Soil Crisis #1: A Need for Economic & Political Change

This episode corresponds to Lesson 1 of our online course.

Episode eighteen: in this part one of a two part special, we speak with zero waste pioneer and industrial economist Robin Murray about the importance of soil as a basis for human economy, and the great chasm between what science tells us about soil’s role and the existing inadequate policies for soil management that has lead to a soil crisis. We will discuss the ways in which our current economic and political models of mass production have severed the link between communities and the soil, how politicians and policy makers are reacting, and how a new circular system might integrate soil management better.

Thank you to YLAD Living Soils for making this episode possible.

YLAD Living Soils is an Australian owned company formed to supply sustainable biological, organic and humus compost fertility products and programs that support the natural balance of the physical, chemical and biological aspects of the soil, lessening the reliance on conventional chemical fertilser inputs. Find more on their website.

Photo by Maurice Chédel / CC BY

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We’ve had a bad track record, at least in the west, with taking care of our soils, because even though our entire existence is completely locked into the soil, the link between soil and human economy is very rarely discussed. As an economist, could you give us some background into the history of our relationship with the soil and explain to us this link?

Robin Murray: Humankind has always had very close relations with the soil, but one of its problems is, as it develops, the tendency has been for a rupture to grow between them. So, one of the great divisions – we always talk about class divisions – well one of the huge divisions of human history is between cities and the country. If you take the great empires, one thesis is that empires have to feed themselves, and therefore they draw on their immediate environments in order to feed their central cities. But the tendency has been for them to deplete the areas around them so that gradually the quality of the soil decreases; and so they have to expand the empire in order to get to new places. So there’s a kind of diminishing returns that sets in and is one of the forces for them to go further and further afield in order to get both the food, but also the raw materials, and so on, necessary for it. And after a bit, to actually keep control of such a vast empire means larger armies and therefore they have to be fed, and it’s a cycle, which suddenly explodes. They get weakened, and a new empire starts up again. Or it just breaks open – as was the case in Europe after the end of the Roman Empire. It just broke up into smaller areas that had a different relation to the soil.

There are two exceptions to this pattern: one is China, and the second is Egypt. In the case of Egypt, why that was not affected in the same way is that their human waste was fed back and replenished the soil around them, mainly through the impacts of the floods, and the way the Nile flooded everything. And in China it was much more explicit: the human waste was gathered and has always, traditionally, been then used for fertilisation. And of course, in the early modern era here the same was true: in Britain, Cheshire and Hertfordshire became very fertile areas. And this was because of night soil, which was taken from the cities to the countryside.

And you could say that the WC was one of the big forces to rupture that connection between the human waste and soil fertility. So you’ve got the rupture growing so that now, as we all know, many people in the towns don’t know what a chicken looks like, or where milk comes from. And this is a terrible, terrible rupture. And at the moment, it’s not just the WC that stands between the humans of the town and the countryside; it is also supermarkets and these long chains of food distribution, which are also cutting it down. And so the question is, how to reconnect the two? Because they are connected – they are connected. We may not be aware of it, but we are part of the cycle. And if we deplete the soil because we take the nutrients from it without returning them to that place, we then either lose them, destroy them, put them in the wrong place, whatever… If we destroy the cycle between them – the cycle within which humans live – then, just like the Roman Empire, we will collapse from within.

In the past, we have tended to see the link as very much one where the earth is a source to be used – to be extracted from. Some people call this “natural capital”, and that we’ve been running down our natural capital because we haven’t been thinking how to maintain it. And in that sense, I think it’s been a bit-piece in the human economic drama. Whereas I think what is now being recognised is that they are very much more interconnected. The human economy – the contemporary economy – is going through enormous changes, and it’s moving from the twentieth century period of mass production to a much more complex, information-centred form of production and distribution.

Some people have called this, and I myself have called this, Post-Fordism. Fordism was the mass production, but we’ve now gone way beyond Ford. I don’t think I would call it “Google-ism” either, but it’s a quite different model. And this has great significance for our relationship with materials and with the soil; so that instead of looking at things relatively simply as linear flows, we are looking at them with much greater complexity. And as we see things more complexly, we see that, actually, the soil and earth fits into more complex systems, and cannot just be treated as an input, which is then producing an output.

I do think, as you say, that there is a change going on and people are beginning to realise the importance of managing the soil in a sustainable way.

RM: Yes, and as you may know I worked a lot in fair trade here, and one of the things I’ve learned – which has been a really profound experience – is that we have a nut company, which is called Liberation Nuts, and it’s owned by the nut farmers. And the ones who do cashews are from Kerala in India, and they’ve almost become our educators, because they come from a Gandhian tradition, and the Gandhian tradition is very much about connecting the human beings and the soil. They send us reading, and one of them is by, sometimes people call him Ghandi’s economist, which is a man called Kumarappa. And he said we have to deeply respect the soil and what it produces, and how we think about these two things. That whole Gandhian principle of changing yourself and then changing what is around you, and making sure that your technology is under your control and not controlling you – that was a voice that was drowned out by the period of mass production, in my view.

Now I think we’ve actually come to the other way, which I think is the Gandhian approaches, which our Indian colleagues follow. A striking example of that is with the Amish in North America. If you go to an Amish farm, there are no tractors and everything is done organically, and what is so striking is that this pre-modern form that the Amish have: regularly the productivity of their soil came out the highest in North America.

So these practices, but when married with modern information and communication technology – that’s the point, it’s not just to keep it like that – this is a very powerful recipe for thinking in a different way about how to produce the food for ten billion people. And I think you might say that the next revolution – the next agricultural, green revolution – is not going to be about seeds and plants and GM crops and so on, it is to be about the soil. And if we think of the soil as the object for revolution, through all these different means, then I think we’ve got a light in front of us to which we can direct our energy.

Do you feel that influencers, such as policy makers and politicians, realise the importance of soil when they approach waste management practices and agricultural policies?

RM: No. The answer to that from the British perspective and my experience here is that we’re right at the foot of Everest on this one. I’ve been involved for, what, twenty years on the issue of waste. It was very difficult to get waste pushed up the agenda, to get people to think about waste; politicians and indeed the press, and so on. Very difficult. When I started in the mid-nineties, I think our recycling rate was five percent, and it just was not on the radar. Also, to be an official in the local government in the waste department: this was slightly like being in the fire brigade; it was the kind of Siberia, in terms of the hierarchy. And so, how to get people aware of, in this case the negative aspects of waste – landfill, incineration and so on. These all had extremely negative sides, let alone the positive.

So, it took five years for us in this country to move to a point where it became a national issue, and it became a national issue very much because of the negative sides of the issues around – particularly about incineration. So always, and I think it’s been true of the environmental movement more generally, but very often (like with Rachel Carson), it is the negative effects which then get people involved. And we have to then think, “Okay, how could it be different?”

So the first way it happens is always local, because it is the local people who then realise that this is actually affecting them. And that is the basis, then, for saying there has to be some other alternative, and out of that, then, becomes an interest; but the next interest is in some form of recycling. But the way in which both the traditional offices, and to some extent the politicians, have then thought, is they thought “okay, well how do we prevent this from getting into landfill or, indeed, incinerators?” and they then have these targets for recycling – but actually (it’s a little bit like supply-push), they don’t really think “what is this going to be used for?” they just want to keep it out of their residual waste statistics; usually because there’s an increasing bit of a punishment for them in financial terms.

The idea that, actually, in relation to organic waste, that it is actually precious, and that this is a resource which you must produce with quality as if you are a supplier; that you’re actually responsible for the quality of your output…We want everything that one rescues from the waste to maintain not just it’s original quality, but all the energy and labour that’s gone into it – like rubber tires have been very well used for making basketball courts; glass has been used as a very good filtering mechanism – that’s an upcycling. And in my experience of much of the waste industry, the waste politics, and the waste management by public officials – this still (in the older generation) has yet to penetrate. The younger ones – this is who we found are the potential agents for change – they young ones, who are part of the new generation, some of them see it much more ecologically. They see themselves as, kind of like farmers of waste, as stewards of waste – and not of “waste” but they are what we might call “nutrient managers”, in relation to the organics side.

But still, you’ve got the silos of waste management, the silos of agriculture; very little do they meet, very little do they meet. And in Britain there has been more connection on the paper side, than there has been on the soil side. Soil and biowaste is still very much in the back seat here, and not even the Co2 implications of composting has been adequately taken on board – they do not become part of the discussion. So, my answer to you on that one is: there is still some way to go.

In order to affect change and influence policy makers and politicians, how do we act? Do we focus on local or national campaigns and debates?

RM: Well, I think that the way in which these big changes – because this is a big industrial change, certainly on the waste side, and possibly with agriculture there are certain similarities, certainly with the big industrial farms – when you’re changing, it always changes at the margins. This is where it happens first, because the big forces of the old system are not as strong. And so you get it coming up from the base, and I think especially in Europe and North America it has been the community movement that has, since the mid-seventies, really led the way in this. And then what happens is that the first impact tends to come at the local level. And local politics has been much more about waste politics than the national level, because it’s immediate and tends to be under municipal, provincial control. But once this happens, we then have a basis for moving it up to the national level.
It’s much easier in places, which have proportional representation, because, then groups (either green groups or specific groups around waste issues) can then get a representation politically. And this is why Germany, for example, has been one of the leaders in terms of establishing very much more satisfactory types of recycling or nutrient management – if you like, a new circular economy. I think this is because they have, not only proportional representation, but they have very strong Lambda, so that there’s considerable decentralisation. So, some of these Lambda, reflecting the work of the movements, then put these things into practice. And the results can then be seen, and they begin to join up, and then they are a force at the national level, which has to content politically with the interests of the old systems.

That’s what’s happened on the energy side, and it is amazing now that that is cross party. It started with the Greens, then the Social Democrats, and then the Christian Democrats took it on, and took the lead because they see the advantage, in this case, of the energy system for all sorts of interests who they represent, because it’s a distributed system. So local villagers and local farmers, and so on, all have an interest in that new system. The same thing is needed on the waste side: we have to re-integrate it and distribute the interest in this new system.

As you said at the beginning, these are big industrial changes we need to make in how we run things, waste management wise, or agriculturally. We’re essentially talking about a paradigm shift from our current economy to a more circular one – and do you think this new distributed economy will be able to integrate soil health and management better?

RM: Well, in principle I think it should. Amongst the features of the new economy, one is what we economists call the movement from supply-push to demand-pull; that instead of producing lots of stuff and then trying to persuade people to buy it, you’re starting actually from the people and thinking how do you supply all the different things that different people want. So, you’ve gone beyond the mass. Now, the moment that you introduce the circular, you realise that we can’t just stop at human demand because you’ve got to think of it as part of a cycle. And if we look at our demands on the production process like that: i.e. not pushing out, but thinking “right, how do we pull it round in a sustainable way?” we then get very different questions. And certainly when it comes to waste, we’re not asking not how to get rid of the waste, but how to ensure that it goes round, how do we pull it round in a way that is sustainable and enriching. That’s one difference.

The second one is that information technology has allowed us to manage very much more complex systems – that is one of its great features. And what has happened is, instead of trying to control everything from the centre, we’ve got the development of what is referred to as “distributed systems”. The German renewable energy economy is a wonderful example, how instead of having a power station, you have multiple power stations – people’s homes become a power station, the farmer’s part of a power station. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of power stations, which are then aggregated through smart grids and various other mechanisms, so that they produce as much, if not more, than a single power station. This is a completely different model.

Now, traditionally, farming and agriculture has been a distributed system. I grew up on a small hill farm, and the valley was full of small hill farmers. What has happened, particularly on the more fertile areas, is that farms have become larger and larger as the twentieth century mass production model is then applied to agriculture. But I think we are moving now into the possibility of a much more distributed system of agriculture and food growing, and soil care – that is what is possible. It’s not going to happen, it is a possibility, which would in that sense be similar to the energy systems developing in Germany, as against the UK.

And a third very interesting modern feature is that the so-called consumer is becoming part of production; we’re becoming prosumers. Well, we know about this with food, we actually have to cook our own food (or at least, we did have). But in more and more areas, whether it be health and how we look after our health: many of the modern issues, like chronic disease, like in diabetes ninety-eight and a half percent of all treatment is done by the person who has got diabetes or their family. The same is true in education; the same is true in transport. So now people are having to design systems so that we’re all actively involved. By the way, the computer of course is a wonderful example; computers are the equivalent of the textile mills of the nineteenth century, but in this case we’ve all got one. So, it’s a highly distributed system, and once you get people involved, then you have to think, “Right, what can they contribute? How should they contribute? How do they play a part in this increasingly complex system?” It’s a very exciting area. So, when we come to food and to soil: how do we ensure that the grievous divide between the city and the country does not become the chasm that is threatened, but is actually re-integrated so that we all play a part in this particular process?

We’ll get into detail about the ways we can organise our ecosystems and the strategies for change in part two, but to round off this part of the discussion, can you give me some examples of how people can play a part in this system, and the opportunities you see the paradigm being changed?

RM: Well, I think part of the food movement has been about this. So, the movement for urban agriculture is gathering and is stronger in some placed than others, but, the development of gardens on roofs – is it in North Korea, which is particularly strong on this? But Nicaragua is another example of where this has happened. But it’s happening now more and more, and San Francisco is strong on this. We have strong movements, and a strong tradition, of allotments here. So I think gardening, even though it may no be producing food, actually brings people in touch with the fact that you cannot treat soil as if it’s a machine; that you have to do this delicately. So, everyone is learning about this.

I think on the food side there are city farms and a big city farm movement, and the community garden movement here is growing. So I think there are very interesting ways in which that is happening. And then there are all sorts of ways in which farms are being opened up to those in the city – both to go to stay there and work there, or at least to visit. So I think that’s one of the big areas for reconnection.

Vineyard Special #2: Using Composted Mulch For True Cost Benefits

In this second part of the two-part special on vineyards, we speak with CEO and vineyard manager of Food and Beverages Australia Limited (FABAL), Ashley Keegan about the costs, risks and benefits of using composted green organic mulch on vineyards. We go into detail about sourcing a good quality product, cost-effective strategies for applying the mulch, the incredible increase in yield they experienced, as well as the water saving capacity of the mulch, and much more.

Thank you to YLAD Living Soils for making this episode possible.

YLAD Living Soils is an Australian owned company formed to supply sustainable biological, organic and humus compost fertility products and programs that support the natural balance of the physical, chemical and biological aspects of the soil, lessening the reliance on conventional chemical fertilser inputs. Find more on their website.

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Ashley, you’re the CEO of FABAL (Food and Beverage Australia Limited), and FABAL is a commercial farming company that manages agricultural businesses across Australia. Can you tell me more about FABAL?

Ashley Keegan: We’re a large agribusiness management company based in Adelaide, South Australia. We operate a number of viticultural enterprises, but also other horticultural operations as well. It’s pretty much spread across the country, with a focus on viticulture in South Australia.

You manage agribusinesses. Do you manage them solely for clients or do you own some yourself?

AK: We own our own, and also manage for others. So, if you’re a company that owns an asset, or you might be an individual, but we also do that work as well. But, we ultimately own a large percentage of what we do ourselves. We also do some consulting work for the industry on an external basis as well.

How many hectares of vineyards do you manage at the moment?

AK: We have about sixteen hundred hectares under management at the moment.

Sixteen hundred hectares is nearly 4 thousand acres, so that’s quite a lot. What are your key performance indicators; what do you take into account when you’re managing and improving the vineyards?

AK: Interesting question. I’m an agronomist by training, and a viticulturalist, but my managers call me the accountant now, because we have to measure the bottom lines of anything that we do. And again, I guess I look at it a bit more broadly in terms of return on investment, whether it be purely from a financial point of view, or a return on investment of our time, or our technology – any of the inputs that we put into our operations. We do extensive internal and external benchmarking from a KPI perspective, but my philosophy is to try and be in the top five percent in anything that we do. Again, when you start to benchmark yourself across the sector, ultimately you go to financial metrics pretty quickly to be able to do that in an objective manner.

Financial success is of course important to you, but in terms of return on investment you take a broader view and include things like labour, time and technology. Our topic today is the costs, risks and benefits of using composted mulch on vineyards. Can you tell me what exactly you use on your vineyards?

AK: Effectively, we’ve done several different trial works with a lot of different products. The products that we’ve mainly settled on now are the composted green organic mulches. So it’s a green organic waste composted through the Australian Standard 4454. We can have them specifically to different aggregate sizes, and different fines profiles, depending on what we’re trying to do with the product.

Where do you source the product?

