Compost happens.
Sure, it makes a clever slogan on a bumper sticker. But how does it
happen? And who really wants to know?
As it turns out, more people than one would think.
Since its founding 12 years ago, the Maine Compost School at Highmoor
Farm in Monmouth has served more than 600 students from throughout the
United States and around the world. The school is an outreach effort of
the University of Maine Cooperative Extension; Maine Department of
Agriculture, Food and Rural Resources; Maine Department of Environmental
Protection; and Maine State Planning Office.
Some who enroll in the certificate program want to learn how to manage
organic waste more efficiently. Others come from municipalities in
search of a cost-effective way to reduce what they send to the landfill.
And increasingly, students come in the hope of starting a business.
"When we first started out, people didn't understand what compost was; I
don't think the market was there," says Mark Hutchinson, an associate
Extension professor who is on the school's faculty. "The demand has
increased tremendously, which consequently creates business
opportunities. Today, we've got people who can't produce enough compost
for the demand."
For the uninitiated, compost is fully decomposed organic matter that is
added to soil to improve its structure and nutrient profile. When
managed correctly, a compost heap won't attract vermin or other pests,
and it reaches a high enough temperature to eliminate most pathogens and
kill any weed seeds.
The end product plays a key role in soil fertility. Healthy soil is a
"living biological system," according to Hutchinson, and compost
provides food for the organisms that drive that system. It makes
nutrients in the soil more readily available to plants, and it improves
drainage and air circulation, as well.
John Beyer of Commercial Landscape Management in South Portland knows
compost is good for plants, but that's not why he got into the business.
He and his crew were producing 10 to 15 cubic yards of grass clippings a
day, six days a week, 30 weeks a year - and paying $8 per yard to get
rid of it.
"I kind of started experimenting with composting on my own, and I was
doing a horrible job of it," Beyer recalls. "I really thought all I had
to do was lump up my products, but it became a big, slimy, nasty mess."
When he attended the Maine Compost School four years ago, he learned how
to combine ingredients such as leaves, sawdust, grass clippings and the
like to create a balanced - not slimy - product. His company now offers
a high-quality compost-loam mixture and straight compost to clients. And
today, other landscapers pay him to dispose of their grass clippings.
"We'll take it, turn it over and sell it the next year," Beyer says.
"It's double-source revenue. From a business perspective, it has saved
us on disposal fees, and it made us a greener company in the eyes of our
customers."
The process essentially turns trash - organic waste that ranges from
leaves to sewage sludge to animal carcasses - into treasure. And it has
large-scale composters seeing green, both environmentally and
financially.
"Our landfills are starting to fill up, and transportation to other
states is expensive, so many municipalities and farmers have decided to
compost and market it to home gardeners as a soil amendment," Hutchinson
says.
That need is what drew Michael Conway of the Bethlehem, Pa., Recycling
Bureau, to the compost school last summer. Annually the city collects
20,000 tons of leaf and yard waste from residents. When Conway and his
colleagues decided to expand their composting capacity, they knew just
where to turn for help: The Maine Compost School.
"It's known across the country," Conway says. "This is the primary
compost school. It's that well-known and the reputation is that high."
The school is an outgrowth of the Maine Compost Team, which includes
representatives from the Maine Department of Agriculture, Food and Rural
Resources; the Maine Department of Environmental Protection; the State
Planning Office and UMaine Cooperative Extension. When the team came
together in 1991, there was no such thing as a compost industry in
Maine.
The team was providing assistance to communities, businesses and farms
trying to reduce, reuse and recycle their organic waste. Over time, more
and more compost operations started with the team's help. Training of
the operators was done on an individual, as-needed basis. As the
industry grew, the need for training also grew, to the point where
individual instruction at each compost site no longer made sense. In
1996, the team decided it was time to look into offering classes on a
regular basis.
After several months of preparing the agenda, planning program details
and development of hands-on activities, they were ready to offer the
program to Maine composters. But the team was shocked to discover the
demand was not just in Maine. Students started showing up from all over
the country and the world.
Over time, the school's curriculum grew to include marketing and
networking techniques, in addition to recipe-building, safety and vector
management.
"We've had a shift in the type of people - from those who wanted to know
what composting is to municipalities interested in waste management and
people who are interested in starting their own business. They see this
as a viable business," Hutchinson says.
To that end, the team started bringing in industry leaders to serve on
the faculty, such as Wes Kinney of Kinney Compost in Knox, Maine, and
Carlos Quijano of Coast of Maine Organic Products in Portland, whom
Hutchinson calls "one of the premier marketers of compost in New
England, if not the United States."
Today, the school is internationally known. The 2008 summer session
brought in students from Puerto Rico, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York,
Rhode Island and Maine. Since its founding, it has attracted people from
48 states and 28 countries.
The lectures are held in Highmoor's barn, while the hands-on classes
take place in a clearing down a dirt road that winds through the farm's
acreage. A recent $56,000 Maine Economic Improvement Fund grant provided
an asphalt pad and buffer areas to catch any leachate that may run off
from the long compost piles, called windrows, or the piles of raw
materials, such as chicken manure, apple pomace, leaves and wood chips.
This is the learning laboratory, where students can experiment with
different recipes and "ingredients." Here, the team has successfully
turned everything from horse carcasses to a dolphin - yes, a dolphin
from the University of New England that had washed ashore - into "black
gold." And because the folks at the Maine Compost School really know
what they're doing, the only off-putting odor in the air comes from the
pile of chicken manure. Everything else smells like moist soil.
The ability to compost almost anything organic is essential, because
everyone who comes to the school has what Hutchinson calls a "problem
ingredient" - too much of one thing. For a student from a Jamaican
canning plant, the ingredient was ackee pods; the fruit's flesh is a hot
commodity, but the leathery pods aren't. For a farmer, the problem
ingredient might be horse bedding or cow manure. For a municipal worker,
the ingredient might be sewage sludge.
"It's not so much the materials you have, but how those materials are
put together," Hutchinson says. "We try to teach methods and technology.
That allows you to go back and apply it. People want to know: How do you
build that recipe? What do you look for in a good pile? What does it
look like? Feel like? Smell like? What do the temperatures tell you? We
really want them to have the ability to transfer knowledge from one
situation to another."
The setup at Highmoor may not work for a city that wants to reduce
landfill waste or a farmer who'd like to turn an old potato conveyor
into a compost bagger. That's why the schedule includes field trips to a
variety of compost operations that show students what is possible from
industry and waste-management perspectives.
For the Maine-based businesses and towns that have sent representatives
to the school, the possibilities are endless - and inspiring. Take, for
example, the Harraseeket Inn in Freeport. When Andy Ono came on board
seven years ago as a purchaser, the inn was producing 40 cubic yards of
waste a week - and paying someone hundreds of dollars each month to haul
it away.
Ono grew up on farms, so he knew that the food waste could be turned
into compost. And for a facility whose mission statement includes
sustainability, environmentally sound practices and supporting local
agriculture, it seemed like a logical fit. So Ono turned to the Maine
Compost School to learn the finer points - the science behind the
process and all the variables to consider when running such an
operation.
What started as a cost-cutting measure for the inn has blossomed into a
closed-loop system: Food scraps are collected on-site and trucked to a
local farm. There, they are turned into compost, which the farmer then
applies to the fields where produce for the tavern is grown. Today, the
inn produces less than 8 cubic yards of waste a week, saving hundreds of
dollars - and, in some ways, the environment.
"Done
right, it can touch a lot of things. It can help a lot of things.
Economically it has helped, and obviously, environmentally it has helped
too," Ono says. "It's full circle."
by Kristen Andresen
May - June, 2009
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