Compost Connection
Soil Is Gonna Save Us All
I have been staying at Conscious Ground Organics, an amazing regenerative agriculture school, learning a bit about holistic farm management, the epic carbon sequestration powers of soil. This experience has allowed me access to a nice big hot wet filthy compost.
Here we are tossing cow poo in the air because so excited about all the carbon soil sequesters when it is healthy & full of bacteria!
Happy plants photosynthesize carbon OUT OF THE ATMOSPHERE & draw it down to the earth. If the soil is healthy rich biodiverse it will naturally STORE THE CARBON. Alternatively, dead soil releases carbon back into the atmosphere! !
The plant grabs carbon via photosynthesis & sends it down in the form of carbohydrates, proteins, sugars to feed the microbiology (life) in the squirmy writhing healthy soil! They digest the food, poop it out & eventually die in the natural circle of life all that turns into organic matter called “humus.” Which further secures the carbon in the land!
In monocropping the land has been sprayed to kill everything but one crop (the aim is pests & weeds but also wipes out ALL useful microbiology) & those mono crops might be genetically altered to survive the spray. Pesticides still get absorbed by the plant that is then sold as food.
So when the dirt gets ploughed for a quick crop turnover it releases the carbon into what? The oversaturated atmosphere causing fast catastrophic warming of our necessarily partially frozen water planet!!
WASTE AUDIT
Photo from Conscious Ground Organics
My experience at Conscious Ground also allows me to test all the plastic-y materials that claim to be “compostable.”
By completing a wasteaudit to assess all stuff getting “thrown away,” to see if there are alternatives to the non-recyclable materials, what can be repurposed instead of tossed out, & how we can clean up the recycling stream to better serve our local materials recovery facility. I dug through the trash bin, sorted the recycling, & literally rolled in compost.
After I called the local council for updated materials they accept & was able to divert 2/3 of the landfill into recycling! A lot of the cardboard I pulled from the recycling to be used around the farm to prevent weeds from growing & to line the floor where the baby chicks live (called the chicken brood).
The compost was possibly most exciting of all, as we learned the inputs for this natural dirt making machine. Kitchen scraps, cow poo, grass, dry grass, sludgy grass, crusher dust, mushrooms, bamboo charcoal (biochar), wood chips, coffee grounds, bones, 2 dead chickens, chicken manure & rice hulls from chicken brood, a bit of compost from another pile, HEAPS of water. Then we shoved in a whole bunch of “compostable plastics” to test if these products are greenwashed bullshit or legit! Stay tuned for the final results!
Alas! Here is a solution!! We can AND ARE reversing planetary warming thru regenerative farming! Check out interviews uploaded all week to my podcast “the Mercast” with regenerative agriculture experts! iquitplastics.com/mercast or search on iTunes or Spotify.