AK: Our compost comes from commercial compost suppliers, and in our city there’s two or three main suppliers that do that. The majority of the material that we use comes from a feedstock that is kerbside collected. So, I’m not sure of what happens in other countries, but in Australia you have a two hundred and forty litre green wheelie bin that the home gardener can put their lawn clippings in, their pruning in, and in some circumstances can also put food stuff into the stream. Those bins are collected, taking it off to a processing facility, where they’re composted. That process then will generally do a few things: create a blend and a particle size profile that is what I’ve ordered up. So, that’s where we get our product from.

Regarding the specifications you ask for – do you make specifications for each particular site, or is there just a general blend that you use for all vineyards?

AK: That’s a really good question, and it’s not specifically with our site. I do fiddle with the specifications when I’m trying to ask the product to do something a bit different. If I’m looking for more of a mulch versus a soil conditioner or a fertiliser, I will manipulate the percentage of fines in the product. If I’m looking for a more mulch, water-saving product, then there’s a coarser fragment in there. If I’m looking for, sort of a multi-vitamin for my vines, then I tend to get a blend with a high fraction of fines in it that break down very rapidly and give the vines almost a hit that’s equivalent to green organic fertiliser hit.

Can you give a bit of context to the operation: when did you start using composted mulch, and why?

AK: We started, I’d say, doing that in a substantial way back in 2003, and 2003 in Australia was the start of quite a dry period that spanned over seven years, particularly in the south-eastern areas of South Australia. We went into, you know, on our history it’s recorded as a one-in-one-thousand year drought. So, rather than necessarily just hurl more water at a vineyard, we started looking at the options for investing in some composted green organic mulch, and doing some trial work with that.

We were pretty fortunate that there’d been a fair bit of work done in Australia – Katie Webster, John Buckerfield had done a fair bit of work with the products that we had available to us, so that there was some good, objective, empirical data for us to make some of the decisions that we had to make at a practical, commercial level. So, we weren’t having to start at a zero-base there. I was able to make some of those decisions – reasonably big decisions – and in 2003 we undertook a significant exercise in mulch: over six hundred hectares of vineyard in one year, and thirty-three thousand cubic metres of composted green organic mulch. Probably one of the largest single exercises ever undertaken in the country. We dove in the deep end!

For our audience, that study is the CSIRO Report “Compost as Mulch for Vineyards” by John Buckerfield and Katie Webster, which found that in certain circumstances, using composted mulch can increase yield by up to 35% and mid-summer soil moisture by 30%. But even still with the research, there were of course costs and risks involved in starting a new practice in the vineyards. Can you maybe explain those a little bit? I’m sure you were very cautious even still?

AK: Yeah, we were, certainly, and from a point of view…we mitigated the risks, for want of a better term, based on research. There are a few risks associated with it from the point of view of the type of application, the density, the application ratio – you need to be a bit careful with that. The research was pretty strong on water saving, and that helped facilitate a commercial payback. At the same time, it was pretty simple to do a nutrient analysis of the product, calculate that into our normal fertiliser programmes, and take that out of the three-year breakdown period, and do some economic benefit of that. So, yeah there was a risk, but what I’d call the agri-risks of that were pretty low, pretty controllable from our perspective.

Apart from risks, there are definitely substantial costs with starting to use composted mulch – can you tell me what the costs were?

AK: Because of the volume that we embarked on that project, we had a purpose built spreader made to be able to spread that particular product, and that was a reasonable investment, but in the context of the overall spend it made sense for us to do that rather than use a contractor. But, the costs involved were commercial at the time, and it was relevant to the market at the time; the market was pretty buoyant, we were getting paid reasonable prices for our product, and the economics stacked up. But just to put it in context for you: the compost itself was around about, just in rough terminology – but around about two-thousand dollars a hectare in material, but it cost you around four-hundred and fifty to five-hundred dollars to actually apply it to the paddock. So you’re looking at around about a two-and-a-half thousand dollar expenditure.

And that’s in Australian dollars, which would be roughly 2300 US dollars, and 1700 euro.

AK: Yeah. And just to put some context around that’s in the background spend of about six-and-a-half thousand dollars per hectare of normal operating expense. So in a single year we loaded thirty percent on top of our annual operating expense to do the exercise; but again, the research was showing that you would get three years worth of benefit out of it – and again, like all good accountants, you just spread that over that period as well.

So in one year you added 30% extra to your annual operating expenses to do it, but like you said the research showed that it lasts 3 years, so spread over three years, it adds just 10% to the operating expenses annually. Those costs were predicted costs, but were there any costs, or risks, that popped up during the operations that you hadn’t accounted for?

AK: Yeah, I’ve spoken about our experience on a number of occasions in our industry level, but I had one of those crucible moments when I was interstate on one of our other properties and I received a phone call from one of the managers from one of the sites that were spraying this material to inform me they’d identified some contaminants in the product. And this kerbside collected material does have some contaminant background in it, whether it be glass or stone, or anything that goes into your green wheelie bin.

But imagine our surprise when we started identifying syringes in the product; and that ground our operation to a hold, as we had to embark on a whole series of risk assessments. And our understanding as to what happened with that is, a long story short, and a lot of effort short, was that obviously the food stream had been contaminated at some point in time with syringe containers, and had been through the composting process. And we ended up – on our six hundred hectares – having to rake the entire area, and after going through that process we identified over four hundred new syringes in the material that had to be extracted out of that material.

So, it’s probably a bit unusual that you see me sitting here still being a card-carrying supporter of compost after grinding our business to a halt and creating an amazing logistics and practical [impact] on our business that we still deal with today. But what we had to do was understand very clearly that those contaminants represented a negligible risk that we had to put in procedures to manage around that – including identifying those risks to visitors to our properties, and our customers. So, we got together as a business and we looked at those risks and fundamentally we decided as a group that the benefits we were targeting and the support that we had for the product still mandated that we were comfortable to move forward with that.

We worked with the industry pretty hard to make sure that didn’t happen to any other group, and the industry responded pretty well. But I think coming out of the back of that, and the message that I recount to people, looking at that kerbside collected feedstock, is that you need to be careful about the fact that…really, the syringes were acute and emotive, but what they represented to me was just risk, and that if syringes can find themselves in your feedstock stream, then there are probably no rules about that, and as a community – as a supply chain – we really need to work hard on making sure that the public who are putting material into their green wheelie bins, understand the implications and the ramifications of the decisions that they make on their front lawn.

Yes, and we’ve spoken a lot about education in the past, and the importance of connecting people with the process so that they understand where their organic materials go and what happens with them. For example, when speaking with Gerry Gillespie of City to Soil, he told us about their extremely low contamination rates, and he attributes that simply to making people understand what happens with their organic materials.

We go into detail about this in Lesson 4 of our online course on Compostory.org, and we go through the whole process of how to set up an education and communications strategy when you’re implementing a new kerbside system – so anyone who is interested can check that out.

But as a business like yourself, what can you do to help control the contamination rate?

AK: I think that if I was talking to – well I guess we are potentially talking to people considering using it – you really need to do your homework with your suppliers, you need to do the homework on the product. And I’m not sure of the standards in other countries, but there’s an Australian standard for composted green organic, and it’s a basic standard but it’s a good Australian, or international, standard as to what actual process it has to go through. That’s a really good first start. It’s not everything, and frankly it’s the base hurdle that the product should jump over, and that helps manage some of the agri-risks, but it also demonstrates that this is actually operating in a sustainable, professional manner.

And then you really need to go around and get your hands dirty and have a look at the product, look at the process; and understand that if you’re just buying a couple of bags, it’s a return on your time, really, but if you’re looking at embedding it into your production systems, then it’s imperative that you go and have a look at not only the process, but I’d argue [you need to] understand very clearly where the supply is coming from. And ten or eleven years down the track, we’re quite discerning about feedstocks going into our composted green organic mulches. We still use kerbside materials, but we also use very specific streams, and we also have a supply base that will create blends from specific streams for me as well.

My experience with the industry is that it’s pretty proactive in that context. Every day the technology improves for sifting and sorting and managing contamination in the kerbside products, but nothing beats stopping it getting in there. And I think that as a community, as an industry, there’s still a lot of work to be done to make the home gardener understand the sheer responsibility that they have. Because it dramatically adds to the cost; it dramatically impacts on the decision-making of blokes like me, and if we could remove those variables – if we had a magic wand that could remove those variables, then look out, because the product is a very powerful product.

Going back a bit, contamination was the biggest risk you encountered, but for costs – what were the biggest costs that you experienced, perhaps transportation of the product was the biggest cost?

AK: Definitely the distance to the producer is really important. It doesn’t weigh a lot, so the bulk density of the product generally, you know, you can only jam so much in a truck. So, there’s a large volume for weight that you’re transporting. So, I guess this is where some of the other products have gone to [muffled] structure and try to get a bulk density increase, but unfortunately you lose some of the benefit of that loose, open-aired structure that you’re looking for with the mulch.

So, certainly transport is a big factor. It’s probably dangerous for me to talk about percentages of that, because it’s so variable depending upon how far you are from… But it can range from ten percent of the product cost, to forty percent of the product cost.

Let’s talk about the strategy for using the composted green organic mulch on your vineyards: I know you’re keen to get the best value out of the product, so how do you apply the composted mulch to achieve this?

AK: We started with a very blanket approach, non sophisticated; start at one corner of the paddock and go to the other corner, and that was as sophisticated as our strategy got, because we were looking for that water-saving, fertiliser input benefit across the whole board. Then we found, almost by accident – we use remote sensor satellite imagery on our vineyards to look at biomass – and what we found by accident when looking at some of those images – after we’d done the mulching work where we’d put in some trial works – was we were having some profound impacts where we were taking low biomass, low vigour areas and really dramatically shifting those profiles.

And it got us thinking about how we can maximise the benefit of that, and it dovetailed into the fact that, as the product is reasonably expensive, you want to put it where it’s going to give you maximum value. And we started to do some trial work on that, where we looked at taking it into the weaker sections of our paddocks, applying it to those, and then looking for a response out of that. So, just to give you a bit of a background as to that in viticulture especially: vineyards are very linear. They’re built on trellises and they’re very linear, and no matter how accurate you were with your source surveys and your selection of the paddock, you end up having high vigour areas, or stronger areas, and some weaker patches on shallower soils.

And managing that vigour variance…that’s viticulture 101. And we do that generically be managing our fertiliser and trying to trim, or managing our irrigation as best as we can, but you end up trying to average that out against the whole block. And what we started to do was some experimental work where we just went into the weak sections and apply it, and then task the satellite again to have it look at another image to see if we could even out the vigour. It was really quite astounding, the responses that we were having on that – and I guess that satellite imagery allowed us to objectively validate that as well.

At this point you started to look at the cost benefit of the mulch – so what were your findings?

AK: What we found was, if I explain to you: you might have a ten hectare paddock that might be contracted to a certain customer and they might say you can deliver a hundred tonnes off that block. If that block is delivering you a hundred tonne, that’s great and everybody’s happy. But in reality, what happens in most paddocks is that half that paddock might be delivering you twelve tonne to the hectare, and the other half of the paddock might be giving you eight tonne to the hectare. That’s really crude, but you’ve got sections that are weak and harder than other sections. And if at the end of the day the equation equals what your customer wants, then everybody’s happy.

But if you’ve got a situation where you’re under performing because the vineyard is not delivering to its capacity, intrinsically what you try to do to meet that contractual opportunity is you try to drive the vineyard a bit harder. And that exacerbates this variability, if you’ve got a problem, it sort of becomes a spiralling cycle at that point. One of the great things we found with the mulch was – when we started to put GPS sensors on our harvesters, and we tracked and found this new variation that was happening in our paddocks, and we lined them up with our biomass images from the satellite’s on the canopy densities – that the correlations were pretty good.

So, we figured that if we can make the weaker sections of our paddocks work a bit harder, then we don’t have to drive the whole paddock up just to meet those obligations and meet those opportunities. And that’s where we really started to look at good, positive returns on investment. We did some work that we published a bit of, that showed the capacity to take areas, increase those in yield by twenty percent, or thereabouts. And depending on your price profiles – at that particular time it was a single year payback for us with a three-year delivery of that result. So, besides the commercial repo, it actually improved our product. It created a more even vineyard block, so our customers are happy; we’re happy because we’re meeting the targets, and we’ve actually minimised our requirement to spend money on the mulch as well. So we’re just putting it where we’re getting maximum return on it.

You experienced a single-year payback with a three-year result, that’s really excellent, though I suppose that’s particular to your experience?

AK: Yeah, the key point that I’d like to make, or I think is really important, is if I was to run that metric again today in a different price metric, different yield parameters…you have to be very careful, it’s going to be very specific to your site and the market you’re playing with. If you’re growing a very high quality product and where a tonne to the hectare makes a big difference because of the price point, then it amplifies the impacts. If you’re in a different quality spectrum then…you need to do the numbers yourself on that. But really, the key return on investment is if you’ve got latent potential, or under performing potential, and you can capitalise on that by returning that area to a better performing area. And therefore there’s a market for that fruit, there’s an opportunity to sell it at a certain price point.

The thing that jumps out to me is the 20% increase in yield. How was the quality of the grapes themselves? Because more does not mean better quality, necessarily.

AK: This is the other point: you’ve got to be really careful with that, because if you’ve got a vine that’s operating at a certain potential and you just make more vigorous to grow more tonnes, well there’s a threshold in viticulture where that could potentially detract from the quality of the grape. And that, again, to me is the advantage of targeting the weak areas that are under performing, and potentially haven’t got enough leaf over the top and have maybe too-exposed fruit: you can create a situation where you can grow a more healthy canopy on that vine and get better protection for the fruit, and at the very least, improve the quality of those under performing areas.

You mentioned water saving benefits and we talked about the study – but how much water did you save then in the end?

AK: We went into the whole exercise with a view that we were potentially going to save thirty percent of our water, but it was a particularly dry year – again, we were heading into the drought – so we almost abandoned the need for that. We almost ignored the water saving component of it; we wanted to maintain the biomass. So what we found was our ability, with the mulch on-board, to create a more healthy canopy than we otherwise would have at the same water level. The research that Katie Webster and John Buckingfield did – that’s really quite categorical in that they were looking at around a thirty percent water saving. And I’ve no concerns about that, that in the right applications you can deliver that. We personally now use the products in more of a remedial sense, and spatially remedially. So our whole aim is to take a block and be able to just apply a normal water level, rather than have to apply more water to compensate for the weak area of the block. So, we can fix the weak area and then just water the entire area normally.

Is there anything else that viticulturalists need to keep in mind in order to achieve success using composted mulch?

AK: I’m a huge fan, absolutely huge fan, of trialling everything. It costs virtually nothing to go and put mulch on a few rows and see what happens. And just record it; put a control in place, put a treatment in place, do that in three different varieties in three different soil types, and you’ll learn for yourself. And that’s ultimately how we started and ultimately what gave us the confidence to go really broad-acre on some of this strategy. But it started with two rows of vines and…You know, wiggle a finger and stick it in the air and see what happens! You know, there’s a bit more science behind it, because you can measure it and do the analytics that you need to do, but….

At the same time, I’d say it’s not for every site. If you’re on a high-vigour site or a wet site, you need to be very, very cautious about it, and you’d need to really have a look and a hard think about the applications for that. And my overriding comment with these products is just to know the source and know the quality of the product. And don’t be afraid to ask; don’t be afraid to have the analysis done, and look at the analysis and make sure you’ve done a little bit of background work on them.

I have one more question before we go. I wonder if you’ve ever considered using cover crops on your vineyards?

AK: It’s interesting, we did, and we compared cover crops. We looked at the biomass that we can generate with a cover crop, and the reality is we just can’t grow, internally, enough cover crop to make a material difference. A really interesting thing we did with cover crops on one of our properties was – almost using the same theory that we did with the satellite images – we’d grow cover crops in all of the vineyard block, and we use a forage harvester (which is a machine that cuts and collects the cover crop) to take it out of the paddock and compost it, and then bring it back in and spread it on the weaker parts of the block again. So, we’re actually using a cover crop to potentially de-vigour the high vigour areas, and at the same time taking the nutrients from there and transplanting them – with the compost process in between. We found that to be a really good way to draw down on a high vigour area by planting a hungry cover crop, and yet put that benefit back into the same paddock where it helps you even it out.

Fascinating, a really interesting way to use cover crops to control the vigour of the vineyard. And unfortunately Ashley, that’s all we have time for. Thanks for coming on the show today.

AK: Thanks!

Vineyards Special #1: The Wonders of Cover Crops

Episode sixteen is part one of a two-part series on the use and benefits of sustainable agricultural practices in vineyards. In this episode, we’re focusing on the use and benefits of cover crops for vineyards. With us to talk about this are agronomist and soil culture expert Bob Shaffer from Hawaii, and Bob Cannard of Green String Farms, who manages 1000 acres of vineyards for Cline Cellars in California. We’ll cover successful management strategies, choice of cover crops, pitfalls you may encounter, the unique benefits of cover cropping on vineyards and much more.

