New Mexico Mercury

“Um…I think the neighbor is playing with poop,” my beloved remarks. He is spying through the glass panel of the front door.

I join him and confirm that yes, the neighbor is, in fact, shaking a dark poo-like substance through a wood-framed sieve. Dark little doo-bits sprinkle over a tarp, like chocolate shavings dotting the icing on a sheet cake.

Incurably curious, I head next door and initiate an interrogation.

My neighbor, Frank LeBeau, is a lean mountain artifact, tan as the San Juan topsoil stretched over the muscular mountains around Durango, Colorado. LeBeau spends a lot of time in that soil, too. A gardener and soil-steward, LeBeau specializes in designing and implementing biodynamic gardens. Working with the Garden Project of Southwest Colorado, he set up a community garden and expanded the garden supplying a local soup kitchen.

I ask about his industrious sieve-shaking, and I expect to hear that he is NOT playing with poo. That this stuff is dark soil, and that Frank’s sifting is some guarded secret of the gardening world—something only he and the quite contrary Marys know to make a garden grow. But Frank confirms: he IS sorting poop.

“I’m sorting out vermicast for my garden,” he remarks.

“Ah.” I nod, trying to seem knowledgeable on all foreign-sounding things like vermicast.

Wise Frank waits out the silence, which forces me to capitulate.

“What is vermicast?”

“Vermi is another word for worms and castings are what they excrete.” Frank finishes answering my question in under a minute, and I think this will end the conversation. But the real explanation requires a year for me to truly digest, understand, accept, and implement.

Should you happen to know, live with, or be married to an individual who deeply adores gardening, then you also know that gardeners tend to be trash-stashers. Somewhere in or near the garden, they keep a midden of scraps. Kitchen scraps and yard mulch combine to form the treasured compost pile. Decked with eggshells. Crowned with banana peels. Swarmed by an entourage of paparazzi-gnats. The compost heap is to gardeners what the fully stocked larder is to a gourmet chef.

Similar to a gardener’s backyard midden, many commercial compost companies adopt the thermophilic compost method, whereby organic materials are heaped into a pile, occasionally stirred, but otherwise left to rot. The right combination of carbon, nitrogen, air, and water in the heap activates bacteria and other microorganisms that feast on the heap. Their digestive gases produce an internally hot (thermophilic) environment that kills pathogens and seeds.

Commercial composting, backyard middens, and vermicomposting are all facets of permaculture. A contraction of “permanent agriculture,” permaculture is a complex schematic integrating complex ecological relationships, water resource management, sustainable architecture, self-sustaining habitats, and a whole lot more.

Simplistically, you could say that our modern agricultural approach has been to plant a seed that will grow and make food or commodities. We nourish and safeguard that seed so that its yield is generous. Permaculture looks beyond the single seed. It nourishes and safeguards the whole plot of land around the seed, all the creatures crawling through or flying over that field, the water and the water’s source. It even aims to nourish and safeguard the humans tending to the seed as it grows. Boiled down, permaculture is sustainable agriculture.  

Promoting healthy soil is integral to permaculture. Improving soil health requires compost.

Compost is a complex organic substance. It is the end result of decomposition. Plant matter. Animal matter. Compounds produced by fungi and bacteria. It all mixes, and with the help of plenty of oxygen, it all reduces into humus (HYOO-mus).[1]  

And humus is an essential component of healthy soil. Unlike sand, which spills and runs loose anywhere, and unlike clay, which compacts thick as Christmas fudge, good soil is actually crumby. The crumbs consist of bits of humus and bits of minerals. Sticky juices oozing out of trillions of microscopic bacteria act as a glue. Finally, fungal strands called hyphae tangle the lumps together. One ounce of soil can hold 54 miles of these fungal strings![2]  

The crumbs provide lots of little open spaces. These spaces allow good soil to act like a sponge, holding on to water during dry times, and providing little air pockets which plant roots can stretch into.[3] So to improve the quality of any kind of soil, the first step is often to mix in humus-rich compost. It can make loose sand stickier, clumpier. It aerates and loosens up clay.

Additionally, the nitrogen and phosphorous in compost feeds plants. Used as a mulch cover, compost can suppress weeds, moisten soil during a drought, and protect against damage inflicted by severe rain or winds. Essentially, if Marvel ever creates a super eco-hero, they could name it Captain Compost!

And just like Hollywood’s muscle-stitched heroes wrapped in protective spandex, compost is here to save the world.

The Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina operates vermicomposting on a large scale. The airport uses 1.9 million red wiggler worms to chow down on the food that travelers toss in the trash and the scraps discarded by all those concourse restaurants. Charlotte Douglas was the first and only airport to vermicompost traveler food waste. The airport now sends 70% less trash to the landfill. And while it took a $1.2 million investment to get the production up and running, airport officials expect to generate a healthy income by selling their compost.

