Composting: not just agricultural, but it's part of the natural cycle
Toolbox
By DENNIS SAUER - Published: August 3, 2008
Most people can easily embrace the concept of a society that creates zero waste. The challenge comes when you try to make that concept into a reality. It's not something that will happen by doing business as usual. We'll need to change the way we do business and adjust our perceptions about the type of systems that are at play in our daily lives.
Karl Hammer's Vermont Compost Company is a perfect example, right in our own backyard, of the type of enterprise that can change the concept of zero waste into a reality. Karl converts a resource that is currently being wasted into high-protein food and valuable soil nutrients. Is it an agricultural enterprise? Not in the opinion of the Natural Resources Board.
Wendell Berry suggests that if you eat, you are involved in agriculture. Karl takes food we don't want to eat, feeds it to chickens, mixes it with manure and other bulking agents and turns it into eggs, compost and potting soil. To the people who eat his eggs and the farmers and gardeners who use his compost and soil mixes, he is very much in the business of agriculture. He is an important part of the agricultural cycle. Do much of his inputs come from off his farm? Yes, but that could be said of most farmers. If we look at farms through that lens, the Natural Resources Board may be seeing an increase in their workload.
It is not uncommon for farmers to use a bulk of their inputs from off the farm. Many organic vegetable framers rely on Karl's potting soils to raise transplants in greenhouses so they can provide locally produced food over a longer growing season. And many of these farms do not raise livestock. They must rely on other farms, just as Vermont Compost Company does, for the manure to make the compost they are required to use as soil nutrients by organic certification standards – or they purchase compost, like Karl's, which is acceptable under those same standards. Many dairy farms purchase grain or other commodities grown off their farms to feed their cows. If every farmer had to prove that more than 50 percent of their inputs were produced on the farm, there might be a lot more farmers seeing orders to cease operations and acquire an Act 250 permit. Our perception of farmers as self-reliant individuals working the land and using only what they produce on that land is just that – a perception. The reality is quite different. Many farms can only survive with the addition of off-farm income and by relying increasingly on imported (either legally or illegally) labor. We must gauge what is a farm, not by some romantic image of the past, but by the realities of the present.
In the future we may need farmers, as in the case of Karl Hammer, to not only produce our food and fiber but to allow us to return to the land that would otherwise be wasted. Organic materials, including wasted food, make up to 40 percent of the waste we generate. But this "waste" really consists of wasted resources that should be captured and reprocessed – including composted – into products, not burned or buried. By doing so we would be almost halfway to creating zero waste. In my mind, an enterprise that can take leftover food and return it to the soil is not only agricultural; it is an integral component of a system that could allow humans to eliminate waste and rejoin the natural cycle.
Dennis Sauer is a partner in Oenethera Permaculture Design LLP and the Program Development Director for Zero Waste, Inc. He may be contacted at dsauer@zwinc.org.
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