Thank you to Recology for making this episode possible.

Recology is an employee-owned company operating in California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington coordinating dozens of recycling programs to recover a variety of materials. In San Francisco, they are part of the program Zero Waste by 2020 and are very involved with compost production and distribution. Visit their website here.

Photo by Robert Reed, courtesy of Recology.

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Cover crops are becoming more and more popular, but they still aren’t completely understood by everyone. Bob Canard, can you tell me what exactly cover crops are, and how do they work?

Bob Cannard: Cover crops are nature’s way of preserving, enhancing and balancing the soil. All they are, are crops that grow naturally, or are planted, that are allowed to grow and establish and protect the soil, cycle nutrients and actually build soil, absorb atmospheric carbon, deposit it in the soil as food for the soil biology, which is the important digestive force of all life.

Bob Shaffer: Yes, cover crops are simply plants. Now, we’re going to chose the genus and species of plant that we call a cover crop, or, as Bob said very brilliantly, we can also just accept the resident vegetation – that which is growing in a field or pasture. But let’s recall that plants are the organism on earth that harvest carbon out of the air and puts that carbon into a form that we call organic matter. So plants are literally producing organic matter on earth that we then can introduce into the soil as a carbon source, which is food for microorganisms and other animals, and then also the plant above ground is protecting the soil surface.

Where are cover crops most popular?

BS: Cover crops are being used every place around the world right now, more and more every time. I’ve watched Napa and Soma Valleys (California), as I’m sure Bob has also, become quite well cover cropped compared to ten or fifteen years ago; they’re more and more used all the time every place.

Bob Cannard, as a long-time cover crop user, can you tell us the key benefits of using cover crops, as opposed to mulches and other methods?

BC: They stimulate the soil biology: all plants produce lots of sugars and other complex organic molecules that they pump into the soil and establish a relationship with the soil, so they actually nurture the soil. At the same time, their root system breaks up (subsurface soil compaction), and cycles nutrients from deeper profiles to the surface, making the soil more aerobic and balanced towards aerobic life – which it’s all about.

By comparison to mulching, they grow many cubic yards (depending on the intensity and the size of the cropping system) of compost for the soil. And mulching – you’re getting that organic material from another piece of ground, and it sacrificed its organic material to turn it into mulch or compost, which is spread on the ground, and it takes a lot of BTUs of petroleum energy in order to do all of that and spread it. Whereas the cover crop is very low energy input: the seeds are planted and they grow, and they harvest that atmospheric carbon, and deposit directly into the soil without those heavy inputs.

That’s a very interesting benefit.

BS: It’s very expensive to grow mulch on one piece of land, take the carbon from that land and move it over to another. We’d like to grow and use the cover crop as our source of mulch.

Bob Cannard, you manage hundreds of acres of vineyards that use cover crops successfully. Can you tell me a little about your strategy and what cover crops you use?

BC: We have a thousand acres in cover crops. Every winter time is the rainy season, and we plant in the fall after harvest, or just before harvest. We used mixed seeds and I’m a great proponent of a mixture of cover crop plants.

First off you need very low energy, quick germinating nurse plants that hold and protect the soil for the higher-level life support plants that come along slower and later. The cover crop protects the soil from all kinds of erosion, and the little quick growers do that quickly. They don’t provide too much organic matter, but they really help the next stage, and the next stage is perhaps the low proteinaceous broad-leaves, and then you’ll phase in to the higher proteinaceous grasses – more and more biomass. And finally, the high level of life, long term blooming plants, like the clovers and the vetches and the peas and the beans – the leguminous plants that take much longer to mature. Each one helps the next one, and the diversity is a very important element.

We like to grow our cover crops and let them stand to as full maturity as possible. In the organic kingdom, there’s lots of conversation about green manure cover crops; well, they break down very quickly and release lots of nitrogen. What I’m looking for is lots of carbon, and stimulating the free-living nitrogen-fixing biology of the soil, and this vastly reduces the need for nitrogenous influences, applications, fertilisers on the vineyards – and in the vegetable gardens as well.

Can you get a little more detailed about the process and tell us when you plant the seeds, how you cultivate it – if you do at all – when you mow it, and how you manage it all?

BC: Well, it depends entirely on the site. Some sites, hillside sites, are never cultivated and the cover crop leans progressively more towards perennial plants. Other sites are cultivated, but we do our best to cultivate as late as possible, allowing the cover crop plant to come to its maturity. When you try to incorporate a green plant, like a green manure, it has only lived a portion of its life and it has a high nitrogenous body; whereas if you allow to as great a degree of maturity as possible, it dries out, it makes its own seeds (some varieties reseed themselves and don’t need to be included in successive plantings), and it’s straw is carbonaceous and has a longer than one year half-life in a temperate climate. So you actually build soil carbon, the foundation of the soil digestion, which is an absolutely critical motion. Everything has to have good digestion, and that digestive force solubilises the minerals. Additionally, on the soil surface, that straw spawns and sponsors the various yeasts, so we are less dependant upon yeasting the pressed grape juice to make wine, and we can use the indigenous yeast of the particular site in many cases which means we get the true terroir, or taste of that soil and that location.

To be clear about the general process of cover cropping: you plant the seeds, either in spring for summer cover crops, or in the autumn for winter cover crops. You can use it as a green manure by mowing it and incorporating it into the soil when usually when it’s flowering and still green, or you can wait until it’s a little woody and chop or mow it down to use as mulch. Is that correct?

BC: Yes, it’s mowed down or grazed down, and maybe cultivated, or maybe just mowed and grazed – it depends upon the plot and the variety, and air drainage, and many, many variables. We’re always trialling little plots of little pounds of sprinkling here and there, and it takes a while to grow the soil; if you have a herbicided, clean cultivated, long-standing degraded soil, high level of life plants like clovers may not take hold, because it doesn’t have properly developed soil biology yet. But through the use of incorporating the maturity of the cover crops over seasons, the soil population will change and you’ll get the nice, soft, beautiful, proteinaceous, easy to work with kinds of plants, and they will take over from the thistly, thorny, creepy-crawly, difficult types of plants to manage.

So viticulturalists should be prepared to invest a bit of time at the beginning if the soil isn’t healthy already. And is there anything specific to vineyards that viticulturalists need to understand about cover cropping – is it much different to cover cropping for farms?

BC: Not particularly, but the height of the type of plant and whether it’s an annual cropping cycle or a perennial, and its degree of maturity so that it can become reseeded, so you don’t have to reseed it annually – at least not with all of the species…

We use early season grazing of sheep and goats at high density, quick rotation so that they aren’t over-grazed but just appropriately grazed. The sheep actually stimulate the regrowth of the cropping system, so it responds as the season advances into the summer time with a good early maturity. Then, in many cases where it’s just mowed, what you end up with is all of this reflective strawy grass on the soil surface – not just grass but all the plants that turns golden as it dries out – and it reflects heat back up to the fruits underneath the canopy and actually increases the warmth and the dryness of the canopy. This reduces the incidents of mildew, and stimulating this broad array of canopy biology that additionally enhances the resistance of the plant through species competition of one dominant mildew type problem.

That’s a unique benefit of cover cropping, or mulching. And Bob Shaffer, do you want to add anything? 

BS: We have to recall that viticulture is a monoculture, often times at least, and I see the cover crop as a way to bring diversity, and to break the problems that are associated with monocultures. Also, I can rotate the genus and species that I use; I can rotate them over space, I can rotate them over time, so it actually adds, not only diversity to the monoculture, but adds the component of rotation. For example, I can put perennials on one side of the vines or tractor rows; I can manage that as a perennial cover for a few years, and then I can have annuals on the other side. I can also use those annuals and/or the perennials – or specific strips planted through the vineyard – as a beneficial habitat and food sources for beneficial insects, beneficial life forms in the vineyard. So, in all ways, the cover crop – if selected and managed well – can be the source of diversity, can be the source of rotation, and the source of beneficial life forms brought to the vineyard.

There are many variables when it comes to cover cropping, and there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach, but is there something you would recommend to everyone starting off with cover cropping?  

BS: It’s something that teaches you. I’d encourage people to immediately start cover cropping, and all farmers must always have trials going on. These do not have to be large, expensive, exhausting procedures, but having some type of trial always going on in the farm shows you where to head next. It also is your little classroom where you can go out and look and learn. So having at least some strips of cover crops – of different species always – to learn what to plant next is a good idea.

There are a lot of species to choose from as well. Bob Shaffer, what are your thoughts on choosing the best species for vineyards?

BS: On choosing species, one of the things you want to do, as Bob Cannard pointed out, you want to use a polyculture. I’m always going to use a mix of grasses, legumes and forbes when I’m planting. Also, as we broadcast it or drill this type of mix, the site itself will sort out which plants are most appropriate there.

In frost-prone vineyards, cover crops may the increase in risk of frost damage. What is your advice regarding this?

BS: Certainly if I’m going to put a cover crop into a frost prone vineyard, then I’m going to add the important component to the cover crop that we haven’t directly mentioned yet, which is as important as species selection, or any other feature of the cover crop: the management of the cover crop. So, if I have frost concerns, I’m going to select cover crops that are low growing, and then I can manage the cover crop in the frost season by further mowing it – at least on one side of the rows to allow some air drainage. Also, if you’re using broad-leafed species, they tend to have less of the ice nucleating bacteria on their leaf surface, and are less prone to causing frost problems in the vineyard or orchard.

I want to address another common worry that people have regarding cover crops, which is water usage. Wouldn’t cover cropping add extra irrigation costs for drier climates?

BC: We grow over-winter cover crops and we utilise rainfall as a natural irrigation, and it actually increases rainfall infiltration by reducing soil compaction. So actually, we reduce irrigation requirements; and then, it’s depositing on the soil surface at maturity, high levels of carbon, and one unit of carbon will support and hold approximately eight units of water. So, we increase our water holding and infiltration characteristics by increasing the organic matter content and the root zone development through cover cropping.

Yes, I read in a couple of articles, including a 1994 research article in the California Agriculture journal, that winter crops generally have very little impact on soil moisture compared to summer cover crops – so that would be a good option for vineyards. And Bob Shaffer, do you have anything to say about water usage or to add to Bob Cannard’s point?

BS: The cover crop, particularly because of its roots being in the ground, increases the humus levels. As those roots decompose, it increases the humus level, and this is the material that Bob Cannard was referring to as holding more water in the soil.

Though I will say that, sometimes if I have an existing vineyard, maybe it’s old and maybe the soil is weak and worn out, the transition period of introducing cover crops into that vineyard – there has to be some care taken to make sure that we don’t take water away from vines. Obviously, a cover crop plant uses some water when it grows, but it’s more an issue of timing: both timing in terms of transitioning into a cover crop (where the vine gets used to having other roots around it) and also as we build humus in the soil, there’s a little transition time that’s needed for that. And then, if we use a little water in the spring time for the cover crop, that doesn’t take away critically from the other crop – whether it be vines or some other plant; but later in the year, as the cover crop has been managed into a mulch, we’re actually using less water because we’re protecting the soil surface, we’ve built humus in the soil… And so, the timing issue on water needs to always be addressed rather than saying “okay, does the cover crop use water or not”.

So the takeaway from this is that timing is everything and it may increase water usage at the beginning, but in the long run it will actually save water. And now onto the management question: I presume it takes a little more time and effort to manage cover crops – wouldn’t this increase management costs?

BS: Considering whether cover crops raise our management costs, we have to look at the whole farm, and look at the multiple benefits that the cover crop has brought to the farm to address whether we lost or benefitted in terms of management dollars.

Can you both give me some examples?

BC: Well, my field, these vineyards that I assist in managing were conventionally grown and heavily cultivated, and herbicided underneath the vine rows. And we had, when I first took over twelve years ago, a preponderance of tenacious, noxious weeds that interfered with the canopy of the grape vine, and through management of the cover crops – planting selected varieties and improving the soil, and utilising inter-crop grazing of the sheep and the goats – after twelve years now we have very few noxious weeds and it’s actually reduced our over all costs; weeds that would shoot up from the herbicided strip into the canopy that had to be mowed or supressed in one fashion or another.

BS: Another aspect of management that cover crops can safe you money instead of cost you money would be for dust control, for example. A lot of times a vineyard or farm will get very dusty during the dry season, whereas if we have cover crops and we’ve managed over to stubble and/or mulch on the surface, it reduces dust. That dust can increase mite pressure in the vineyard, so if we have mulch and we’re absent of the dust, then it decreases our cost of spraying for mites, or managing for mites. There a number of other features that we could name that the cover crops actually decreases management costs.

One of the benefits I came across was the introduction of beneficial predator insects that keeps pests down. Has that been your experience?

BC: We’ve had very few problems with pests.

BS: Certainly, if you provide habitat and food for everyone, then the system tends to become more balanced. Where there are appropriate numbers of predators, there are appropriate numbers of prey. As the goal in “managing the farm” or “managing pests” is not to eliminate all the pests; it’s simply to increase the antagonism from the pest’s predators. And we do this by carbon, we do this by having flowering plants; nectar, pollen, habitat, and carbon above ground.

If anything, I’ll say the cover crop, with all the glory that we’ve talked about and the beauty of the cover crop, still: the cover crop shouldn’t be viewed as all we need; we always have to look after the whole system and say “okay, look: I’m going to manage organic matter, which includes cover crops, compost and mulches. I’m going to manage minerals. And I’m going to manage my tillage”. Those three areas: OM management, mineral management, and tillage management all need to be considered, all need to be cared for to have the cover crop show its best; to have the compost to show it’s best, and to have the minerals show its best. They’re linked in biology, they’re linked in being foods, and they’re all necessary to manage at the same time to get the best benefits.

So a holistic approach is really what you’re going for. And are there any other benefits to using cover crops that would outweigh other management costs?

BC: The cover crop and the soil surface organic material holds and supports the soil, where many clean, cultivated and just bare soil surfaces can be very tacky. Let’s say during harvest we have modest rainfall, then it impedes the ability for the harvest crews and the equipment to move through the vineyard because of the muddiness, whereas with the increase of soil surface organic material (and especially the dry carbonaceous material), the soil surface is held and supported by the residual root systems. And the soil surface itself is protected by the strawy organic material, and this really reduces the stickiness in many different ways: just physically at a large-scale straw level, and at a digested carbon level/humus level it allows the soil particulate matter to be happy with itself and want to stick to other elements, such as harvesters feet

That’s an interesting benefit that I wouldn’t have thought of, actually.

BS: That’s actually a huge benefit, even during the year sometimes with the irrigation systems, if you have cover crops it enables workers to have less mud on them, and to have some place to sit down; to have some place that’s green and flowering instead of just a bare herbicided soil. There’s a huge difference in the vineyard for both the people and the crop when we use cover crops.

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this episode already, although we could probably go on forever. But for the final question: are there any issues you want to address with cover crops, or anything else that viticulturalists need to keep in mind when cover cropping?

BC: Well, it’s a possibility that you might have overgrowth. A lot of viticulturalists, back to frost issues, are worried about canopy heights of cover crops. Well, there’s legitimacy to this, because it reduces air drainage, but at the same time, a high-density cover crop of good, bread-leafed plants has a better canopy biology to it that resists frosting. And those plants are also respiring energy and actually warm the vineyard’s atmosphere on cold nights.

No, there are definitely problems, and it’s a progressive activity. A novice viticulturalist beginning to grow cover crops might be afraid to let them come to maturity, and boy, that’s all right – it’s a beginning. And as we develop and grow, we develop more confidence as we grow, and we also develop our soils and select a broader diversity of cropping specimens, a variety, and allow them to come to greater maturity.

BS: That’s certainly experience speaking, and I’ll say to summarise that excellent comment by Bob Cannard: I would encourage people to view cover cropping as a transition, as part of a transition into more healthy soils, and to better above-ground relationships, rather than an instant change.

Well put. So, cover cropping is definitely beneficial, it just takes a little bit of time and a little bit of effort to get it all going. But once you have the experience, it’s probably the best way to go. Unfortunately that’s all we have time for I’m afraid, thank you Bob Cannard and Bob Shaffer for coming on the show.

BC: Well, thank you for your interest.

12 Days in Benin: A Community Ready for Organics Recycling

This episode corresponds to Lesson 3 and Lesson 4 of our online course.

