I have tried to find rice hulls too but no no luck. Riceland has a website devoted to the wonders of rice hulls and a contact e-mail to find distributers. Maybe you could try that? I couldn't even find a way to order online!

I put them on my corn THICK some years back, when they were a lot cheaper, and it zapped all but a few weeds and kept the soil very nice and moist.
The corn grew very, very well also.

Run the test like this, when you pile is in need of browns, you put the Cocoa Mulch in and taking the temp before and after with the compost thermometer. If get more heat then before it is a brown, if no change then it would be green. But, if you compost them straight out, there would be no way to tell what it was. Whenever I add coffee I get an increase within an hour, but if I added sheared paper, then no increase will appear.

RpR - I agree it is a great mulch. I'm amazed you have gotten several years out of an application! I use it in my rose beds and I reapply every year. Kind of a soil ammendment/mulch. It will break down almost completely by the following spring!

Better quit drinking coffee, using some wood products, stop developing West Africa etc., etc., etc.
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Sandy, I put it on heavy and it does change color and texture before it gets a total redo.
When I bury my roses as I did for the past several years, I scrape away the hulls into piles and then push them back when the roses are uncovered.
With my naturally black soil, the dark brown/black color the hulls eventually turn is good as everything blends aesthetically and for me it is/was much easier to scrape away the hulls than it was the Eucalyptus mulch I used before.

I am trying another system this winter rather than scrape away and bury the roses, I will scrape the hulls into a mound over the cut-down rose bushes and then put the fabric and leaves of over that as it is the uncovering in spring that wreaks havoc.
On two bushes I tried this on last winter the mounded cocoa bean hulls seemed ease the bushes through the nasty cold-warm-cold etc. that kills roses in spring better than with the buried ones that were pulled out of their holes.

This year I disturbed the soil heavily when I roto-tilled between the bushes because a few items annoyed me once too often, and several of the rather sickly ones looked like they might join a couple of others as fuel for cooking steaks but after I applied a thick bed of cocoa bean hulls, which I always water heavily after applying as it forms hard wind but not water proof skin on the surface.
The sickly ones recovered extremely well even when during the early onslaught of our semi-drought the roses got zero water for over two weeks.

is it OK for me to finish my stash of Snickers or should I just compost them?