An employee of the Durango Compost Co. holds a precious handful of what is known in farmers’ and gardeners’ nomenclature as black gold. (Known in laymen’s terms as  worm poop.) Vermicomposting is growing in popularity as people find ways to lessen their footprint on the earth./ Telegraph file photo

 

A story of waste & hope

(and worms)

by Joy Martin

Welcome back to our snapshot of La Plata County’s local food landscape. If you were around for the first course in the series, you’ll remember we visited a few farmer-restaurant collaborations and checked out the win-win scenarios of community supported agriculture.

This week, Scene Two opens where your unfinished meal stares at you shamefully, as your mother’s voice echoes in your head “Clean your plate! There are starving children in Africa.” Meanwhile, the uneaten food in the back of your refrigerator revolts in odiferous attacks, rebuking you through an onslaught of stink. Rather than feeling guilty about having eyes bigger than your stomach, get excited that you play a bigger role in this food saga than you might think.

Waste Blows

Let’s kick off this party with some factoids. According to a 2011 study conducted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, about a third of the planet’s food produced for people to eat goes to waste, which is enough to feed 2 billion people.

The ultimate in sustainability: Whitney Jones’ two-wheeled compost retrieval mobile. Each week, he picks up 800 pounds of food waste from local restaurants./ Photo courtesy Durango Urban Agriculture

Besides skipping hungry bellies, wasted food is terrible for the environment. If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world, after China and the United States. And as you already know, the more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the warmer the average global temperature gets, says the website, Greenhouse Gases for Dummies. 

Speaking of dummies, Americans on average throw out 40 percent of edible food. From cutting the crust off bread for PB&J’s to not using the weird, fat stalk at the end of the broccoli, think about the food you’ve not consumed this week. Where does it go?

Usually it goes in the trash, which ends up in landfills, boosting those devilish greenhouse gases, ultimately not helping to save the planet for your children’s great-great-grandchildren and their hairless golden retrievers. 

Before we take this to a dark place and get all gloom-and-doomy, remember that blip in the first series about no small parts, only small actors? Well, small actor, here’s what you can do today and tomorrow and the tomorrows after that until your own body returns to dust.

New Diet Trend: Reduce Food Surplus

“Instead of skipping straight to recycling and composting, think of the front end of waste stream reduction, that is, consumption,” says Rachel Landis, director the Environmental Center at Fort Lewis College.

The EPA agrees, providing us with a handy Sustainable Food Management page that offers everything from the sustainable food hierarchy to advice, like plan your meals each week so you’re only purchasing food that gets eaten, and shop your refrigerator before you go to the grocery store. Who knows? You might discover a lip-smacking stew or refreshing smoothie featuring all of those bruised, shriveled, ugly fruits and veggies.

“Track and map your food,” says Landis. “Make a commitment: ‘I will use all my leftovers.’ And if you eat vegetarian one day a week, you reduce your carbon footprint by as much as 10 percent.”

And before you scrap all and dump everything in the garbage, consider composting, because of that 40 percent of food you throw away, 20 to 30 percent of it is compostable.

Compost is So Hot 

Compost is organic material that can be added to soil to help plants grow. The dummy-proof recipe includes alternate layers of some kind of brown material, like cardboard or wood chips (carbon), then green stuff, like food scraps (nitrogen), and finally water (moisture for breaking down the organic matter). 

Jennaye Derge, of Durango Compost Co., calls this “your average everyday compost,” or thermiphilic. Founded in 2008 by Tim Wheeler, DCC uses this heat-producing method in combination with vermicomposting, which employs the mighty help of earthworms.

“I basically take old coffee grounds from Durango Coffee Co. and feed it to the worms,” says Derge, who, in full disclosure, is also photographer for the Telegraph. “They don’t have teeth, so they break it down like cows with rocks in their stomachs, so it keeps the nutrients in there.”

(There’s actually a thing near their mouths called a “gizzard,” much like that in chickens, that uses sand and soil to grind the food up for digestion, like a processer.)

Digging in There are several options to get your hands dirty, whether it be learning to grow your own tomatoes or turning said tomatoes into salsa to be devoured deep into winter. Upcoming opportunities include: - CSU Extension’s Backyard Food Production Series – 6 – 8 p.m. various Tuesdays starting May 3 ($130 for the 12-week series). The series is designed to help you grow and preserve more food. Learn how to grow your own food, from design and seed starting, to harvest, storage and preservation. Classes take place at the La Plata County Fairgrounds Extension Bldg. Space is limited, so RSVP ASAP with Darrin Parmenter, 382-6464 or darrin.parmenter@colostate.edu. - The Garden Project of Southwest Colorado hosts several free or low-cost classes and workshops throughout the growing season as well. The project is responsible for gardens at Needham Elementary, Miller Middle School, Manna Soup Kitchen, Ohana Kuleana (564 E. 30th St.) and 16 more in LPC. Upcoming is a free Small Space Gardening workshop Wed., May 11, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at Ohana Kuleana. There is also a Jr Gardener Summer Camp in July for the little green thumbs. For details, or to sign up for one or all in the series, go to: www.thegardenprojectswcolorado.org. The Garden Project is also currently seeking backyard gardens, community gardens and farms to include in its annual Tour de Farms on Aug. 20. Folks can contact Darrin Parmenter at darrin.parmenter@ co.laplata.co.us. – Joy Martin

“And then magic happens,” says Derge. “Whatever they poop out is known as black gold. And then you put that shit – literally – on your garden, and it’s the most amazing thing ever.”