In this fifteenth episode, we speak to scientist Dr. Vara Vissa about her short trip to Benin, Africa, and the spontaneous grassroots organics recycling campaign she helped create with the help of local students and community leaders. Vara saw a wealth of opportunities for the local communities in the organic material that lies in makeshift landfills, and discovered that the open-minded and proactive people of Benin are ready and willing to make this change happen.

Thank you to Big Hanna Composter for making this episode possible.

The original since 1991, and now installed in more than 25 countries, Big Hanna’s five standard models of on-site in-vessel composters range from 75 to 2400 kg of food waste per week, for housing areas, prison, schools, canteens and restaurants. For more information, visit www.bighanna.com

Photo by Babylas / CC BY

 

Drought Special #2: A Mulching Guide for Farms and Gardens

This episode corresponds to Lesson 1 of our online course.

In this fourteenth episode, we’re speaking to agronomist and soil culture expert Bob Shaffer, and soil scientist and professor at UC Berkeley, Stephen Andrews about drought-proofing your farm or garden using mulch. The experts discuss best practices for choosing and applying mulch for water retention, the most suitable irrigation systems, the cost factor in drought-proof and area, and much more.

Thank you to Kellogg Garden products for making this episode possible.

Whether you’re starting a garden from scratch, sprucing up your planting beds, or mulching your favorite fruit tree…we have a natural and organic premium garden soil, potting soil, mulch, or fertilizer to help your project reach its best potential. Kellogg Garden products have been dedicated to meeting the needs of gardeners for over 85 years, and we continue to provide products you can trust! Visit our website here.

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EM: Hi Bob and Stephen, thanks for coming on the show. Now to start us off, I think it’s important that we distinguish between compost and mulch – for those out there that might not know the difference exactly. Stephen – can you please tell me what that difference is?

SA: Mulch is defined as a ground cover, so anything that’s covering the surface of the soil. And we don’t think of mulch as something that we actually incorporate into the soil, which we do with compost, so it’s important to recognise that compost is a soil amendment, and that mulch is a ground cover.

EM: Right, okay, so that’s the difference between compost and mulch – but is it true that you can also use compost as a kind of mulch as well?

SA: Yes, compost can be a form of mulch; it can be used as a ground cover. But often, and my recommendation would be (at least from the home gardener perspective), that you use compost and mulch together as a unit – as part of a system of protecting the soil. And that you would apply compost first, and then, to protect the properties of that compost, the living biology of that compost, you would want to apply mulch on top of that. And that would insulate the compost so it’s able to do its best work in contact with the soil.

EM: Mh hm

BS: Yes, very well put. And let me just say that, although I agree entirely that mulches and composts are different, however: mulches from woody materials or grassy materials, do become broken down in particle size, come in intimate contact with the sand, silt and the clay in soil, and become humus and/or soil organic matter over a longer period of time. So mulches, actually, are very effective at increasing the soil organic matter, or what can be called also the humus content of soils, even though they break down very slowly.

EM: Right so it acts a bit like a compost as well. And Bob, a lot of farmers in California are getting ready for the summer and are thinking of ways to combat the drought. Can you tell me what the key considerations would be when choosing a mulch to protect against drought – what should farmers know when choosing a mulch?

BS: Well, with drought in mind, or with wanting to have more water infiltrate into the soil – be held in the soil; one of the things that I do on farms is raise cover crops.

EM: Right – and just to jump in there – I just want to clarify for those who don’t know: a cover crop is a type of plant grown to suppress weeds, help build and improve soil, and control diseases and pests. They’re also sometimes called “green manure” and “living mulches.”

BS: Yes, and often times cover crops aren’t looked at as a form of mulch, or a source of mulch, but for me on farms, especially on larger acreages, it really is the practical and economical way to get mulch. Now, I’ll say this: with cover crops, I can choose the species that I want, I can plant them; and then manage the residues above ground, the green tissue, to where it’s a little older, and where it has a little more lignin. And then, when I mow this material and lay it on the soil surface, it has a longer half-life because it’s been lignified; and then, maybe most importantly, sort of secretly or quietly going on, is the decomposition of the roots.

So, the roots add to the humus level, the development in soil, the mulch laying on top and slowly breaking down…and between those two – both the roots decomposing and the mulch on top – we get a significant development of structure, water holding, water infiltration, and healthier roots to reach out to the water and utilise the water – by simply using a cover crop technique.

EM: Interesting, so cover crops are definitely a possibility. And perhaps you can list a few other mulches that are ideal for water retention on farms? Will your choice depend on the type of soil you’re working with, or?

BS: Well, it somewhat depends on the soil. I mean, certainly when we have a sandy soil, or light textured soil, mulches are even more desirable. However, mulches apply to all soils. Now, as far as accessing enough material on a farm situation, where we’re talking about maybe…even small acreages; it takes a lot of mulch to cover that three or four inches deep. Sometimes a farm will have access to larger amounts of woodchip, or some type of material that’s appropriate for mulches, but typically I grow the mulch onsite.

EM:  Okay, and is it only water retention that matters when it comes to mulching to fight drought – or are there any other considerations?

BS: Well, to me, again, if I can get more humus developed in soil – and that humus has the ability to hold a very, very large percentage of water…and recalling also that once the water is absorbed by humus, it’s released back to the plant much more easily than the water that is held by clay in the soil. So, my drive on farms for a number of reasons – including water retention and water infiltration into the ground, and then water retention…and released to the plant – is to increase the humus levels in soils.

EM: Amazing. So, yeah, there’s a lot of talk about the importance of humus going on now. And Stephen, let’s talk about gardens now. What would you say is important for gardeners to keep in mind when choosing a mulch?

SA: Yeah, where cover crops are an excellent application for farming in the residential and landscape setting, that’s probably not as practical because people would look at it as kind of weedy, or that sort of thing. So, using an organic form of mulch, such as recycled wood material, for example, or straw, cardboard, newspaper…these are all forms of mulch material that can be used in a residential setting. And I particularly prefer the sheet mulching technique, which is not only good for maintaining moisture within the soil, but also it’s great for weed prevention; it’s great for keeping the temperature moderated within the soil, and also it aids in the decomposition process to increase that soil organic matter content, which is so important. A one percent increase in soil organic matter content quadruples the water holding capacity of the soil.

So, sheet mulching is a very effective technique, and it’s kind of like making lasagne. You’d apply a one to two inch layer of compost, lay down some newspaper, straw or cardboard in a double overlapping layer; apply another couple of inches of compost on top of that, and then at least three inches of recycled wood mulch to protect that whole lasagne package that you’d created. And you can actually plant directly into that.

EM: Mh hm, okay…

SA: Now, three inches of mulch is particularly important, because we really want to maintain that moisture content within the compost, and the decomposing cardboard or straw, or whatever it is. A lot of people don’t recognise it, but mulch itself – while it acts like a great sponge, and can hold a tremendous volume of water – it also can lose a lot of water to evapotranspiration.

EM: That’s actually an important point I wanted to bring up. For those of you who don’t know, evapotranspiration is when something, in this case mulch, loses water through transpiration and evaporation. So, how should you combat this?

SA: So, knowing what size material to use is very important, and there was a very good study done by the University of California Cooperative Extension several years ago that looked this. And it was actually found that yard waste – or what we call green waste – mulch is a very good source for home gardeners. It holds a tremendous amount of water, and it does a very good job at slowly decomposing and adding organic matter, or humus Bob was mentioning, back to the soil.

So, sheet mulching and using something like green waste, or yard waste, is a very good way to go…or recycled woodchips. And those woodchips should be somewhere between the two and three inch size range, in order to optimise the moisture holding capacity, and also the…we need at least three inches.

EM: Right, so three is the key. Is it the same for farms, Bob?

BS: Yeah, more or less. Three or four inches have been shown through many trials to be an effective layer for mulch.

EM: Great, and I’d like to talk a little bit and talk about that study you mentioned, Stephen. We know from that study that some mulches, such as yard waste applied 3 inches thick, can hold up to 2.51 inches per foot of water – which is pretty substantial. And it warned that sometimes mulches can soak up the rainwater and sprinkler water and it lose that water before it gets a chance to reach the soil underneath. What were the reasons for this happening – I presume it has to do with the amount of mulch applied?

SA: Well, that’s…yeah. It had to do with the size of mulch, the kind of mulch…yeah, it was kind of a complicated set of things, but the size and type were the two key variables there that were related to the moisture loss.

EM: Mh-hm.

BS: Yes, this is actually an important topic, because either on the smaller level – or on the larger level – mulches can interfere with light rains or light irrigations. I’ve put mulch on macadamia and on avocado trees, and a lot of times, in a dry farm system where they get light rains and the trees have trained their roots up into the upper layers of soil, when we go in and mulch rapidly – come in and just put three or four inches of mulch down – it seriously can set back the vigour of these trees, because they don’t get those light rains anymore.

Now, over a longer period of time, the system will balance out, the tree size will change, and the root structures will change and the mulch will become effective. So, one of the things that I do if I’m going to go to mulch is, I’m going to question…mulch a new area…I’m going to question what is my irrigation capacity, if any? What is my rainfall pattern? And try to keep from stressing the crop by providing more irrigation to the crop if I need to in the interim period while there is transition and adjustment to the new mulches.

EM: Okay, but I presume that adding extra moisture would be tough to do during the drought, no?

BS: Ah, it’s all doable. It’s all doable. And once again, in some instances, and in particular on some farms, taking a transition instead of a sudden change, tow, three inches of mulch, may be a good idea – depending on the circumstances.

EM: Right. So, what type of irrigation would be best suited for this type of situation, then?

SA: What I think people should be thinking about is drip irrigation and going with some form of sub-surface, rather than having a sprinkler type of system. And that’s the kind of irrigation that they were looking at in that study that looked at loss of moisture from mulch. So, I think folks should be looking at drip – so that the drip is actually below the mulch level and it’s making contact directly with the soil; that folks are making sure that they are monitoring their drip system and they’re adjusting it as the plant material grows; that they’re adjusting the flow rates based on the size and the developmental stage of the plant material; and, to the greatest extent possible, that they get that moisture into the soil versus getting it into the air through a sprinkler, where a lot of it is being lost.

EM: Alright, excellent, so a drip irrigation system is definitely the right choice, especially for drought. But going back to the mulch itself now: is there any types of mulch you would advise against using?

SA: Well, here in California, with drought we’re also concerned about fire. And it is possible for mulches to be quite flammable. Things like gorilla hair, for example, would not be a recommended form of mulch to use. I prefer recycled woodchip material that’s come from pallets or from construction projects, where the wood is clean, and then it’s been shredded up. Bark chips, for example, redwood bark chips would not be preferred – they tend to be easily floated away…. There was just a recent fire in Massachusetts, actually, at a wedding reception where someone threw away a cigarette into the mulch and it actually ignited and caught the vinyl siding of a building.

So, there are these situations where that happens, and there was, when we think about mulch in a residential setting, and in California where we have urban wild land fire, selecting the right kind of mulch, and how close it’s being used to a building, is important to keep in mind.

EM: Right…

BS: Also, I would say that with mulches, I’ve seen red cedar, or other highly aromatic type woods, if used fresh as chip around shallow rooted plants – I’ve seen them damage shallow rooted plants if it is a very aromatic type of mulch material. Also, I guess I would be cautious about mulches that came from plants that were chopped or chipped off of likely contaminated soils – this would be around some highways, or just some situations where a lot of herbicide or pesticide is used, and then we don’t like to take the mulch chopped from that area.

SA: Yeah, I would whole-heartedly agree with that. You need to know the source of the mulch. You need to know your mulch provider. And you should never be afraid to ask questions about what went into the mulch, the mulching process, whether it was treated with any kind of material. And this is particularly true in a residential setting if you’re using coloured mulches – you want to know what the provider used as the colouring agent.

EM: Okay, great. Brilliant tips, very useful to know. And let’s focus now on the strategy: would there be certain areas to priorities over others, or certain plants to protect first? Bob, say, in farms?

BS: Well, I would say that mulches are probably most appropriate where there is projected to be a lot of water loss from the soil, either because of low soil organic matter levels, or a lighter textured soil, or a certain drainage or exposure. Always when we’re talking about using onsite grown mulch, if that’s in conjunction with an actively growing crop, we want to make sure that we’ve picked the cover crop that we’re going to chop over to mulch carefully, as we don’t want the cover crop competing with the crop.

In terms of where we would apply mulches first, like I say, I think on lighter textured soils, on exposures where it’s particularly hot, or on slopes where we’re subject to losing soil – soil erosion, sheeting off the surface…so mulches are very effective at lowering the potential for erosion.

EM: Great, and Stephen, do you want answer from a gardens and landscaping point of view?

SA: If you want to take a strategic approach, I would look for those areas that are most weed-infested, or the areas that you’ve got little planting in at the moment, and focus on starting the mulch those first, and then being able to move in with California native plants or drought tolerant plants into those areas; making sure that you’ve got the appropriate amount of mulch, that three inches that’s going to help to keep the weeds under control and keep that moisture in the ground. And it is very effective on any kind of a slop situation for controlling erosion.

So, my strategic approach would be: think sheet mulching; think about it applying to the areas that you’re not heavily landscaped, or underutilising, or that you’re going to transition with plant material; then go to using plant material that is drought tolerant – particularly using California native plants, or wherever you are, the native plants that are particular to your watershed. And that would be the approach I would recommend.

EM: And, how much, or how often, should you mulch, and would it be good to blend the mulches, or?

SA: Well, from the residential perspective, really you don’t have to change the mulch up all that much. Once you apply it, if it’s particularly within that two-and-a-half to three-inch size range, that’s going to slowly decompose over time. If you’re wanting to freshen up the colour of it, or over time it’s going to oxidise in the sun and you want to be able to brighten that up, you can do a little top-dressing of an additional inch or so a year – that’s about what will get processed over the course of a year.

If you’re going to be adding compost as part of that process, you need to peel the mulch back, apply the compost, and then return the mulch back on top of that. It’s very important that home gardeners remember not to incorporate mulch directly into the soil; that compost is what we want to be incorporating into the soil, or leaving on the soil surface. But, woodchips – those kinds of things – should not be incorporated directly into the soil, so that we don’t cause a nitrogen drag situation.

BS: Well yes, those are great points, and I think the incorporation of mulch into the soil is a problem often times that I run into, either on farms or in gardens. One way or another, people can think that it’s better off to incorporate these materials, and they’re too woody. And, as Stephen pointed out, we can start to tie up nitrogen by incorporating too much woody, high carbon stuff too quickly.

EM: That’s an interesting point about the nitrogen – that it could possibly get tied up. Would you recommend replacing the nitrogen in the soil in that case, via fertilizers, say?

SA: Well, from a residential perspective, during drought conditions you never want to fertilise. Fertiliser stimulates new growth. New growth requires additional water, and in a drought condition when we don’t have that available water, that’s going to put the plants under tremendous stress, which will then invite pests…and so we just create this downward kind of spiral within the garden.

So, I would let the compost feed the soil, not the plants. Focus on making sure that the biology in the soil is getting what it needs. It is perfectly capable of moving all the nutrients around, the water around, and making sure the plants get what they need. And as part of that, I recommend that folks have their soil tested to know what they actually have in the ground. The idea of applying fertilisers every two weeks is great marketing, it’s great brainwashing, but it’s not good soil biology – good soil ecology. So, test your soil, know what you already have, and then don’t be fertilising during a drought: be applying compost and let the soil biology do the work of sustaining your plants through the drought conditions.

EM: Right.

BA: Those are great points and good comments. Now, plants, of course, to be most protected, they have their own mechanisms against – protecting against – water loss, and protecting against drought stress. Plants need to have, particularly, potassium and zinc, in addition to all the rest of the essential minerals. But potassium and zinc have a lot to do with how the plant circulates its fluids, and how it protects itself against drought stress, and so….

Yes, testing the soil, but also testing plant tissues is something we do where there’s crops in particular, because we’re raising crops for food, so we’re very interested in making sure that the crops have good access to minerals. Not over-fertilising is important, and by testing the soil, and then also testing the plant, we can determine what is missing, what is going to be provided by compost…. And, for example, compost will increase the K level – the potassium levels – and the phosphate levels; typically compost does not increase, or mulches do not increase the calcium levels in plants. And again, the calcium, along with boron and copper, help to make the plant harder and more resistant to pests, and also have a healthier root system that can be larger and healthier and pick up more water in the soil.

So, certainly anytime that we’re talking about farm, or garden, we want to make sure that we’re asking our questions sort of through the filter of all three primary cultural practices, which is: organic matter management – that includes compost, cover crops and mulches; mineral management, or what I would call, more accurately, mineral balancing in soil; and then also, tillage management. We look at the whole soil ecology, and ask ourselves: what will the compost and mulches provide? What is my soil sample, my tissue sample, showing? And what minerals might I need to replace to increase the plant’s ability to resist drought, and to make the root system so that it’s particularly large and healthy, and able to uptake water effectively, and to have microbiology on the roots that increase the plant’s ability to uptake water very strongly?

