The Regenerative Power of Wasted Food

Author: Katie Kaulbach, 281

Date: December 14th, 2021

33% of our farmable land has been lost due to unsustainable farming practices (The University of Sheffield). With growing human populations, we must produce enough food to sustain ourselves, so it is crucial to take advantage of all usable farming land. The importance of sustaining farmable land is augmented when we hold the desire to guarantee the availability of healthy food sources for the next generation. What must happen in order to convert unusable farming land into sustainable farms? In order to find the solution, we must assess the problem. Many of our agricultural issues arise from the soil beneath us. With poor soil health, plants struggle to grow to their greatest potential. Soil health is limited by our overdependence of chemical fertilizers, which only treat the symptoms of the soil problem and not the cause. We must transition from chemical fertilizers to other ways of providing our soil with nutrients in order to sustain our farmable soil.

What’s so bad about chemical fertilizers? By using fertilizers, we ignore the power of plant biospheres to regenerate and produce healthy soil on their own. Plants rely on soil microbes to provide them with nutrients found deep in the soil and in return, soil microbes receive energy from plants (Bikle). When we treat plants with synthetic nutrients, we break down this symbiotic relationship between plants and soil microbes, which do much more for plants than we can manage to do manually. Continuing to use chemical fertilizers to supplement natural sources of nutrients will continue to deteriorate the relationship between plants and their neighboring soil microbes, causing them to grow less efficiently.

So what’s the solution? Among many newly embraced sustainable agriculture practices, compost poses as an answer to our soil dilemma. Compost is organic matter, plants and food, that decomposes into a rich array of nutrients and particles that provide soil microbes with structure and nutrients. This restarts the exchange between soil microbes and plants as the microbes have nutrients to exchange with plants for energy. Compost provides soil with a fuller set of nutrients, unlike synthetic fertilizers that provide one or two nutrients, and these nutrients provide plants with benefits for a longer time than synthetic fertilizers. Also, compost introduces all sorts of macrobial life into the soil, such as insects and worms. These organisms aerate the soil and warn off pests and diseases from harming the plants (Washington State University). This leads plants to living a healthier life for a longer time than they would with synthetic fertilizers. The FDA deemed the kale grown in soil treated with various kinds of compost to contain twice as much calcium and zinc than the standard nutrient levels of food grown in the USA (Bikle). Composting leads to high nutrient levels in fruits and vegetables, and since there are more nutrients in the crops that means there are more nutrients that we, as omnivores, consume.

The benefits of compost are clear, so why hasn’t our agriculture system embraced it? Big farm companies are stuck in the ways of the past and fail to see how their plants are failing to function as efficiently as possible. Chemical fertilizers appear to help plant health, but the only way to continue the benefit is to apply more and more chemical fertilizer, while composting is a long term solution. Large-scale composting systems are a lot of work, but with them comes a lot of benefits.

So how can we start our own composting system? Compost should be an accumulation of food waste that includes fruits and vegetable waste as well as coffee grinds, woodchips, and leaves (United States Environmental Protection Agency). The frequency of aeration, a process that involves manually mixing up the compost, pile volume, and carbon to nitrogen ratio are important factors for creating effective compost. The compost should be aerated, or mixed up, every three days. The size of the compost pile should be about 25 foot squared and the carbon to nitrogen ratio should be about 30:1 to function most efficiently (Washington State University). The carbon portion of compost comes from dry leaves, stray, woodships, and newspaper; the nitrogen portion of compost comes from vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, grass clippings, and manure (Nancy M. Trautmann). Creating your own compost pile takes a lot of work and knowledge, but your garden or local farm will be transformed when compost is incorporated into your maintenance and care for it. Alternatively, if personal composting is inaccessible to you, you can subscribe to a compost service. These services, such as Bennett Compost and Circle Compost in Philadelphia, pick up your compost from outside your house and then you will get a bag of compost to put in your garden at the end of the year. Participating in a composting system is easy to start and will be hugely beneficial to you individually and our agricultural system.

Composting provides us with many benefits such as improved health and sustainable farming systems. Not taking advantage of these benefits is imprudent, especially if the actions needed to be done are accessible to you. So when will you start composting?