This worm poop is more eloquently called casting. Harvested casting is the most organic type of fertilizer you can get, explains Derge. 

“We’re just trying to replicate nature,” says fellow composter Whitney Jones. “First we observe it and then try to copy it. We’re trying to close that loop, because in nature, there’s no such thing as waste.” 

Jones, a 27-year-old engineering and art graduate from Fort Lewis College who pedals around town with a bicycle trailer collecting waste from restaurants, is the founder of Durango Urban Agriculture. 

Like the farmer-restaurant partnerships, Jones says strong relationships with restaurants is critical for creating healthy, nutrient-rich castings. Besides offering the restaurants free bins so that he’s competitive with Waste Management, he also does training with the owners so they know how to separate garbage from high-quality, compostable waste. 

“I don’t go to restaurants with high amounts of contaminants,” says Jones, who is at capacity with just three eateries: Raider Ridge Cafe, Earth Girl Goodies and Durango Natural Foods. 

After picking up no less than 800 pounds of compostable goods from those players each week, Jones starts cooking. He mixes the leftovers with wood chips from Woodchuck tree trimmers, who he trusts to provide “pretty clean trees.”

“I try to be careful to not get something hanging out in Smelter,” says Jones. “I have to be picky there.” 

Then the amalgamation is left to simmer. The heat generated from the composting process is used to heat stuff, like his geodesic biodome, and to kill pathogens, like salmonella on egg shells, says Jones.

Next, he feeds this steaming slop to worms, soldier flies, black maggots or grubs.

“They really boogie down and reduce waste at an incredible rate,” says Jones. “But it depends what you feed them. A banana is gone in a half hour. A pound of waste will be gone in four hours.”

What comes next is, as Miss Derge said, magic.

“Worm casting is worth a fortune,” says Jones, who sells the black gold for $20 a pound. “The silky fine worm poop makes the best sprouts. I sell those to the restaurants. But most of my clients are young moms and middle-aged women who are working on their backyard gardens.”

Jones says it’s not only fun to see Durangoans grow vegetables and get into urban farming, it’s also a really important step to becoming food secure in La Plata County.

(*As this story went to press, we became aware of yet another local taker of food scraps: Table to Farm Compost, which will pick up castoffs from your house for a nominal fee. For more on them, go to www.tabletofarmcompost.com.)

Hope Grows

“We totally could feed ourselves on a local urban scale model,” says FLC’s Landis. 

It’s possible, she adds, but challenging due to our arid climate, lack of farmers and lack of available, irrigated land.

“Seventy-five percent of the nation’s farmers are over the age of 65,” says Landis. “People just aren’t farming anymore.”

The Environmental Center is trying to revolutionize that trend. With agendas like the Real Food Challenge, Zero Waste campaign, and the incubator program, Landis sees it as her job to help graduate students “to be a little army of change makers by advancing sustainability on campus and throughout the community.”

Meanwhile, the rest of us get a taste of how to modify our local food landscape in order to grow closer to our roots.

According to the 2009 LPC food assessment, we only have four days’ worth of food on the shelves in our grocery stores. All the more reason to preserve local lands for agricultural use, says Landis.  

“Imagine if the apocalypse tripped our food supply from other sources,” says Landis, half-joking.

Eighty-year-old founder of The Land Institute, Wes Jackson, says that “if we don’t get sustainability in agriculture first, sustainability will not happen.”

“I have such a crush on him,” laughs Landis. “Jackson basically says, ‘let’s go back to a regional, small-scale economy ... we need to get away from giant agricultural models.’

“Beyond feeding ourselves,” Landis adds, “we shouldn’t be disconnected from our source. Eating locally informs your ethos and paradigm.”

In regards to those young moms purchasing worm poop for their backyard gardens, Landis says, “Heck yeah! The best way to make something not overwhelming is to do something small and manageable. When you see the forest through the trees, it shuts you down. But if you empower yourself to do one thing, that leads to one more thing and then suddenly, there’s hope. Without hope, people don’t take action.”

So regulators, mount up. It’s time to take action. Scene three of our local food landscape is just around the corner as we celebrate one of our favorite ways to support homegrown efforts: the beloved farmers market. As you anxiously await this final course, stress less about cleaning your plate and focus more on your role in the big picture by checking out the above upcoming community events for learning about composting, gardening, waste reduction and more.