EM: That’s very interesting, very cool. So people should definitely test their soils first of all.

BS: Definitely.

SA: Absolutely.

EM: And finally, lets talk about the cost-factor: Bob, could you tell me roughly how much it would cost to drought-proof an acre of land, say?

BS: This is a great question. However, we have to know where we start. I work on some soils that have five percent soil organic matter in Northern California; I work on some soils that have one half of one percent. And those two soils could have different textures, meaning the amount of sand, silt and clay. Particularly clay in a soil will cause the soil – a lot of soil – to hold more water. So it’s a hard question to answer arbitrarily. On the average, I would say you’re going to spend, maybe less than one hundred dollars per acre for a cover crop; it’s going to cost me thirty-five dollars an acre to mow that cover crop; it’s going to cost me a little bit for seed – or the seed that was a hundred dollars per acre; there could be a little other costs in there possibly for assundries.

EM: Right okay, so under 100 dollars for the cover crop itself, 35 dollars to mow the cover crop, and possibly a little bit more for assundries – so on average it’s roughly a hundred and thirty dollars per acre to use a cover crop. And Stephen, finally, what’s the rough cost estimate for a home garden?

SA: Yeah, so for the home gardener, it’s generally, I would say, between thirty-nine cents and seventy-nine cents a square foot. Again, it depends on where you’re starting from. And that thirty-nine to seventy-nine cents per square foot is for three inches of a recycled wood mulch being applied. And the largest cost component in that square footage is the transportation cost. So, if you can find a local source of great recycled wood mulch, or yard waste material that can be transported, you know, for very little, then that cost is going to drop significantly. But the largest single component in the cost for the mulch is the actual transportation of it from one place to another.

But three inches is what you’d want to shoot for, and generally speaking in California it’s somewhere between thirty-nine and seventy-nine cents per square foot. Now, if you were to multiply it out for an acre, it looks like an astronomical amount of money, but remember we’re talking about residential garden, home landscape situation, so…thirty-nine to seventy-nine cents is about what it would cost.

EM: Alright, that’s great. And, well, we covered the basics now and unfortunately that’s all we have time for today, so thanks Bob and Stephen for coming on the show.

BS: Certainly

SA: You’re very welcome.

EM: Alright goodbye now!

SA: Bye!

BS: Okay, bye now, take care.

Drought Special: Communicating Compost’s Magic in Our Cities

This episode corresponds to Lesson 3 and Lesson 4 of our online course.

Episode thirteen is part one of a three-part special on the drought currently experienced in California, and the value of compost for saving water. In this episode we’re talking to Robert Reed on how cities can prepare for drought through awareness campaigns that highlight the water-saving benefits of compost use.

Thank you to Recology for making this episode possible.

Recology is an employee-owned company operating in California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington coordinating dozens of recycling programs to recover a variety of materials. In San Francisco, they are part of the program Zero Waste by 2020 and are very involved with compost production and distribution. Visit their website here.

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EM: So Robert, I know that there’s a lot of talk about California right now, which is experiencing one of the worst droughts on record at the moment. The Governor declared it a state of emergency, and has signed a 687 million dollar drought-relief package into law. Farms are suffering, and people are being urged to reduce their water usage by up to 20%. So, it’s going to be a tough summer and people are doing all they can at the moment to help save water. What are you doing over at Recology to help the effort?

RR: Well, we’re trying to help people understand and know that compost saves water, and that by participating in our curbside compost collection program, people can help California save water. Compost by weight is fifty percent humus, and humus is a natural sponge. And farmers understand this, and they’ve purchased a whole lot of compost from us in the last six months, to put it on their farms in an effort to retain more rainwater.

And, at Recology we’re trying to help people understand the ability of compost to help capture and retain water. In the city, the traditional reasons to participate in the curbside compost collection program are to keep materials out of landfills, and return nutrients to farms. And almost everybody understands the first one; everybody gets that composting is a good thing to keep material out of landfills, and to have less landfilling going on.

I would estimate that about half of the people in San Francisco are connected and understand the second motivation, which is to return nutrients to farms. And now, we’re trying the emphasis a third reason to compost all of their food scraps, all of their plant cuttings, and this third reason is to help save water, and to help California – the state that we love – do better in terms of mitigating the drought.

EM: Yeah, excellent. And I presume getting people to understand that last one is a little more difficult, then?

RR: Well, for people in the city, it’s a new idea and so, when you have a new idea, you need to get it out there a lot, you know. You need to get it on the internet, you need to write about it, you need to do TV reports about it…you need to put it in your newsletter on your website…. It just helps of people hear it multiple times from different sources.

We’ve worked a lot with some agronomists to help get the wording right, get the research correct, so that we can frame the message correctly and accurately, and then help communicate this, about how compost helps save water. And we’ve written an article, and we’re going to publish it as the lead story in our customer newsletter next week. We also shot a photograph that shows some hands holding a little young plant – green with water on its leaves, and of course the compost in the picture is very wet, and very heavy with water. So we have an iconic image that helps people…they can look at it and they immediately understand this point, that compost and the humus in compost is a natural sponge. Pictures are very powerful, and so this image is important, and we want to present this image in as many places as possible – and the message.

Mh-hm, right. And as part of your outreach campaign, too, you host an annual compost giveaway in various locations around the city for people just to come and collect compost, is that right?

RR: Yes, and it’s absolutely a joyous community event and it’s a bring your own bucket event, so people will bring two five-gallon buckets, and we’ll fill them with compost that they helped make, and they take it home and put it on their gardens, and on their outdoor plants. And, you know, this is the kind of thing that you can do when your city has a compost collection program. You know, not only can you keep materials out of landfills; not only can you send nutrients back to farms; not only can you help the region and the state that you live in save water – but you can also help create a compost that then comes back to your city, that residents can get through a compost giveaway; they can use in their own gardens; and that can come back to community gardens in your community; and can come back to urban farms in your community.

EM: Yeah, exactly. But now I’d like to get down to business and talk a little bit more about campaign strategies – can you tell us what you think makes for successful awareness campaign and public outreach strategy?

RR: Well, you have to go straight to it and say, you know, “compost to help save water”. And people kind of subliminally understand these things; it’s a very old understanding for people. All of us have gotten our fingers into the soft soil in a garden at some point in our life. And so, when we present a picture that shows compost that’s heavy with water and it’s very dark, it rekindles this subliminal memory in people.

And so, it’s our feeling that people need to see this picture and hear this message. They need to see it in print, they need to see it online…one of the points here is that the outreach and education around composting and recycling is competing with a lot of other information that’s in your community, that’s on the news.

There’s just all kinds of information out there that’s competing for people’s attention. And so, composting has to be part of that discussion. Composting has to be part of the game, so how do you make all this good information; this positive information about composting…how do you get in the game?

EM: Mh-hm, right.

RR: And one of the things is what you mentioned, is that the leaders in the community need to be talking about it, and concerned about it. And they need to attend the compost giveaway; they need to talk to the media about it; they need to hold a news conference about it periodically, or pen an article or an op-ed that gets published in the city’s newspaper. So, you need to do creative things. And one of the things we just did at Recology is we came up with a playful recycling quiz, and we posted it on our website.

EM: Yeah, I saw that actually, I thought it was very funny.

RR: Yeah, well okay, I’m glad you enjoyed it. You know, we…it’s a series of nine multiple questions – what goes in the blue bin, what goes in the green bin. And of course the first answer is something completely ridiculous, and then the second option is something frustrating or annoying. And then of course the third answer is the correct answer, and it’s something you might not have known that you could compost – like soiled paper.

EM: Yeah, and I particularly like how you actually explained in your newsletter about the soiled paper – that it’s great for compost. And that you call the short paper fibers that organisms love to consume – y you called them carbon candy. I think that’s a great way of framing it.

RR: Yeah, and those are the kinds of stories that we need to tell, and we need to particularly tell them to younger people. The Union of Concerned Scientists did an analysis – they looked at all the message about recycling and about composting: should the outreach dollars be spent on radio ads, or TV ads, or bus shelters, you know. And they measured for the first time in the history of America; really, they did a very complete measurement of what is the most effective way to communicate about recycling and composting. And the answer…what they discovered was that the best thing to do was to communicate to students and to younger people.

They reported that we all know that kids learn to recycle at school and then go home and teach their parents. What this research proved was that parents are actually listening to the kids. So when the child goes home and says, “Mom, we compost at school, dad we compost at school – why don’t we compost here in our kitchen at home?” Then the parents are listening and the family will then get a kitchen compost pail and start composting more of their food scraps and their plants at home, and increase their participation in the composting program.

EM: That’s very interesting.

RR: Yeah, it’s very interesting. So, we’re trying to tell the story of carbon candy to kids. We’re making presentations every week to students in classrooms in San Francisco. One of the reasons, you know, that we did the playful recycle-compost quiz is to do something entertaining, and we’re going to let all the schools know about it. And that’s what we’re doing in California.

The farmers are joining us. The farmers have come to San Francisco and held news conferences, and asked people to be more attentive to put all their food scraps and plant cuttings – and soiled paper – in the green bins, so that we as a community can make more compost and we can get it onto farms, and add life to the soils – return life to the soils to help protect our topsoils. This is very interesting: farmers coming into the city, holding news conferences; asking people in the city to do right by the environment, to compost more of their food scraps.

EM: Very good. And for the last question, now, I’d just like to get your thoughts on the drought and how it looks for the future of California?

RR: Well, there’s many articles that are suggesting that California will not have as much rainfall in the future as it has historically. So, we have a history of dealing with dry periods; we’re going to have to remember what has worked for us historically. And, if you want to know the answers to environmental questions; what should we do to help protect the environment, what can we do to do more recycling, more composting…often the answers are in the history.

Look back: what did your grandparents do? What did your great-great grandparents do? They composted! Okay. They had an area where they would put their food scraps – they made compost. And we need to remember that as a community, and we need to do more of that. And we’re going to need to do more of that in the future.

EM: Wise words. But unfortunately that’s all we have time for now today, Robert.

RR: Alright.

EM: Thanks for coming on the show.

RR: Thank you.

EM: Alright, best of luck now.

 

In Focus: The City To Soil Composting Process

This episode corresponds to Lesson 6 of our online course.

In this twelfth episode, we speak with Organics Recovery Specialist Gerry Gillespie about the City to Soil organics collection program, and their unique composting process using minimal machinery or manpower; ideal for remote locations and small farms.

Thank you to Polytex for making this episode possible. 

At the cutting edge of the Poly Textile fabrication industry, Polytex is a reliable supplier of quality products, servicing a wide range of customers from industry, agriculture, construction, commercial spaces, and mining in Australia and overseas. Polytex designs, manufactures and services the right product at a competitive price. You can deal confidently with Polytex. For more information, visit www.polytex.net.au.

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EM: So Gerry, would you mind just giving us a little background information on City to Soil and give us some background information on how it all got started?

GG: We commenced using City to Soil as a program in 2003/4 in a little town called Queanbeyan, which is next to our national capital. What we were trying to do at the time was demonstrate that we could collect clean, source separated organic waste, turn it into a high quality compost, and get it into agriculture for much cheaper than we could put it into landfill.

And we demonstrated that we could actually do that. We could collect it, process it, carry it two hundred kilometers, and put it at a farm gate for about fifty dollars a tonne, including profit when the disposal fee to landfill was seventy-five dollars a tonne.

The thing that really surprised us was the very, very low levels of contamination. The entire focus right through the City to Soil program has been on the idea that this material is going into agriculture to produce food, so it must be clean. And we’ve found that that message absolutely resonates with people.

EM: Mh-hm.

GG: Anyway, after the first very successful trial, we were given a two million dollar grant to run the program in four areas of New South Wales – four council areas. One of those areas is four and a half hours away from where we are here. If you use the normal method of composting, it would have meant that we would have been loading machinery onto trucks and carrying it from one place to another – we would have used up our two million dollars in a very short space of time. So it was clearly necessary to find a new way of composting.

EM: Yeah – and what was that new way of composting, then, that you developed.

GG: So we really…we developed this process of covering the material and using an inoculant, and it’s been very, very successful. It’s more or less, if you look back at the history of composting, it’s a combination of what the Japanese community call “Bokashi”, which uses effective microorganisms. These inoculants speed up the process, but more importantly they change the biological nature of the compost pile.

These sorts of processes have been used – there’s a very good description if anybody has the old book by Sir Albert Howard called “An Agricultural Testament”, pages forty-eight and forty-nine are almost this process absolutely described, so it’s very much like the original biodynamic composting process as well.

EM: Okay, and maybe you can give us a talk through the actual process? How do you go about it?

GG: So, the composting process that we use for City to Soil, is basically that we’ve asked people to give us clean, source separated product because we’re putting it back into the soil to grow their food. And people really seem to understand that, because our contamination rates are very, very low. We bring the material into the composting site, and we spread it out on the ground. We take out any obvious contamination – and there are things you miss in that first step. And we don’t shred: that’s very, very important. The argument is because we collect our food waste and the garden waste in one two-hundred-and- forty liter wheel bin, all of that material, pretty well most of it will be no longer than you arm and no thicker than your thumb. So most of that material will break down without shredding. If you do shred in that first stage and there’s a bottle that you’ve missed, what happens is you end up with glass, or plastic, all the way through your compost.

EM: Mh-hm.

GG: And then we get it very, very wet; so somewhere between forty percent and sixty percent moisture. Then we inoculate it with the inoculants that we’ve prepared previously. Then we push it up into a pile, we put a cover over the compost pile, and we put an indentation. And what normally happens then is that green waste in that circumstance will go up to about seventy degrees Celsius, so it gets very hot. That heat drives the moisture out of the pile, onto the inside of the cover, if you’ve got a cover on, and all the water runs off because it’s a slope. If you have an indentation in the top, then what it causes is: the two sides of the compost pile will push the water up toward the top, but most of it will drip into the bit that’s indented and fall back into the pile. That actually means that in most instances – not all, but in most instances we don’t have to apply any more water after that first stage. Although sometimes we put more water on in the middle stage, about six weeks into the process.

But then, after the compost goes through the seventy degrees Celsius, the family population – that’s the first stage, aerobic stage of composting, is totally an oxidation process. Once it gets to that peak, all those families change, and they collapse back into the pile and the process becomes fermentative. So it’s a fermentation process, much the same way as you’d make…as a farmer might make silage, or the Germans might make sour kraut, it uses lactobacillus as the principal biological agent. But those biological processes can change quite dramatically in the compost pile.

So then we just leave it for another six weeks. We leave it for six weeks in the first stage, we take the cover off and check the moisture and everything is breaking down quite well, and we may put a bit more inoculant on or we may put more moisture on, and we put the covers back on. We sometimes turn it at that stage, put the covers back on and then leave it for another six weeks – or another twelve weeks if possible, because in that secondary stage the humus in the pile is actually building quite dramatically. We’ve found with our compost process…at the end of this process we’ve had thirty to fourty percent more compost than you’d normally have if you have a totally aerobic process.

EM: Amazing.

GG: In this compost process, what we’re trying to do is make something. Most waste management processes are trying to reduce something – they’re trying to get rid of something. Which is how the oxidation process in compost is quite often looked at from a waste manager’s perspective. What we’re doing is: we are not trying to solve a problem; we are trying to develop an opportunity. It’s a totally different focus; we’re trying to make something beneficial out of something, and we want to return it back to the soil to give an even bigger impact biologically into the soil.

Interestingly, the council in Armidale, one of the five councils where we’re using the process now (they’ve been using our inoculants strictly now for about eight or nine months): the Environment Protection Authority has just given them an extended license to process fifty thousand tonnes a year on their site -which is large for a regional center in Australia – but they’ve made it a condition of the license that they have to use our process. Which I think is wonderful.

EM: Yeah, it really is. It’s a testament to the success of the process then.

GG: Absolutely, yeah.

EM: And so let me go back a bit now and ask you a few more details – can you tell me what kind of covers you use for the compost?

GG: The thing that we found to be best of all is what in Australia we call grain covers. They’re very heavy-duty, – they’re generally used to cover large outdoor piles of rice and wheat in Australia – they’re very durable which means that we can have the same cover for a long time without it deteriorating because of the ultraviolet light. So, it’s important to get something of good value. If you’re going to invest in something, you’re better off spending a couple of hundred dollars on something, because it’ll last years. Sure, you can go out and buy plastic, or you can go and buy a cheap cover, but, you know, it’s gone in six months. So yes, we try to rely on quality.