Entrepreneurial vermicomposting doesn’t happen only on such large scales, however. Savvy local business folks get their hands dirty, too.

Through a biting wind that has snuck out of November and into April, Tim Wheeler leads me to a huddle of four wooden boxes, each the size of a Fiat. I help lift the lid and Wheeler pulls back a sheet of plastic. Underneath is a stretch of dark vermicast dotted with furry fruit and moldy veggie bits.

In gardening circles, vermicast is known as black gold, and Wheeler is in the business of selling it through the Durango Compost Company. Established with a friend and hobbyist worm-composter, the Compost Co. began as a way to recycle all the coffee grounds that Wheeler’s other business, the Durango Coffee Company, was otherwise putting in the local landfill.

Wheeler combs through the compost and slick red strings emerge. Worms. Red wigglers, Eisenia fetida, and their cousins, Eisenia andrei, bask in this artificial paradise. With neither arms nor eyes, they swim all day in a sea of soft food. As if they were all linebackers on the high school football team, Wheeler’s worms can chomp down 50-60 lbs of food a day. And like the world’s luckiest teenagers, they mingle in the dark and have lots of casual sex.

According to Mary Appelhof—author of Worms Eat My Garbage, the go-to handbook on worm composting—two worms under ideal conditions can produce 1,500 offspring in six months.[4] Wheeler isn’t even certain how many thousands of worms he has. Ten? Fifty? Maybe more.

“We feed across the top and then collect from the bottom,” he explains as he opens a flap door on the side of the worm-Fiat. The compost is suspended over an empty chamber. Wheeler notes that the chamber has been recently raked out. Otherwise it would be full of worm castings.    

The castings are carefully sifted and gathered into large buckets or smaller bags. These go up for sale at the local farmers market or garden center. While Wheeler hopes to expand his operations in the future, he is at capacity for the time being.

But if compost is really just garbage, why is it so valuable?

Two months after our initial vermiposium, Frank and I reconvene. He razor blades a box into cardboard pasta.

“Vermicast is magic,” he says, explaining how worm castings are packed with humus. The worm poop also acts like an immune booster shot for plants. Each tiny poo-pellet retains special bacteria from the worm’s gut. Plants absorb these bacteria, which protect their leaves and roots from fungal infections. Essentially, vermicompost does more than just reduce waste; it improves overall growing conditions.

Studies conducted by Norman Arancon at the University of Hawaii concur with Frank. Arancon has found that vermicastings suppress a host of plant diseases and pests, all with names evil enough to be on Sauron’s roster of dark armies in Middle-earth: pythium, verticillium wilt, rhizoctonia solani, and tomato hornworms.

Frank plops the brown linguine box bits into a bucket of water. As they soak, he fills the bottom of a Rubbermaid bin with moist leaves, bits of wood, and shredded paper. The bin is speckled with holes, as if it had been mauled by a psychotic woodpecker. In truth, it was Frank’s power drill.

“The bin has to be aerated. It has to breathe, or else you’ll build up anaerobic bacteria,” he says.

“And those are bad?” I ask.

“Oh yes,” he nods. “You want aerobic bacteria.”

Instantly, I imagine bacteria with fuzzy head and wrist bands. They do bun-and-thigh toning exercises that make Jane Fonda proud.

Frank seems to sense my imagination running away again. He presses on and informs me that since worms don’t have teeth, they need bacteria to soften up the food in the bin.

“Aerobic bacteria survive in places with plenty of oxygen. Anaerobic bacteria can live without air. But they produce vinegars and acids that don’t smell very nice.”

This is why the food rotting in your trash can reeks. It gets no flow of oxygen, so anaerobic bacteria settle in and emit smelly hydrogen sulfide and ammonia[5] farts. These same conditions are present in landfills.

Frank dumps a bowl of scraps from his kitchen. Celery, spinach, banana peels, fruit cores all combine in a pretty mélange. Over this salad, he sprinkles a bit of blue corn meal.

“Worms have gizzards, like chickens,” he comments when he sees the skeptical arch in my eyebrows. “They need some grit to help them digest.”

He dumps a bowl of worms on top of the scrap casserole. The worms dive under the food scraps. Because they “see” through their skin, the sun overhead is more than blinding to them. Frank scoops out the cardboard noodles and wrings them out. He slathers these gently over the eroding pile of wrigglers. He sprinkles on another layer of moist leaves, which with the cardboard will act as the worm’s bedding. Bedding replicates the damp, soft detritus of a forest floor.

Frank snaps on the lid and voila! A brand new doo-it-yourself worm bin!

Technically, my brand new worm bin.    

