Shamik Chandrachood
Starting a fellowship in a rural community in the Central Valley seemed paradoxically necessary. The Allensworth Progressive Association is on a mission to create a regenerative agri-food system in historic Allensworth. While I am supporting them in pursuing this mission, I drive past enormous monocultures every day and a thought has been popping in my head almost every time: we are a society of consumers. Especially when it comes to agriculture and food systems. We plant one cash crop on millions of acres, and spray indiscriminate biocides and broad-spectrum synthetic fertilizers to kill off any other life that doesn’t directly promote the growth of these cash crops. We hardly ever consider the damage we are doing to our soil, the non-food plants that grow within, and the microbial communities that try to make a home for themselves. We utilize ground-disturbing machinery to harvest millions of pounds of two or three crops, and the scary part is most of this harvest goes directly to massive concentrated feeding operations. According to the FAO and the FDA, a staggering 16 billion pounds of food that does end up in our nation’s grocery stores ends up going to waste. In a perfect world we would focus on source reduction: only taking what you need, growing what is necessary to feed ourselves and our animals. Maybe just enough to also use for industrial uses like biofuels/bio-products. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and the fact of the matter is that, in California alone, nearly 6 million TONS of food end up in landfills.
So what do we do about this massive food waste problem? Source reduction seems like the obvious solution but wouldn’t make economic or social sense. In the US, the agriculture industry accounts for approximately 5-6% of the total GDP, or about $1.5 trillion according to the USDA. Not to mention the fact that agriculture represents 10% of total employment in the US. Additionally, having a reserve supply of food in case of extreme climate crises is becoming all the more necessary in the midst of an ever changing and increasingly unpredictable climate. If we are unable to reduce the source of this food waste, the best remedy may be composting.
The idea of composting is pretty simple: rather than just throwing away all this organic matter, we can intentionally facilitate the controlled decomposition of this food waste. This solves a couple of problems; firstly, it alleviates the amount of waste that ends up in landfills. Secondly, it adds more carbon material into the soil which would otherwise be in our atmosphere as a greenhouse gas, and crucially, it creates an overall healthier soil system by returning nutrients to the soil and promoting microbial communities. Declining soil health has been an unfortunate side effect of the agricultural industry and by diverting food waste away from landfills into composting systems, we are helping many microbial communities with one banana peel.
One of my colleagues Nina Weithorn helping finish up the box
As of January 1st, 2022 the state of California enacted SB1383, a piece of legislature that requires all residents and businesses to recycle food and yard waste. It’s no surprise that legislation takes a while to actually occur in communities, especially smaller communities like Allensworth. In an effort to get this community encouraged to start composting early on (before big brother comes in and starts telling not asking), the APA allowed me to host a Community Composting Workshop.
Lecture time! We tried to keep it super brief and really just a space to ask questions
This workshop started with a super brief and very informal lecture about the main components of soil, describing compost and how it can improve soil quality. We talked about how soil has four main components; roughly half is air and water, around 40-45% of soil composition is rocks, minerals, and other parent material, and the last little percentage is organic matter. Among other things, organic matter acts as a source of nutrients, provides structure for the soil, and retains water. We walked through how compost can add organic matter and improve nutrient availability in lackluster soils. Residents were allowed time to ask questions about what organic matter means, specifically what kinds of things make good compost, how they can start at home and how to use compost in their personal gardens. Following this we walked the residents out into the AAES garden site.
Some residents listening to me rant about how compost really does work
As a visual proof of concept, we walked the rows of the garden, observing the unamended mineral soil we had to import, and discussed how no one thought we could grow in mineral soils that looked so deprived. We went through the simple procedures of leveling the beds and layering in a few buckets of compost. It was very apparent that we were able to grow crops despite the low-quality mineral soil and just a little bit of compost, water, and time.
Residents throwing in food waste and increasing surface area by chopping it up
Next, we carried our buckets of food waste to the three-bin compost system we built. The perks of this system are we only need to turn the compost over when we transition to the next stage in the box. Now that the residents got a lecture on what compost is and how to make it, they got to actively participate in adding more “greens” and “browns” into our bins. Importantly the residents were the ones to add everything, I was simply standing back and watching in amazement.
They’re doing it all! I’m just washing out the buckets
Their passion and willingness to listen to some 23-year-old with such intent was really something special. I was very appreciative of the time given and the amount of participation we got from residents. We ended with an open forum discussion on little details; ways to monitor decomposition, best practices, what kinds of food waste you can include, etc. Before everyone left they made sure to grab a bucket for collecting their own food waste. Some residents have been stopping by the community center donating their food waste to our collection systems and a handful have started experimenting in their own backyards.
While the issue of food waste on a global scale is largely unchanged, I hope that residents start to spread the good word on composting throughout the rest of the community and beyond. Hopefully, sometime soon we can start to recognize how some of the most basic functions of the ecosystem can be leveraged for the betterment of society.
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