EM: Mh-hm. And they’re not breathable covers, are they?

GG: No, they’re solid, yeah. They’re actually, you don’t let any air – they entire idea is to contain the microbial processes. You’re trying to create a circumstance where they’ve got a food supply, and they’ve got enormous family members there together. While the food supply and the family members and the right conditions are there with moisture, then they’ll breed up. And in breeding up, they’re creating more humus, they’re pulling more things in from the atmosphere, and they’re creating beneficial outcomes.

EM: Excellent, and how much machinery, then, would it take to run a program like this?

GG: Very, very, little. Our entire objective in designing the process was to have something that really used minimal machinery. I’ve tried to get farmers to use the process because the only thing they need is their tractor. And most tractors have a bucket on the front so they can move manure and things around their farm. So the only things you need, basically, are the tractor and some supply of organic material, and just a simple cover. So, not a complex process.

And the inoculants: if you look up lactobacillus on the internet, you’ll find the start of those processes. Or even better still, go to your locate effective microorganism supplier and buy some of their product.

EM: And you can make the inoculant yourself?

GG: Yeah, I…we made it in a hotel room in Egypt. So, basically the process is: half a cup of rice in a small jar – a honey jar – with water. And you leave that sit for three or four days. It pulls the lactobacillus in from the atmosphere. With a loose-fitting lid: the lid has to be on, you don’t want little animals getting in there because they carry other types of biology, but the air contains the lactobacillus.

So, rice in water, for four days in a dark cupboard. And then you take that water, pour it off into two litres of normal milk – or skimmed, I’ve used skimmed milk, tinned milk, powdered milk, all sorts of treated milk. After about another four days, all the solids in that milk will form a cheese on top, which is about two centimetres thick, or an inch thick, on top. You take off the cheese and feed it to the chickens, or the dogs. Animals love it. It’s beautiful; it’s quite edible stuff, actually.

And then the serum, which is underneath: you dilute that one hundred percent with rainwater, because you don’t want any chlorine in there. If you do use tap water, let it sit for an hour. But dilute it one hundred percent with water, add a cup of molasses, and that’s the basic product. It will stay in that form for about three years without – and quite stable.

And then we take that product, and we extend it again. We turn it into a more extensive product; it can be used as a fertiliser or a compost inoculant or…. The secret to the whole thing, to my mind, is introducing a process that enables the biology to be as diverse as possible. The more diverse the biology in the compost heap, the better outcome you’re going to get in the longer run.

EM: Mh-hm. And the quality of your compost, then, is quite good?

GG: Brilliant! It matches the best of any compost I’ve ever seen anywhere. We have local people here – there’s a company called Ylad, west of us, who sell their compost for about one-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars a tonne, whereas commercial compost in this area, in bulk, would normally sell for about forty dollars a tonne.

The end objective of what we do is to have a product that is biologically active, has high levels of humus, and it uses the compost material simply as a substrate – as a vehicle to carry the biology back out into agriculture.

EM: Excellent, and so because of the nutrient value, you can sell it at a very high price. And can you tell us a little bit about the feedstock now. I know that this process can operate with variable feedstocks – so what kind of materials can you use?

GG: There are a whole lot of different feedstocks that we’ve used in the process so far. Normally in a composting process you have to have a ratio of about twenty-to-one carbon to nitrogen, up to about sixty-to-one carbon to nitrogen.

Using this process, we’ve composted Australian native sawdust, which has a carbon to nitrogen ratio of about one-hundred-fifty-to-one, on its own. Now, the reason for this, and the reason why variability of feedstocks does not matter all that much, is that this process pulls its nitrogen base from the atmosphere.

So after it goes through the first phase, or while it’s going through the first phase, the aerobic composting will normally blow off a lot of nitrogen, but the fermentative stage seems to build a whole lot of things back into the process. So yes, the mix of the materials is not really all that crucial. We’ve done it with pure food in New Town in Wales in 2007 and it worked perfectly, or we’ve done it with Australian native sawdust at the other extreme.

EM: That’s really good – it’s a really good advantage. And now Gerry, can you tell us in what contexts would this process be ideal for, do you think?

GG: Well, in terms of using the process, I think the biggest advantage is that it’s excellent for remote locations. We’ve never, ever said that this process is so unique, you know, it’s better than any other compost process in the world. Composting processes have been around since the dawn of time, and nature is very good at doing it in all sorts of different ways. But what we’ve tried to do is come up with a process that can be used in remote locations, or by farmers, to get a very, very good product.

The process is not that different to biodynamic composting, except biodynamic composting is not generally covered. And this is absolutely simple. If you’re a farmer and you don’t have time – you can set up the compost pile, put the cover on, and just go away for six months.

EM: That’s incredible, so it really requires very little. And the odour issues either, isn’t there not?

GG: Not at all. No odour…no shredding, no turning, no odour.

EM: That’s amazing.

GG: Yeah.

EM: And we know that in order to make good quality compost, you need a very clean source of organics – and you mentioned before that you’d had great success with the City to Soil program – can you give us an idea as to why that is?

GG: The thing, I suppose, that’s really unique about – well, I don’t “suppose”. It is. The thing that’s absolutely really unique about City to Soil is the community engagement process. I think people have got to a stage with recycling programs where they see that when they’re putting their newspaper into bin, or their aluminium (or aluminum, as the Americans would say) into a recycling bin, they’re giving that material away. They pay for the service to have the material collected, and in most instances it goes off to some re-processor somewhere, so they’re giving Rupert Murdoch his newspaper back at a discount price. Or they’re giving aluminium away to Comalco or one of these larger companies. Where…if you put organic material into a bin and it’s being made into compost and it’s going back into soil to produce food – the people see that it’s a very real connection.

I think that what we’ve done inadvertently, and in some ways intentionally – we obviously expected to get very clean material from it – what we’ve done is we’ve hit a button in people that really resonates with them.

We’re operating now in five council areas with City to Soil, and our contamination rate seems to get lower and lower, not worse and worse. Most contamination rates around the world in organics recycling, people think they’re doing really well if they only have five percent contamination. Our contamination has never gone above point-four of one percent. The lowest council – we just started at a place called Palerang. Their contamination level is currently running at point-zero-six of one percent.

So, in a small town of about four hundred people, we collected one-and-a-half tonnes of material and the total contamination were two soft drink cans and one plastic pot. That’s absolutely nothing.

EM: That is really incredible. And for our final question now, because we’re running out of time: can you tell us how you get such low contamination rates? What do you do?

GG: What we collect is garden waste and food scraps together. Now, that’s unusual, but in Australia, our circumstances are relatively unusual. We have four hundred and fifty-five million hectares of land under agriculture. Seventy-five percent of that land has got less than one percent organic material in it, so our soils are very low in organic material.

We have about forty-five million tonnes of waste a year, and about sixty percent of that is organic. So it’s an absolute no-brainer that the thing we should be clean product, and getting it back into our soils.

So to make that as easy as possible for people, we use a two hundred and forty liter wheel bin – a cart for the Americans – into which…we give people a compostable bag which sits on their kitchen bench. Because the compostable bag breathes, it allows water to go out of it, and allows the material to lose a lot of its moisture, but it won’t smell. People then tie up that bag and they put that in with their green waste in a two hundred and forty liter wheel bin.

The difference with our bags, is that when we give a household a roll of one hundred and fifty bags, they all have a number on them. So we can, theoretically, if we’ve registered the number against the street address of the house that we gave it to – we know where that bag came from. But we don’t use it negatively; what we generally do is we’ll wait until we get bags back at the composting site, we’ll pull two of those bags out of the compost pile and if there is no metal, glass or plastic in those bags when we open them, that household wins a one hundred dollar hamper of fruit and vegetables.

We’re trying to make people think about where their food comes from. But, more importantly the fundamental thing about City to Soil is trying to connect the urban population back to the rural population. And that whole link is to try to get people to think about the farmer as their food supplier. Because regardless of a farmer’s religious, political or social beliefs, you need to have a relationship with them because they’re growing your food. And they need security and you need security of supply.

So food is very, very important to us. We say to people all the time: if you eat, you’re involved, you know? It’s a process you can’t avoid. And so…and we think this message can transfer quite comfortably into any language, because it’s a very simple message. It’s just simply saying: clean material goes into your food supply.

EM: Amazing, that’s a great message. Well, congratulations on the success of the program, and Gerry, that’s all we have time for today so…

GG: Alright.

EM: Thanks a million for coming on the show.

GG: Okay, talk to you soon!

Organics Recycling in University Curriculums: A Growing Trend

In this eleventh episode, we speak with Director of the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences at Cal Poly University, Hunter Francis, and Adjunct Professor at University of Illinois Springfield, Wynne Coplea, about the state of organics recycling, composting, and anaerobic digestion education in North America, and about the advantages of introducing composting into University curriculums.

Thank you to ecovio^® from BASF for making this episode possible.

ecovio^® is a high-quality and versatile bioplastic of BASF. It is certified compostable and contains biobased content. The main areas of use are plastic films such as organic waste bags, dual-use bags or agricultural films. Furthermore, compostable packaging solutions such as paper-coating and injection molding products can be produced with ecovio^®. To find more information, visit our website.

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EM: So Hunter, as director of the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences at Cal Poly – can you tell us a little bit about the situation at Cal Poly regarding composting and training?

HF: Yeah, we have a large agricultural college; it’s the second largest campus in California. We have about six thousand acres here in San Luis Obispo, and an additional three thousand acres in Santa Cruz County. And so…and we have one of the country’s largest agricultural colleges, which means we have a lot of animal units; we have quite a bit of beef cattle, we have a large dairy and we have chickens and horses and so. And because of that we have a lot of manure, and we have developed a compost operation that handles all of our manure and our green waste, and so it’s a good site to do all our trainings in composting, because we have all of the equipment, and so on.

EM: That’s excellent. And your course is taking place very soon isn’t it? When is it starting?

HF: The 24^th. It’s the whole week: march 24^th through 28^th.

EM: Right, okay. And have you been running this training very long?

HF: Well, it’s the second time that we’ve offered it. So, this is a week-long professional development compost training, and as I said, this is the second time we’ll be offering it. We did a week training two years ago in 2012, and it looks like at this point it’ll be an offering that we do every two years or so.

EM: And is your target audience the industry people that are actually working at composting operations?

HF: Yes, or agriculturalists. We have a lot of vineyards in our area, and we have…we are pretty rural, so you’re correct: the target is more people working in industry or in agriculture, or waste management, who are looking for skills either to improve their composting knowledge, or to start new facilities, so. We do have a couple student volunteers who help with it, but as it stands we do not have a composting course in the normal curriculum. So that’s something we’re hoping to develop. The one course that’s in the process of being initiated is a compost and soil-testing course, which is going to be offered through the Soil Science Department, that would focus more on the laboratory techniques for testing compost.

So, that’s exciting. We do have a pretty strong soils department, and as you can imagine, soils is a good way to connect with a lot of the processes involved in compost. And my understanding is that that’s probably about as close as you can get to actual, you know, established academic degree programs that would be focused on composting would be some of the soil science programs around the country. Because as far as I know, no one’s offering a degree in composting per-se.

EM: Right. Well, that’s great though that Cal Poly is starting to bring composting education to the fore in various ways, that’s very promising. And a question to both now: who do you are the key groups that need composting education today?

WC: I believe each sector in our culture and our economy does have a need for some form of composting education. But at this time, the particularly important target audiences for composting education in my mind, would be ag professionals and growers, the agricultural community; some of the more traditional farmers have maintained a form of composting, many of them certainly still do land application of manure and animal bedding, and things like that, but not a lot of them do actual blending and composting and use the compost. With the upsurge of interest in local foods, organic growing, specialty foods and so forth – they’re a prime target audience. As well as, I think, local government officials, because that’s where the policy rubber meets the road. And local government officials can do an awful lot, just with their own contracts for services, their own direct services that they provide.

The third prime group I think would be current waste management professionals. Absolutely, I think those are our target audiences right now. But really, the answer could be everyone; anyone.

HF: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that was well put. I think on the state level too, in terms of policy makers, there should be more education. Particularly when it comes to aligning some of the overall goals of these different agencies. In California we definitely struggle from the fact that there are a number of environmental regulatory agencies sometimes that don’t…it almost seems as if the policies are not well aligned. So, you know, here the big challenge is the fact that the air quality boards are creating restrictions in terms of monitoring VOC’s, and so forth, that are making permitting of composting facilities difficult in some areas, so at the policy level I think there’s some need for education as well.

EM: Excellent points. And like with Cal Poly, we see more and more universities including organics recycling and composting as part of their curriculums and daily activities as well. Can I ask you both, then, for your clear take on widely including organics recycling in university curriculums especially, possibly even as a stand-alone course. Is it a good idea?

HF: Yeah, I think it would be. I think it would tie into student interests, especially, you know, there is a fairly strong contingent of students who are interested in environmental studies and in recycling, and so on, and…. The other thing that I was thinking about is the fact that a lot of academia across the country, and probably across the world, is paying a lot of lip service to this idea of interdisciplinary studies, and breaking down silos, and, you know, having offerings across departments – and composting is really ideal for that type of education because it draws on a lot of the different disciplines; so everything from soils, to environment, to biology, agronomy, engineering, even marketing, or energy use. It can all be tied into these types of curriculums. So, I think it offers a lot of potential for meeting that student demand and for, you know, engaging the different disciplines. And it also could be a response to a lot of overall social goals too, which is namely to get organics out of the waste stream.

EM: Wynne, do you want to weigh-in on that?

WC: I definitely think that there is a need, and it would be welcomed for colleges and universities to begin to create and teach, and keep on-going formal curriculum built around composting. At this point, I would agree there’s not a lot of formal curriculum and/or even stand-alone certificates or degree programs out there. The non-formal education community has actually done a better job of pulling together the players. And it was already noted that extension is one of key players – certainly here in Illinois, UOI has a strong extension presence and they have a good composting instructional setup and resources online. And there are places like Cornell’s Waste Management Institute that has done a lot of research; I believe that that institute is set up more for research and hands-on involvement for the students in research.

EM: They have a composting site as well, and the campus also has a lot of sustainability and recycling initiatives going on too around the campus. So, you know, that’s really great – they’re at the forefront of sustainability education as well at the moment.

WC: Oh yes, uh-huh.

HF: Yeah.

WC: University of Georgia also has some research going on in vermicomposting at one point, as does SIU Carbondale here in Southern Illinois – they have a major vermicomposting program; they utilise…they grind all of the food scraps from the cafeterias on campus, feed it to worms in an – at least – thousand square foot building, and then take the vermicastings and utilise that on campus. So, it’s a hands-on opportunity for the student workers to be involved, and to learn about it. It’s also that some of the professors there are conducting research and involving students –

EM: Yeah, and another example off the top of my head as well would be the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, which does a lot of work with renewable energy – they’ve installed a biogas facility at the university, that’s totally run by the students and provides great training for anaerobic digestion and biogas production – so there’s that as well.

But as you say, there doesn’t seem to be a formal, stand-alone university course or curriculum based around compost – how far away do you think we are from Universities offering these kinds of courses?

WC: There is a change on the horizon, and groups like Compostory.org are helping to usher in that change. I do believe universities and colleges are waking up to the value of multi-disciplinary approaches. The students want it. Hands-on experience is so valuable, along with the research aspect and the higher-order thinking and writing skills. The hands-on stuff and service goes right along with it. And industry, I think, is arriving at the same point as education is, where we see a need for some change, and more collaboration.

EM: And you’re developing a curriculum for Kankakee Community College as well. I was wondering what role do community colleges play in composting education today in the US?

WC: Community colleges have served more-or-less as the “in-between” the universities and industry and trade associations that are providing very specific, very targeted short-term training, you know, for a specific topic. Community colleges can help take that and put that within a context of industry, but also giving academic credit, which then can be build upon for these further certifications, degrees, and so forth. I think that all three levels need to begin to work more closely together, and it is beginning to happen.

The National Recycling Coalition, along with RONA (the former recycling organisation of north America) – in which there are many movers and shakers out there in California, Hunter – put together three years ago a national committee for sustainable resource management learning standards; and from a variety of sectors: business people, processors, academic folks, non-profits…this committee agreed and put together twenty-five standards for learning, which any state recycling organisation, trade association, or college, really, could or should be using if they want to formalise and teach some standardised sustainable resource management – it’s not just recycling coordination anymore.

And they’re brand new, I mean literally hot off the presses. They just were announced and, kind of, finalised late in 2012. There are several state recycling organisations that are considering implementing them, or being more-or-less, quote-on-quote certified to teach sustainable resource management. And again, I’m Vice President of IRA here in Illinois, I am chair of the Certification Committee here; we have a hope and desire of taking these two classes: one is currently being taught through Kankakee Community College online, completely online. The second course will be available this summer. And then the students in that course will be offered the opportunity to test for certification to become a nationally certified sustainable resource manager through IRA – through the Illinois Recycling Association – because we’re using these new learning standards.

