Appreciate it.

Can you get aged horse manure? That stuff is compost treasure.

Straw has always been rot resistant in my compost piles, it seems to break down faster as a mulch. I've had better results after chopping it with my mower. I do a deep litter under my chicken roost and straw is a poor litter. Not sure if its a surface area problem or not. I

just won't do it again.

I would love to use the horse manure, but unfortunately regulations require immunizations and antibiotics when they are sick. I don't want that in my garden.
As for rot resistance, I hope it breaks down faster if it's mixed with kitchen waste. The moisten and nitrogen may help?

Straw is slow to break down. Sorry :-\ I too chop it up so it's smaller (I use the vacuum attachment on the leaf blower) but only use straw for mulch. This weekend I bought some pine bedding pellets from the local rancher's supply. This is said to be a good brown for the compost bin. I have trouble, here in Phoenix, finding good leaves and have no grass clippings.

I do large piles of straw/manure compost and the straw is slow to break down. I still get excellent compost, but it does take a while. I'm also bad for turning mine since we don't have a tractor and our piles are huge.

When I lived in the city I often used brown clippings from spring pruning and leaves from the previous year. They worked well.

One year I used wheat straw as the only high C material in the tumblers. Didn't work well for heat. Eventually composted okay but heat was not sustainable beyond a few days. I had intended to try shredding first but never got around to it. I use wheat straw a lot when doing high nitrogen materials in a windrow but that is to prevent odor issues.

Straw has a higher content of lignin which impedes speedy composting. It makes lovely compost when it does finaly finish it just takes longer.

Also just to add I give my horses less than 100gms of drugs annually (and rarely if any antibiotics) and they produce over 12 TONS of compostable waste a year. I don't worry so much about the 100 grams.

Good advice from subk3 about vet meds. Also, the FDA requires studies to ensure that they decompose in the manure and don't cause problems in the environment. Many of the vet drugs are the same as human ones, so if you'd put them in your body, they shouldn't be a problem in compost, which you will not be eating anyway. Just my humble opinion.

You could always time your manure pick up as well. We have chicken, ducks, goats, sheep, and cows. We also have pigs 6 months out of the year. While we do on occasion need to give antibiotics, it's very minimal and only in life threatening situations. Deworming is on an as needed basis and I feel comfortable putting compost on my own gardens. Most people tend to deworm either spring before letting out on pasture or fall before bringing in for the winter, or both. If you pick up your manure from farms that bring animals into the barn during the evening all summer you should be pretty good. During the winter they should be pretty free of insecticides as well.

Just a little fyi. When we refer to animals having "worms" or using "dewormers" we are talking of internal parasites that are worm-like shaped, but are not actually "worms" in any biological sense. They have no relation to earthworms in your soil, and animal dewormers don't have an effect on earthworms.