It’s International Compost Awareness Week! Composting is something that we’ve done for many years, but we didn’t start talking about until relatively recently. Many farms and households compost their waste, but have you ever wondered why? Composting has many environmental and economic benefits, which we will share with you below. (This post will probably be quite similar to the Community Composting Q&A session that I hosted via Facebook Live in 2024. If you’ve already seen that video, this post should just serve as a refresher on the importance of composting.)
Let’s start from the beginning, with the definition of composting. Composting is the process of recycling organic materials into a usable end product. All sorts of things can be composted: leaves, wood chips, leftover food, byproducts from the food production process, manure, and even roadkill.
There are so many reasons to compost. For many folks, composting is just the logical way to dispose of the waste that they generate. Composting can be done on site for many farms and households, so it eliminates the need to transport the waste elsewhere. Composting also benefits the environment: when organic materials are taken to a landfill, they degrade in an anaerobic environment (without oxygen present). It is through this anaerobic process that methane is generated, polluting the community around the landfill and the global environment, as methane is a potent greenhouse gas. When organic materials are composted, however, they degrade in the way that nature intended (in the presence of oxygen) and they do not generate methane.
Even if climate change is not something that is on your radar, think about composting from a resource perspective. The organic materials, such as leftover food, contain nutrients that are needed to be able to produce more of that food. When the waste is landfilled, the nutrients are lost from the natural cycle. Unless the nutrients are somehow replenished, it will become more and more difficult and more and more costly to produce that food on the same land. Chemical fertilizers can be utilized to restore some nutrients to the soil, but at what cost? Not only are chemical fertilizers expensive for farmers, they come with a host of environmental problems, such as leaching, which pollutes streams and lakes, killing fish and reducing water quality for those who live downstream.
Composting allows us to keep nutrients in the local food system, reducing or sometimes eliminating the need to import chemical fertilizers. Compost benefits the soil more than chemical fertilizers ever could, because compost is alive! There are billions of microbes active in a single tablespoon of compost, so when it is applied to the soil, these microbes become a part of the food web that helps to produce thriving crops.
We’re all about keeping it local. Composting allows us to do just that: the food that we produce on our land goes to feed people in our local community, but inevitably there is some portion of that food that is wasted or cannot be eaten (like rinds, peels, fat, and bones). Through our community composting program, we are able to collect these waste products and process them into a soil amendment that we will use in future years to grow more vegetables and improve the pastures where we raise meat animals, producing more food for local families.
We are of the opinion that everyone should be composting. If everyone could have a compost bin in their backyard, think what a better world we would have! However, we know that it’s not that simple: some people don’t have backyards in which to site a compost bin, or they lack the time or physical ability to maintain an active compost pile. (Yes, composting takes work! You can’t just leave a pile of food waste out to rot.) It is for these reasons that we started a community composting program back in 2022. We compost on a large scale due to the amount of manure, bedding, and other waste products that are farm generates. It is relatively easy for us to add additional waste to our compost pile outside of this. We have a bin at our farmstand where members of our community can drop off their food waste.l to be composted. We believe so strongly in the importance of composting, that we offer this service to our community for free. In other places, people usually have to pay for composting services, because of the labor and additional materials that are required to create a balanced finished compost.
There are other community composting programs like ours all over the country. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance has a handy map that can help you locate a community composting program near you, if you live too far away to participate in ours. With all of the reasons to compost, we hope that you’ll give it a try!