Now, I’m kind of putting the cart before the horse because we haven’t formally been accepted yet, but I’m pretty sure we will be. We’re excited about it, we’d like to see it grow and again, in my mind, this collaboration – academically, but also with industry driven, up-to-date, cutting-edge information on best management practices, on current best technology…. That stuff comes from industry, you know? And where industry can collaborate and advise, and – whatever – help provide and create this kind of curriculum, there you will have very valuable curriculum.

EM: Yeah. That’s really great points there, actually. And what would be the outcomes, then, of having such widespread composting education do you think?

WC: The ultimate outcomes? I guess the ideal would be that composting begins to be accepted as an integral part of a sustainability curriculum, as well as any sustainability goals at any local government or community program, any organisation program. That there would be a greater number of jobs specific to composting in the economy as a result of professionalising it academically and, you know, through the trade associations.

And just that…you know, there’s going to be more of a cultural buzz as time goes on. There’s definitely a paradigm shift, a sea change occurring. There is a greater push for sustainable practices that capture and manage natural processes, as part of every day business and as part of our learning and education. So, I just see…including composting education and training at any level – formal or non-formal – that’s the way we’re moving.

EM: Yeah, definitely. And last question now – Wynne, you’re involved in course development – what needs to be done, and what types of support is needed in order to develop such a curriculum?

WC: Well, federal dollars, grant dollars, private foundation dollars; to help a college or a professional trade association…you know, it takes time. I mean, a college course – a university course – the general rule of thumb is that it takes twenty-five weeks full-time to develop a new course from scratch. Two courses – you’re talking a full year just to develop two new courses, and that would include researching all the existing stuff that’s out there right now. That’s a chunk of someone’s time. So that’s valuable, you know? And the knowledge of how to pool all those resources together, and…. So anyway, what’s needed is support for the college or the trade association to be able to do that.

HF: Yeah, and that’s actually how we got our compost training that we’re doing here next week. Originally the first year’s offering was funded by a grant from the USDA SARE program – which is the US Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education – they funded the first training in 2012. And then, this current training, we have also received some funding from a local charitable foundation, the Miossi Foundation, so…

WC: Yeah. So there are often grants available through federal agencies, through colleges, to help with something like that. Honestly, unless trade associations have a 501 C3 designation, I doubt that they would, many of them would be eligible for a lot of the larger foundation grants. But small grants, even, can help. So, getting a little bit of funding together to begin with is a key start.

But beyond: assuming you have somebody that’s going to drive the bus and dedicate a significant amount of time to it, then begin researching. You would have to begin researching the curriculum that’s already out there, the industry and trade association-type trainings that’s already out there. I already researched – I don’t believe there are learning standards out there, but that would be a great thing to begin to pull together. You know: what would be the learning outcomes of such a training. I.D. the proponents in your area: those that are interested for environmental reasons, as well as those who are interested because it could be a value-added operation for their existing business. Fill in the blanks; bring them to the table and fill in the blanks. Decide what training is already available, where we need to go, and then fill in the blanks in-between; what the students should know, and how to get it to them.

And I’m a firm believer, as Hunter is, that a blend of formal resources and some classroom learning, with the science behind it…. Compost is perfectly suited for STEM: for science, technology, engineering and math – all of those skills can easily be applied when studying and/or implementing composting. So: bring everybody to the table, come up with a good product, with very specifically identified learning outcomes…someone is going to pick it up somewhere along the line. That would be my advice.

EM: It’s great advice. And that’s all we have time for today now, so I want to thank you both for coming on the show to talk to us.

WC & HF: Thank you.

EM: Okay all the best now, bye!

Toxic Dump Transformation: A Story from India

This episode corresponds to Lesson 1 of our online course.

In this tenth episode, Master Composter Peter Ash tells us how he helped transform a hospital dump in Kerala, India, from a toxic wasteland into a lush environment – with a dramatic drop in heavy metal quantities in the soil – by using recycling and vermicomposting techniques.

Thank you to the BioCycle for making this episode possible.

BioCycle, the Organics Recycling Authority, is the leading magazine and website on composting, food waste management, anaerobic digestion and renewable energy from organics recycling. Subscribe to BioCycle and get access to every article published over the last 10 years, and sign up for @BioCycle, our free biweekly e-bulletin. For more, visit www.biocycle.net.

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TRANSCRIPT:

EM: Just to set the scene a bit, Peter, can you tell us a bit about the AIMS hospital and where it’s situated?

PA: The hospital, AIMS: Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences and Research Centre, they call it AIMS for short. And that, it was really a trip, because this had been a twelve-bed hospital about twenty years ago. And it turned, it grew up, like: everything that…where Amma goes, wherever she has a school or any kind of centre, it just goes from zero to a hundred miles an hour in no time.

So this hospital went from a twelve bed hospital to now a fifteen hundred bed, state of the art hospital and research centre, Med school, dental college, nursing college, school of pharmacology, you know, the whole thing. And with Amma, if you can pay, you pay. And if you can’t, you come and you get served, and you bring your family, and the family stays in the guest house while the patient’s being, you know, treated in the hospital, and everybody eats for super-cheap, and you stay until, you know, everything’s fine, and then you go home.

And so, there’s probably seven to ten thousand students that serve over, probably, twelve hundred patients every day. There’s thousands of employees. And it’s all coastal, tropical wetlands environment. And the hospital, it’s about 7 kilometers inland from the Arabian Sea. The city of Kochi, it’s a huge metropolitan area, you know, India is so densely populated. So there’s Edappally and Ernakulam, all these communities that just all run together – it’s just huge and it’s all interconnected with these waterways.

EM: Okay right, so it’s a densely populated area, and a massive hospital.

PA: Mh-hm.

EM:  And often hospitals use incinerators to burn the medical waste – but you were telling me that this one didn’t have an incinerator the first few years, and they were just dumping the medical waste onto the island itself. So, what did the dumping ground look like when you got there – and what did you do?

PA:  Basically, when I got to AIMS, the first thing I did was a big waste audit and a site assessment. And they took me around and showed me different properties, and the property I picked was right across this backwater channel connected to the Arabian Sea, to this big island that’s just, not even a meter above sea level. You know, it’s mushy in places. But, where they had been boating the waste, and the food waste – they were just dumping it in the backwaters – but all the other waste, if they couldn’t just easily recycle it, they were taking it over to the island and they were dumping it in pools of water or burning –

EM: And this was from the hospital?

PA: Yes. And for years before they got the incinerator, they had just been taking the hospital waste over to the island and burning it – right on the surface of the island. They took, like, metal rods, stuck them in the ground and made, kind of a rack so they could get some air in it, and they just put the bags…. I’ve got pictures of when I first arrived on the island where they had red hospital waste, you know, medical waste on this rack where they were burning. And the island, right there where they were dumping and burning was so dead that there was no insects, there was no birds, you know, it was just completely dead. And I said, “okay, this is the spot. This is where we’re going to do it. We’re going to have to build a big roof, so we can compost during monsoon season…”.

So, they said, “Well, what do you need?”

“Yeah, well I need this roof…”

“How big?”

“Well, like, by this, by that”

“Okay”

So, they laid it out and they started digging holes to pour concrete to hold up the pillars to hold this roof up. And then all the dumping and stuff that I’d seen, I said “Well” you know, “no more dumping, no more burning. We’re going to sort through this, we’re going to do better recycling. If it’s recyclable and it’s already over here now, we’re going to wash it and send it back to be recycled. If it can’t be recycling, then we’ll bag it up and we’ll send it to the proper incinerator, but no more dumping, no more burning”.

But when they started digging these holes for the footings, they’re like a meter wide, and they’d dig down so they can pour concrete and get…because it’s like the roof…like almost…our initial roof was almost the size of, like, a football field, because we had to build these big windrows of compost. Here we’re talking each day we were going to be composting six to eight metric tons of material a day. So, we’re building these long windrows, you know. We build a pile and then we’d add onto it the next day and add onto it the next day, until we run out of space. So when they start digging these holes, all this stuff starts coming out of the black mud. Syringes, blood vials – with blood still in them – catheters, IV bags, medicine packets…I mean, it was just, it was nasty. It was terrible. And I’m going, “Oh my God”. And they had told me the reason that Amma wanted me to come back was to start composting because they were under a lot of pressure from the State Pollution Control Board. And when I saw what was coming out of the mud, then I understood that, okay, this is not about composting the food waste, this is about the hospital’s impact on the environment.

EM: Hmm, I see…

PA: And Kerala has laws, I mean, they’ve got an environmental policy, they’ve got laws – state laws, federal laws. It’s just that, enforcing laws – they don’t, like, fine you. What they do is, they tell you “Okay, you can’t build anymore”. And with Amma, everything is growing, you know: more students, more patients, more technology, you know. So everything’s got to keep…they’ve got to keep building. And so, we couldn’t hold still. So we had to show them we were getting better.

And we actually, we cleaned up everything we could off the surface, and if it was recyclable, we washed it and bagged it up and sent it back to be recycled. If it couldn’t be recycled, we sent it back to go into the incinerator. What was buried in the mud we couldn’t do anything about because they hole fills up with water, you know. And this was really black, nasty, dangerous toxic mud, you know, with needles and…so we had to be careful.

So what we did was: once we cleaned the surface up, then we just, we took, like, palm fronds and, you know, things that were growing along the water edge. And we laid them out over the surface of the spongy soil, just so we wouldn’t sink into the mud, and we built our compost windrow on top of that, and then we build another one next to it. In two or three days we’d have a whole row of compost.  And in the island there was a little channel, where they had been boating with the waste and they’d been dumping on either side. And so, on either side of this little channel, we had a plot where we were making compost. And as soon as we’d turned and spread out the compost on one spot, we’d go right back in there and start composting again. And then we’d be turning and spreading on the other side, and we just kept going back and forth, and we did that for six months waiting for the roof to be finished and the floor to be compacted so that we could get a piece of equipment to turn our windrows by equipment.

EM: Okay.

PA: So, in the six months we’d built about eighteen inches of finished compost on top of the black toxic mud.

EM: Mh-hm…

PA: And before we got too far along, I went and I took a soil sample of the mud – about the upper four to eight inches of mud in this one area. And I had it tested for heavy metals. And I asked them to test for every metal you can test for, and there was only one metal that was not found: antimony. But mercury, lead, selenium, you know, arsenic, it was all in there. And it was way over limits. And we knew that was what it was going to be.

I also took a sample of the river sediment because we’re not the only polluters, you know: all that huge metropolitan area – there’s chemicals, and open sewer lines, and you name it, and the rains are running off, you know. But we did find that, there where I sampled where the dumping and burning had been going on, it was more toxic there than in the river, especially for certain metals.

EM: Mh-hm, okay…

PA: And, but anyway, so then, after six months of composting out in the open, we saw that now there’s all kinds of insects and stuff, you know, in the compost and birds are coming, you know, so it’s, like, coming alive – and then there’s seeds sprouting out of the compost. So we just come out and looked at each other and we go, “Hey, that’s pretty cool. Let’s bring in some clean soil now and mix it, and we’ll start planting stuff, you know, and we’ll restore the habitat here.

EM: That’s incredible. And what else were you doing? You were vermicomposting as well, right?

PA: Yeah. And I’d done some research, you know, like, how people were composting with worms in India, and so we build our own, kind of, open tank system: it’s just basically you build walls about waist-high on a cement floor, you put a roof over it, you put netting between the wall that’s about a meter high or less, up to the rood so it’s shaded and so birds can’t get in. And you have a little drainage on the floor so if there’s any liquid leaching out of the vermicompost pile, then you can capture that because it’s got nutrients in it. And so we started a lot of vermicomposting.

And then when we started planting plants, we used a lot of the fresh vermicompost to plant the plants with. So we knew we were inoculating the soil with earthworms, you know: there’s going to be some babies, there’s going to be some hatching eggs. And I knew that, from research that I’d done, that worms actually extract heavy metals out of the food that they’re eating. So getting earthworms into this new ecosystem that we’re building is going to be a good thing.

EM: Yeah, and we’ll talk a bit about what happened with the soil in a minute. Just before that though, can you give me a little bit more information on the logistics of the whole thing, and equipment you were using? How did you…?

PA: You know, everything gets boated over to the island – everything. You know, all the construction materials, all the cement blocks, the sand, the roofing materials, and then, you know, all of our plants for gardening and you know. And then all the food waste and the woodchips and…and then, we found this manufacturer in India that made this agricultural shredder, and then we bought this shredding machine to shred palm fronds and…. But we needed to shred a lot of wet materials too, like fresh coconut and green coconut palm fronds, and that wet stuff tends to clog up a lot of material. And so we found that this shredder machine – we bought a little one and we tested it, and then we had our own mechanics and fabricators and engineers look at it, and we told them what we needed and so we made some modifications to it. And then we took it back to the manufacturer and we said, “Look: we want to buy the big model, in fact we want to buy a couple of them, but we need these modifications build into it, because we’ve got to run a lot of wet stuff through it, and the way it’s designed right now, it clogs up. So we worked with the manufacturer and they built us, you know, the one that we needed.

But then we also needed some compost turning equipment, but nobody in India really makes composting equipment, you know: commercial scale composting equipment – there’s no compost turners, there’s no big filtering machines for compost. So, you know, I found a YouTube video of a farmer in Northern California that built his own compost windrow turner by taking the rear axle out of a heavy truck and just done a bunch of modifications: he welded this big tube onto the wheel hub, and he connected the differential onto the tractor on the power take off, you know, the tractor, to drive this differential.

Then he had this big tube with these paddles welded on it, so that you could lower it down next to the compost pile and you could drive the tractor beside the pile, and this tube with these paddles on it is now going to turn – and the thing is, this tractor is going forward, but this tube, this big metal pipe with these paddles on it, has got to turn the opposite direction; it’s got to be going, like, in reverse, as opposed…you know, so it can lift up the pile with, you know, these paddles welded to it: lift it up and throw it up into the air to get it aerated. And at the same time, we spiraled them around the tubes, so that it would actually throw the edges of the pile towards the middle, and the middle of the pile to the outside. Because that’s what we want: we want the middle of the pile on the outside, and we want the outside of the pile moved to the inside. So, we bought a tractor, and we built the compost windrow turner to put on it.

EM: That’s brilliant. And going back to the soil now – what was it like after all the work you were doing?

PA:  Yeah, so I’ll tell you what, here’s what happened was: last April, I went to the very same site that I took the original sample. And I dug down below the compost and the imported soil, down into the same black mud that I took the original sample from. And so I went and I did the same thing, in the same area, in the same soil layer, and I took that sample in. And it turned out that, like, in the upper eight to ten inches of that same original layer, we reduced three of the metals to non-detectible levels. Two others, we reduced them so that they’re still detectable, but they’re within safe limits for food consumption. There’s still three metals that we’ve reduced by at least fifty percent, but are still too high for human consumption.

EM: That’s still incredible, though, isn’t it?

PA: It is, especially when you consider that so much of the food in India is grown with overdoses of toxic chemical pesticides and fertilisers and stuff, that if that food was tested compared to the plants that are being grown on the island, they probably wouldn’t be much different.

EM: Okay, interesting…

PA: And we did, in just over three years, what we did on that island – reducing the metals the way we did – that’s unheard of! It’s unheard of. You know, and, so we’ve written some papers and I’ve presented this to different conferences…I presented this last fall to the Global Humanitarian Technology Conference in San José, California. We had another presentation at a conference held in India, also late last summer.

EM: Okay cool, so you’ve been busy trying to get the word out about this. And how do you explain to people what happened with the soil – do you know how exactly the results came about?

PA: Yeah, so what we’re finding is, like, there are a lot of different things that are happening, and we don’t know all the answers, you know, that how this could happen so quickly. We know that the earthworms are playing a part; we know that some of the plants are accumulators, or hyper-accumulators or metals. So we can plant certain plants that will pull metals out of the soil. And then, what do you do with the plant, you know? Can you compost it? Can you keylate it? Can you change the form of the metal? And then the earthworms, you know, pulling metals out: what happens when the earthworm fills up with all these metals and then it dies? Well, another earthworm eats it, so it keeps it tied up.

