g and actinomyces to be 3.68 108CFU/g in two days. Fungi number was relatively high at the beginning of composting while with the temperature rise, it became decreased, and at later stage of compost with temperature decline, fungi rose slowly. As a whole, the number of fungi was low whereas that of bacteria and actinomyces was much higher.

Key words: agricultural waste materials, compost made at high temperature, temperature, activity of enzyme, microorganisms