Composting either via worms or thermophilic midden “heaping” is one of the greenest activities that average persons can incorporate into their home routines. Besides creating a substance that can improve the soil around their homes or in their flowerbeds, composters are reducing their household trash.

More importantly for the planet, at-home composters reduce the amount of trash they would otherwise contribute to a landfill.   

Globally, landfills are in a crisis. Many have run out of room to dump, while others are still dealing with the toxic legacy of buried trash. In Albuquerque, seven of the city’s 26 former landfills require flammable gas and ground water contamination monitoring. Under the vast vacant lot near Paseo del Norte and Alameda, where Balloon Fiesta-goers park their RVs, lies the rotting remains of the city’s Los Angeles Landfill. The Rio Grande Chapter of the Sierra Club reports that a gas-extraction system installed at the site removes 3.4 tons of toxic gas daily. But when it is not belching airborne toxins, the Los Angeles Landfill spews a plume of pollution that crawls ever closer to the aquifer.

Burning trash produces boatloads of carbon dioxide, one of the leading greenhouse gases that chews away at the ozone and contributes to more volatile climate change. Methane gas is another delinquent bashing through our feeble atmosphere. 25% of the methane in the U.S. comes from biodegradable waste buried in pits or stacked to rot in landfills.[6]

Hoping to do more than curb its urban waste, the city of Boston recently proposed an ambitious, multimillion-dollar compost facility. The city already diverts and composts yard waste outside in a huge thermophilic heap. But with the new indoor facility, the city wants to capture and compost yard and food waste while converting the heat energy into electricity for 1,500 homes.

To date, Seattle and San Francisco are the only US cities that mandate city-wide residential green-waste recycling. This means everyone must recycle their yard trimmings and food scraps. San Francisco alone extends that mandate to its businesses and apartment dwellers.

By 2010—just one year after the mandate—San Francisco was hauling in and recycling 500 tons of food waste each day. That’s like discarding 167 Blue Whale tongues every day! San Francisco wants to be 100% waste-free by 2020.

Operating out of similar environmental concerns, Soilutions, Inc. in Albuquerque contracts with a vast network of businesses and community partners like UNM, CNM, Whole Foods, and others who want to keep their food waste out of the landfill. For a small fee, Soilutions will collect food scraps from homes or businesses. According to their website, Soilutions diverts 32,000 cubic yards from Albuquerque-area landfills annually.

The New Mexico Recycling Coalition launched an aggressive food waste management initiative in early 2014. Thanks to a $50,000 grant from the The Walmart Foundations State Giving Program, the New Mexico non-profit has been able to target the food streams in Santa Fe, Rio Rancho, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces. NMRC Executive Director English Bird states that food waste is the “single largest type of material entering our landfills.” Americans alone throw away 40% of their food. Meanwhile, notes Bird, “15% of US households don’t know where their next meals will come from.”

In a press release, the NMRC states that the bulk of the grant will be used to “reduce food waste going to landfills,” “divert edible food scraps to feed the hungry,” “create compost to build healthy soils,” and “raise awareness amongst food-handling businesses.” 

Additionally, the NMRC earmarked about $20,000 which will be awarded as sub-grants to local businesses and municipalities looking to launch compost initiatives and food waste collection. NMRC Deputy Director Sarah Pierpont anticipates that the recipients of those sub-grants will be announced in the coming days.

While the larger municipalities in the state are taking greater responsibility for their food waste, my beloved and I are shining examples that you need neither grants nor business acumen to save the world. Over the span of many months, we have taken on the joys (and horrors) of worm composting. We squeal in wonder when our kitchen scraps dissolve in our worm bin. We gag when anaerobic bacteria populate our bin—the result of too much food and not enough air. (Full disclosure: we crammed in our Halloween Jack-o’-lanterns and watched them smile away the rot.) But with Frank’s help, we routinely restore our bins to a healthy nirvana. And we cheer whenever we harvest a batch of black gold.

Once sifted from the bedding and the still-recognizable chunks of decomposing food, vermicast is lovely. It looks like a mound of Oreo cookie crumbs. It is softer than velvet and as weightless as bubbles. Does it stink? No. In fact it has almost no smell whatsoever. Sometimes it exudes the minty-moist perfume of a forest drenched with rain.

We spoon-feed vermicompost to our house plants and watch them swell into an Amazonian jungle. With no food to stink up our trash can, we go weeks without needing to take out the trash. Clearly, we have taken our first big steps toward living greener lives.

It hardly seems helpful: a pair of doo-it-yourself worm composters versus a vast global expanse of waste. But in truth, we are not alone. Many individuals, researchers, and business owners are gradually discovering the far-reaching benefits of compost, of soil reclamation, of waste reduction and redirection. Our numbers may not multiply as fast as worms in the dark, but every day, you can bet more and more people are thinking with dirty minds.