And then there’s some keylation that takes place, and it’s some kind of an ion exchange, especially with carbon molecules, apparently, and where there’s active fungi in the soil. You know, and one of the things we did too was we took a biological testing of the soil. Normally, farmers and gardeners to a chemical soil test, you know, they look for NPK, pH and EC – they look at the nitrogen, the potassium, the phosphorous, you know, that kind of thing. And then they want to know, like, how the chlorides – how salty is the soil. So that kind of a typical chemical test – but that’s just really supporting the chemical companies, because then they want to sell you more nitrogen, or more phosphorous, or something to condition the soil with. But if you just make compost, and you get the organic material, and you get all the microorganisms in the soil, then everything takes care of itself. The soil pH neutralises, and then these metals start to get tied up. They get keylated – they pick up or they lose an ion, and now it’s still lead or mercury, or whatever, but it’s no longer in a toxic form that enters into the food chain.

EM: Yeah, exactly. And it’s amazing to see it actually happening!

PA: Absolutely.

EM: And before we go now – because we don’t have much time – is there anything else you’d like to add, or some advice you’d like to give to people listening in?

PA: Well, you know: whether it’s composting or habitat restoration, or reforestation, or just permaculture design, or even just backyard gardening, you know, the key that I see is that: we just need to look at natural ecosystems – how is nature doing this? You know? What we need to do is mimic nature. Assist nature. As gardeners and farmers, when we see pests or we see weeds, we often ask the wrong questions. We go, “What fertiliser do I need?” or “What pesticide do I need”, you know? And that’s the wrong question. Those are all wrong questions.

We need to look at what’s out of balance in the soil, in the ecosystem. What’s out of balance so that these pests are coming? Why are the pests there, why are the weeds there? These are nature’s cleanup crew. The plant diseases and the insect pests are nature coming in and taking out a plant that can’t live there because something’s missing. And what’s missing is the microbiology. If all the microbiology is in place, then the plant will feed itself and be happy and healthy.

EM: That’s great advice, Peter. But that’s all we have time for now. Thank you very much for coming on the show to speak with us.

PA: My pleasure.

EM: All right, okay thanks.

PA: Thank you.

EM: Bye.

PA: Bye.

Food Recovery & Onsite Composting in Schools & Institutions

This episode corresponds to Lesson 3 of our online course.

In this ninth episode, we examine a food recovery school program in Oakland, USA, with program director Kelly Ernstfriedman and an onsite composting program in Ioannina University, Greece, with Prof. Georgios Pilidis, in order to get a vision of how a 360 solution can work in schools and other institutions.

Thank you to Big Hanna Composter for making this episode possible.

The original since 1991, and now installed in more than 25 countries, Big Hanna’s five standard models of on-site in-vessel composters range from 75 to 2400 kg of food waste per week, for housing areas, prison, schools, canteens and restaurants. For more information, visit www.bighanna.com

(more…)

TRANSCRIPT

 

Kelly ErnstFriedman:

EM: Let’s just start I suppose with a little background information – you started the Food for Kids program back in May 2013, yeah?

KE: We did, we did. We were approached by Nancy Deming, who works for – she’s a consultant for the Oakland Unified School District, and she works for a program called Green Gloves, which is all about greening the Oakland school system. And she had been seeing a lot of the waste that’s been going on – she works on various initiatives in the schools, including a sorting program, which is the basis for our food donation program. Instead of everything going to the landfill, she’s working on getting the schools to sort their trash at lunch. And then they have something called a Food Share, which is basically, the kids – especially at the elementary and middle-school age, where their bellies are a little smaller and they’re required to take a certain amount of food and they often don’t eat it. So the Food Share bin gives them a chance to put that in there and if someone else decides “hey, I want another milk” then they can take that during the cafeteria period. But then after that cafeteria period, that food goes into the landfill, or the compost.

And so Nancy really wanted to connect with someone who could take that food and then donate it. Thanks to the Bill Emerson Food Recovery Act, which was passed in the U.S. In 1996, organisations are encouraged to donate food. It’s sort of a liability coverage that says that unless there’s gross negligence, non-profits can take this food, or businesses can donate this food and get it out to people that are hungry. So, we kind of had the legislation there behind us, we just needed to figure out a system that worked for Oakland. And we started our pilot in May 2013 with two schools – two elementary schools – and we recovered over three thousand pounds of food, and worked with about thirty families just in about six weeks.

EM: That’s great. And how much would you recover now per month, say?

KE: We…total, we’ve gotten about, I think forty-five hundred pounds of food in the last six months. And we average probably thirty to fifty pounds a week. One of the schools that we’re going to be starting in the next couple of weeks – we did a survey and they had fifty-five pounds of food from one day of lunch.

EM: That’s a lot of food.

KE: It is. It is (laughs).

EM: And does it all get distributed then?

KE: Yeah, all of the poundage that we note – all of that gets distributed.

EM: That’s very good. And to touch on the regulations again, is it primarily the regulations that are preventing schools and other public places from distributing food?

KE: It is, it is. Because the food comes from the Government, there’s very strict rules on what can and can’t go back to the kitchen, and that’s been another part of the program as well, sort of educating the kitchen managers and staff about what can be returned. So for example, if they have apples or pears that go out and go into the Food Share; if those are in pretty good shape, and the kitchen manager has the opportunity to make the call and say “you know what, I think I can use these again tomorrow, or the next day, they’re going to hold up”, they can take those back into the kitchen, clean them off and re-serve them. Anything that hasn’t had a, kind of, heat differential, that can go back in and be re-used.

But anything that has had some kind of temperature change – we see a lot of cartons of milk, for example – some of our schools are satellite cooking kitchens, which means packaged food comes in that gets heated up, so they’ll have a plastic wrapped piece of pizza, or a burrito, or a baked potato with cheese and broccoli – anything like that would have to go into the trash before we came along. But now that we’re here, then immediately after the period, that goes back into refrigeration or the freezer, depending on the site – and then that is distributed either to the students and their families during a distribution period at the school, or it’s connected with a community partner: a soup kitchen, a church – some organisation doing food assistance – and is given back to the community.

EM: Right, okay. And do the schools that you work with compost their waste already, or is that something that hasn’t been done yet?

KE: Yes. That’s actually a great first step to setting up a type of food recovery program, because you want to make sure you’re getting the food – you don’t want to have to actually, you know, go through the bin and do a dumpster dive type exercise where you’re cleaning things off. So having a sorting system that includes compost and includes a food share is absolutely essential. And that’s the first step in how we choose the schools that we’re expanding to is do they already have a Green Gloves in place, or can we get a sorting system up and moving relatively quickly so we can begin the food recovery.

Because that’s just…that takes a little bit of onus off the process when that’s already done, and you can say “okay, here’s the box of food that gets donated – great, that’s done, that’s neatly packaged – let’s hand that off to the parents,” or “let’s hand that off to the community organisation”. So definitely, I think composting and sorting is vital.

EM: Excellent, so they work well together side-by-side?

KE: Yeah.

EM: And would you say that composting and the food recovery program are a good educational tool for students as well?

KE: We hope so. That’s actually, sort of, the next phase that we would like to work on is getting the education component in there, because we have hand outs and, you know, we talk to the parents and the kids. And that’s one of the feedback from one of our pilot schools, Brookfield, saying “this is really important, this is the message that we want to be sending our kids, is that food…you know, food is a resource, food isn’t something you take a bite of and you throw away and you really have to think about that”.

Thankfully, you know, because of Nancy’s work with the Green Gloves program and the sorting, the kids are already getting a sense of that. One thing that’s really fun to see when we do site visits is; we go in at lunch and you see these kids, especially the youngsters that come over, and they’re really looking at the bins and saying “okay, is this landfill? Is this compost? Is this food share?” And you just, kind of, see them working it out, and then they put something in the food share bin and we say thank you, and they just get this big smile on their faces. So, you know, it’s definitely a group effort and all of these different things working together – the teachers as well have been very supportive of the program, and you know, they want to see the kids getting more nutrition and understanding about food and the food system, so

EM: Yeah, well that’s never a bad thing. And I know you’ve been running this in schools, but could you see this type of program running well in a university, say, or other types of spaces, like maybe restaurants, for example?

KE: I think that, not necessarily this program, but there is potential for other programs to work. In the United States, we have a lot of really exciting initiatives going on: there’s the Food Recovery Network, and Food Recovery Network is all about creating student-run food recovery networks in universities. And they have, I want to say over twenty or thirty schools that are participating, and then they had another sixty requests from students that want to start a program. There’s also really great restaurant initiatives that are going on. Out of Austin Texas there is Go Halfsies, which is a group that’s working with restaurants to help them offer smaller portion sizes. So they would have a meal, it would be half the size and the difference in price would be donated towards a hunger relief organisation. You know, there’s all different kinds of ways that businesses can get involved, really specific to what their business is. Restaurants have a great opportunity to donate food and to create compost programs. Schools, especially, you know, large universities with multiple cafeterias – there’s a huge opportunity there to divert waste, and also to get students involved in the process, which I think is really important as well.

EM: Yes, definitely. And for those listening in who might be interested in setting up a similar initiative – could you maybe give a bit of general advice or share some insights into how best to go about setting up a program like this?

KE: I think the biggest thing, you know, regardless of what country or what school district you’re in, is really working with the school and working with the parents and the staff. Because with any new program, to make it work you have to make sure it works with what’s already going on. Particularly with a resource-strapped staff, you don’t want to come in and say “here, we’re going to give you a whole bunch of new tasks”, you know. So, talking with them about the problem of food waste, and then figuring out a way that’s going to work best for them. Some schools are going to need to do distribution twice a week, some are going to need to do daily. You know, looking at the amount of surplus you have is a great way to start: doing some kind of survey with the kitchen management – just to look at okay, “how much milk are we getting in? How much extra food do we have?” And really working with each site and making it very site-specific. There’s not, sort of, a once-size-fits-all. There’s definitely steps you want to take in terms of talking with the schools and finding parent volunteers, or if you don’t have a strong parent volunteer group, which several of our schools don’t, you can partner with another community organisation. We have several schools that are going to start – they’re going to be working with community partners (churches and soup kitchens) that are going to come and pick up that food every day. So, it’s a much smaller ask for the community, but we’re still recovering that food, we’re still getting that food to people that are in need.

EM: Yeah, which is the most important thing. And what’s the future vision for food shift then?

KE: The large vision for Food Shift is that we can create a fee-for-service food recovery network. We believe that food recovery should be compensated in the same way that waste management is. In the same way that we pay for people to pick up our trash, our recycling, food recovery should be valued in the same way. It’s difficult with school districts because they’re so resource-strapped, but what we see, sort of the larger vision, would be policy changes around food recovery. So, you know, cities and municipalities, and maybe even the federal government would eventually put money behind this and say “yes, this is important, we’re going to pay for this service”. So not necessarily the schools themselves, and it’s not going to be, you know, it’s not a get rich quick kind of thing, but ideally yes, that that would be compensated. But that’s a much further down the line vision.

 

EM: That was Kelly Ernstfriedman, program director of the Food for Kids program, with some great insights and advice on running a food recovery program in a school setting. We go into detail about potential models for edible food recovery in lesson 3 of our online course, and list the key steps on how to get started.

And while our next guest doesn’t work directly with a food recovery program, he does have great experience with onsite composting in a University campus. Professor George Pilidis is a member of the Biological Applications and Technology department of the Ionannina University in Greece. Ioannina University is the first to start composting its waste in Greece and Prof Pilidis has been monitoring the composting program’s performance very carefully, so we’ll get into a little bit of detail on how it all works, and any issues they had along the way.

 

Prof. Georgios Pilidis:

EM: So Georgios, Ioannina is the fourth biggest university in Greece, I’ve heard you started recycling back in 2008, but when did you start composting organics?

GP: So I have to say, we have started earlier. Fifteen years ago, we had started to recycle our laboratory waste. This was the first step, and a very important one, because we were the first university [to do it] in Greece. We have started for the management of the solid waste in 2009, and the composting system was part of the solid waste management within the university campus; where we have approximately twelve thousand students – undergraduate students – plus two thousand post graduate students, so in total, fifteen-thousand people are living in this area.

EM: Okay, you must have quite a few restaurants and canteens then?

GP: We have two restaurants and we have fourteen canteens.

EM: So yeah, that’s quite a lot.

GP: Yes. (laughs).

EM: I imagine that’s lot of food waste too, then?

GP: Yes, we have approximately one hundred kilograms food waste per day.

EM: Right and how much compost does that make in the end?

GP:  So, according to our studies, fifty percent of the carbon is released in form of carbon dioxide, while the other fifty percent is being converted into a first-class compost. This means we have approximately fifty kilograms of compost per day.

EM: Okay, and how do you manage the compost then, do you sell it?

GP: So, this compost is used mainly by the gardeners of the university, and for this reason we do not have any chemical fertilisers within the campus. As well as, it’s used by people which are working in the university.

EM: Well, that’s a great use of compost.

GP: Yes.

EM: And you were the first university in Greece to start composting?

GP: Mh-hm, exactly.

EM: Yeah, how did the students react, did you have a lot of education to do beforehand?

GP: Yes, the students reacted very positively. We have located this composter directly under the student restaurant, in the basement – it’s an open-air basement of course – and we have also bought an air filter, therefore we do not have any bad smell. The only smell which is coming out is during the maturation process, which is taking place outside of the composter. And we use this composting unit also for didactical issues: many schools are coming here and visiting this composting unit, children, and….this educational process is excellent.

EM: That’s great. Yeah, the educational opportunity, I guess, is a good reason to have a composting unit in a school and university…

GP: Yes.

EM: And can you tell us a little bit about the composter itself?

GP: The composter is a big one – a closed system – the dimensions are approximately five meters long, and two meters in the height, and capacity is four cubic meters, the cylindrical capacity, and this composter is able to treat between four hundred kilograms and one thousand, two hundred kilograms food waste per week. We have approximately six hundred to seven hundred, so we manage this very well.

EM: That’s great. And it’s important to pick the right equipment for your specific needs – what was important in your decision, then, when it came to choosing a unit?

GP: The first and important thing is the material where this composting unit is made. The stainless steel, for example, the quality of the stainless steel is very, very important. And also, of course, the mechanical part, because our composter unit has temperature sensors automatically we have also aeration, and rotation of the drum [it all works] automatically, and this electronics should work very well. But the most important for me is the frame of the composting unit, and the material which is used.

EM: Right, and how do you handle contamination in the input stream of your composting unit?

GP: We are very happy because only one person is responsible for that from the university restaurant. And this person collects the waste, and we made recommendations to him, what kind of food waste he should [put] in the composting unit, and he’s very careful of course. The input is very important: you should avoid to have foreign subjects, for example glass or plastics or stones, or something like that.

EM: Yeah, it sounds like it’s a well controlled system – and this composting program was a pilot program to see if it could work elsewhere, is that correct?

GP: Mh-hm. The pilot program works very well, and Greece as [a] country is really far away from a good system for solid waste management. It’s the biggest environmental problem in Greece at the moment, and we thought that the university should play a pioneering work on that, and we made this, I think, [unclear] with success, due to the fact that we are going in many symposiums and national conferences, and we are presenting this…I think we’re well-known, at least in Greece at the moment.

And at the moment, as far as I know, the municipality of Ioannina is going to buy also such types of composters in order to place them in different places of the city: Ioannina is the seventh-biggest city in Greece with approximately one-hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants. And they’re going to place five or six such composters in places close to restaurants. I do not know exactly the plan, but they’re going to buy five or six composters like this.

EM: That’s great to see it expanding. And permits and regulations apply in most countries and can be quite strict – what’s the situation in Greece and did you have any issues?

GP: No, the Greek government has not any regulations on the quality of compost or the operation of composting units, but there is the European Compost Net, and they set some quality criteria. But according to my opinion, this criteria should be expanded also to organic compounds, not only to heavy metals and xenobiotics or foreign subjects etcetera, or microorganisms, they should also focus on organic compounds and this has been not done. And in order to be a member of this Compost Net, you have to produce a compost which has the regulation which was set up by this Compost Net. But these regulations, according to my opinion [are] very high – for example if you say, for lead for example, it’s approximately one hundred milligrams per kilogram and this is too much.

EM: That’s too much?

GP: Yes, it’s too much for me, or for nickel, it’s twenty-five milligrams per kilogram, this is also too much. They should be more stronger.

EM: Okay interesting, and compost quality standards is an important and quite serious subject that unfortunately we don’t have time to get into right now since we’re running out of time, but George just to finish up – do you have any final words on the success of the composting program or?

GP: No no, we’re very happy to have this composting unit here. We’re very happy that we’re the first university which is using this solid waste management system within the campus. And, of course, many people are coming and visiting us, and I’m going everywhere and giving lectures on that, and I’m very happy.

EM: Well that’s great, that’s great news. Thanks for talking to us today, Georgios.

GP: Okay, thank you very much.

EM: Okay all the best.

GP: Okay, bye.