March 23, 2004: One man’s trash is
another man’s treasure. The familiar adage certainly
holds true on Ken Gehringer’s Four Springs Farm, a cash
grain operation in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, where up to
10 tons of food waste from the produce, bakery and other departments
of a local high-end grocery store are delivered for composting
weekly.
Gehringer is one of two
farmers who initially participated in the county’s pilot
program, along with Wegmans grocery store in Allentown and
Chambers Development Company, which specializes in trash hauling
and recycling. When the other farmer dropped out of the program
after the first demonstration year—because a son who
was handling the project went off to college—Gehringer
agreed to take on the entire weekly load, which he turns into
rich compost for his fields. For his troubles, Gehringer also
collects a $20 per ton tipping fee from the grocer.
Wegmans, which normally pays $80 a ton to the landfill for
disposal, saves about $16,000 a year by recycling an estimated
40 percent of its waste—with Gehringer help—into
valuable compost. Of the compostable material brought to Gehringer’s
farm each week, about 60 percent comes from the produce department,
30 percent from the bakery and the rest from various other
departments.
“I’m lucky to have a job with a county that lets
me dream up ways for diverting compostables out of the waste
stream and recycling them for farms,” said Cary Oshins,
composting specialist Lehigh County, developer of the program,
and presenter at the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable
Agriculture (PASA) 13th Annual Farming for the Future Conference.
Getting permission and getting organized
The first phase of the project, which began in 1999, Oshins
explained, was to demonstrate that it could be done. After
a year of planning and bringing on partners, the first load
was delivered in 2000. By 2002, the state was convinced enough
of the effectiveness of the program to develop a permit to
allow farmers to receive up to 500 tons—about 1,000
cubic yards—of grocery store food waste annually. (Previously,
a cumbersome solid waste handling permit would have been required.)
One of the main challenges for the grocer, Oshins said, has
been to train employees to separate the non-meat, non-dairy,
and pre-consumer food waste out for composting. Since this
type of waste is typically nitrogen rich, the county does
its part by bringing the farmer several hundred yards of carbon-rich
material, such as leaves and brush trimmings, annually.
“The store has done a lot of education of employees
and instituted a lot of signage,” Oshins said, adding
that additional labor costs have been minimal. “The
guys are great; they really like doing this. No one likes
to see food go to waste.” (Oshins also stressed Wegmans
commitment to channel any usable food to hungry hands before
discarding it.)
Occasionally, some material gets into the compost collection
that shouldn’t be there, but those incidents are few
and far between, Oshins said. (And, he said, the farmer has
the right to reject any load before it’s dumped onto
his property.)
“Once it’s been collected, then you have to get
it from the store to the farm, and that’s the most expensive
part of the system—by 80 percent—from the store’s
perspective.”
About once a week and at $200 per load, long roll-off containers
specially designed to hold in the materials and smells are
hauled off to the farm. “It gets heavy and wet and it
starts to stink if it stays around too long, especially in
the summer,” Oshins said.
The relatively simple permit process involves a one-time
$500 fee, operations and nutrient-management plans, a site
sketch (but no engineer’s drawings), no bonding process
(as is required by the more expensive and complicated solid
waste handling permit), and no drainage requirements (the
farmer simply prepared a loading pad; ground sawdust works
best). The working farm—as legally defined by the state—must
also be at least 5 acres in size.
On-farm handling
The freshly delivered compost is covered to contain smells
if the farmer can’t get it into windrows right away
(within a week). To form the windrows, the raw compost material
from the grocery store is loaded into a rear-discharge manure
spreader and covered with carbon-rich waste mulch. “This
encourages a mix,” Oshins explained.
It takes about 6 to 8 weeks to make a full windrow, which
is about 5 feet high by 10 feet wide “and as long as
you have room to make it,” Oshins explained. Every two
to four weeks, the windrow gets turned with a front-end loader;
it’s ready for curing and storage at about 12 weeks.
