Composting

Its not really the idyllic part of farming that you’re supposed to talk about. Composting is all about death and excrement and what didn’t succeed and what didn’t make it onto the photographic dinner plate.  I think our aversion to talk and photos of composting makes a lot of sense actually in a culture that goes to all efforts to avoid contact, talk, and thought about those above listed topics.  We work really hard culturally to make sure they get put into a realm both societally and personally where we don’t have to interact with them daily, if ever.  Nonetheless, I love compost and all of the topics it keeps us in touch with in order to aid its process.  And, I love compost as the foundation of next year’s life and fertility.  Farms and animals and soils and humans cannot live without the input of last year’s compost into their lives and so, compost always inspires me about next year’s growth, even as I collect the death of this year’s.  Even as we deal with the darker shadow-side of our existence in the topic of compost, I find so much hope in the framework.  ‘Waste’ is linear.  A material has an end and gets to serve no other process, and in fact becomes a huge burden to many systems.  ‘Compost’ is circular.  A material has an end to the current existence only to get the opportunity to serve and aid the next cycle.

The compost on our farm isn’t an avoided and marginal chore.  We spend at least a third of our farm chore time on composting-related tasks: cleaning chicken manure, trimming & weeding, collecting & processing garden trimmings and weeds, turning & tending 3-5 (depending on the time of year) compost piles, spreading finished compost onto garden & non-edible plant beds, cleaning out food scraps and kitchen trim, collecting dinner prep byproduct as if its gold, wheelbarrowing spent straw, and shoveling out winter bird manure bedding, to name a few.  Our approach to growing vegetables is actually that we are growing soil, which requires constant attention to the nutrients which are available to that soil, and you don’t get nutrients without feeding the soil with organic matter that is the result of animal, human, and plant compost. In a world in which our overall soil nutrient density has a measured decline and nutrient deficiencies literally drive an entire supplement industry and arguably part of the pharmaceutical industry, we care deeply about growing ourselves and our guests food that has living and dense nutrients, minerals and vitamins.  And the only way to do that is to be so nerdily devoted to compost – to the death, the excrement, the byproduct – to hold it in our hands, to smell it, to witness it, to stare at it, to move it, to feel it.  I feel more human practicing my comfort and work of this arena of materials.  I feel more alive and thankful for my life tromping through the world of our collective death cycles.  I feel less afraid and ashamed of my own body as I learn to hold and midwife the transformation of the death and excrement cycles of other bodies.  Chef Tony is fond of saying, ‘in the end, we’re all compost anyhow’.

 If you have a great beverage within arm’s reach as you read this, you can join me in a cheers:

Here’s to the death.

Here’s to the life. 

May we be worthy of the life brought to us through the cycle.