The goal is to maintain enough heat in the center of the pile
to kill potential pathogens; 131°F by EPA standards. Over
the course of the pilot program, Oshins said, the center of
a new windrow typically held a temperature of around 160°F
while the CO2 level of the pile was around 18 percent. Those
levels, he said, dropped in mature compost to around 136°F-150°F
with a CO2 level of about 3 percent.
Ned Foley of Two Particular Acres farm in Montgomery County
was the first to pull an on-farm composting permit from the
state. While he eventually plans to take full advantage of
the grocery store/farmer partnership, Foley currently uses
the roll-off container model predominantly at horse stables,
hauling the manure back with his own truck to mix with landscape
waste.
Making literally tons more compost than he could ever use
on his own farm, Foley began investing in the infrastructure
to process it more efficiently for sale off the farm. Not
only does the microbial-rich compost vastly improve the shaly
and drought-prone soil on his hay and grain farm, but he sells
the surplus for $10 a yard.
“The most fundamental question you have to ask yourself
is ‘is composting appropriate for our farm?,”
offered Foley. “For us it made sense…our organic
content was extremely low.”
While Foley’s operation is not wholly organic, he said
his annual fertilizer bill has dropped significantly, from
$5,000 to around $500. “It just makes economic sense
to do this,” he said.
One nice thing about the compost business, Foley said, is
that it’s not nearly as seasonal as his other farm activities.
But there is a downside, he said. “It’s hard on
equipment. You wear things out quite fast; you go through
a lot of iron, no doubt about it.”
Using a manure spreader allows for a more homogenous mix
and a neater appearance—a plus where neighbors are concerned—Foley
said, “but if you have a tractor, you can do it with
what you already have on hand.”
As Foley began to export more compost off the farm, he invested
in a compost turner. “With a turner I can [turn a windrow]
in five minutes,” he said. “I turn based on temperature;
I don’t turn that often. In 10 to 12 weeks, based on
weather conditions, I may do 6 to 8 turns. With one windrow
that doesn’t sound like much, but if you have 8 to 10
windrows…”
Foley also invested in a 100-horsepower, 4-wheel drive tractor
with a full PTO and a creeper gear that allows him to crawl
over the land at half a mile an hour, or about 2,200 rpms.
This mammoth machine, he said, does quadruple duty—including
loading trucks and turning compost—so that, just like
the farmer, it’s out there working every day. A small
grinder and various screens—which he scoured several
counties to find a rental source for—add a further dimension,
Foley said, allowing him to offer a diversity of finished
products.
Foley cautioned other farmers to go slowly in determining
the level of commitment of time and equipment that would best
fit their individual operations. A several-day class offered
by the Professional Recyclers of Pennsylvania (PROP) was key
in getting him started on the right foot, he said. “We
learned everything we needed to know about composting, and
the cost was next to nothing.”
Foley and Gehringer represent two approaches to utilizing
the state’s new on-farm composting permit. One has made
a successful business of selling compost, though he hasn’t
yet taken full advantage of the opportunity to import compostables
from grocers. The other is taking in as much compostable food
waste as the grocery store can provide and using every bit
of it on-farm.
Oshins offered the following equation: 500 tons of food waste—the
maximum allowed by the new permitting process—equals
about 800 to 1,000 tons of finished compost (after incorporating
the carbon-rich material Lehigh County will bring in free
of charge). No matter what you choose to do with it, that’s
a lot of compost.
The pilot program has worked out many of the kinks in the
system, such as finding a hauler willing to retrofit roll-off
containers that can hold up to the job. Each container costs
the grocer between $3,500 and $4,500. James Chrin of Chambers
Development Company (the hauler working with the pilot program)
recommended at least two such containers for each operation,
in order to maximize efficiencies, if the travel distance
between farm to store exceeds 15 to 20 miles.
Now that there’s a permit in place, Oshins is actively
seeking grocers and farmers to match together. “I don’t
want to approach grocery stores until I know that there are
farmers who are willing to work with them,” he said.
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