- [Alex] Tell me why compost is so important when it comes to climate change.

- [Mike] You want me to start?

- [Jayne] Start, yeah.

- [Mike] Well, everyone should watch the movie "Kiss the Ground".

- [Alex] I've watched it.

- Well, in that movie they show you there's two components to climate change.

One, we all know about reducing our emissions and everybody can help out a little bit there.

But what we're overlooked, is the other component is that if we respected and recycled all our organic matter and turned it into compost, and then spread that compost on soils to improve the soil, for every 1% you increase your organic matter.

Now, I know that's getting a little technical for some people, but it's not that- - It's okay.

- high of a science.

For every 1% that you increase the organic matter of your soil, you're sequestering 10 times the amount of carbon that would normally be in the atmosphere.

So when you... - You're taking it out of the atmosphere?

- Yeah, holding it in the soil and that nourishes your plants and holds moisture and aerates the soil.

But I'll give you an example.

This farm, when we bought it, it was an abandoned farm with depleted soil.

- Okay.

- It had soil of maybe 1% organic matter.

Some areas might have had 2 or 3% organic matter.

Now, all our fields have 10 to 20% organic matter.

So, and this is just one little farm.

So you can imagine if not only all the farmers, all the gardeners and everybody, if they just didn't waste their food scraps and composted their organic matter, we could sequester, we could turn around climate change, we could turn around desertification.

It's so simple.

- It is simple.

- It's simple.

- But for some unknown reason to me, people don't get simple.

- And the leaves we take out of our gardens, all the trimmings.

- [Alex] Yep.

- [Mike] Yep.

- Besides the food scraps, there's a lot of resources.

- Oh.

- Just around our yards.

- [Alex] Yeah.

- All the wood chips and grass clippings, it's all compostable and there's different qualities compost.

We are trying to have the cleanest and the best for high-end farm production, garden production, but there's other sites that could use a compost that are growing only ornamentals or roadsides or reclaiming, re-vegetating gravel banks.

They wouldn't need such a high-end compost like we produce.

- It's not only so great for when you're adding it to the soil, all the things it does for the soil of capturing carbon from the atmosphere.

But there's also, if the other way, if you take those food scraps and organic matter and bring it to the landfill.

- Right.

- Instead of turning into a rich compost it's producing tons of methane gas, which is the number one cause of climate change.

- You don't want that product being produced.

- [Jayne] No.

- Not at all.

- But we're finding incredible benefits also.

I mean, we're in such a drought year right now.

- Yes.

- And our soil's holding great water, keeping our crops really nourished.

- They look unbelievable.

I mean, here we are.

Tomorrow's the first day of September.

- [Jayne] Yeah.

- [Alex] And it looks like springtime.

- [Jayne] Yeah.

- [Alex] Over here everything's so healthy looking.

- It's not 100%, it's been a little harder to germinate some seeds.

- [Alex] Yep.

- But once they've established a little bit there's enough moisture in that soil to keep things going.

And the things I'm really noticing are when it does rain that water, because there's so much organic matter, it can just, it's like a sponge.

It just that sinks in.

- [Alex] It sinks in.

- It can really go in and really penetrate, - Hold it.

- really hold it, there's no runoff.

- [Alex] Right, which is important during the drought season.

- [Mike] Yeah.

- [Jayne] Yeah.

- [Mike] Moisture holding capacity.

- [Alex] Yeah, absolutely.

- [Jayne] Yeah.

- When the soils are, don't have as much life in 'em, it tends to run off like an asphalt.

It's on soils that have been harmed, but when you have a real good living soil it holds the moisture.

- [Alex] Yeah.

- [Jayne] We just have one type of compost that we make and we make it from a diverse range of ingredients.

- [Alex] Yeah.

- [Jayne] So it has yard materials as well as food scraps and fish.

We call it fish curry, fish scraps, and shell fish as well.

- Not the actual shell, right?

- [Jayne] The actual shell too.

- [Alex] The actual shell?

- [Jayne] That comes in with meat and some seaweed as well.

And we have a good balance of carbon and nitrogen materials that we mix up this recipe.

And it does take us about a year.

And that's the compost that we use and sell here.

- [Alex] Now, will those shells, will they decompose or do you have to grind them up or you just let it stay?

- [Alex] They break down over time.

- They do break down.

- But we screen the compost.

- [Alex] Oh, okay.

- So there's little pieces.

- It's little pieces of shell.

And that gives you the calcium, so you don't need the lime.

- [Alex] Right.

- It's a great source of calcium.

- Yeah, you deal with whatever's in your bio region.

We're dealing with, since we're the ocean state, we get seaweed from beach communities.

- Yeah.

- The fish processing plants bring us the part that we don't eat.

- We get Roger Williams Zoo bedding and manure.

- Oh really?

- [Jayne] Yeah.

(Jayne chuckles) - And a lot of horse manure and bedding.

- Yep.

- And the arborists, the tree companies, bring us their wood chips.

So all this stuff is valuable organic matter that just needs to be composted.

Composting is going on in nature all the time.

- Yeah.

- We're just accelerating the process a little bit.

- [Alex] Yeah.

- One thing you'll notice that we don't use the term waste.

So it's not food waste or fish waste or yard waste.

It's all resources.

These are food scraps or we just have different terminology so that... - [Alex] Yeah, that makes sense.

- It can start to teach in our minds, train it differently to treat it like a resource and not something to throw out, yeah.

- Words are important because... - Yes.

- And age, Jayne started right from a baby on this farm.

Always composting.

But a lot of young kids don't get it.

They're taught, they're conditioned, that it's goes in the trash can.

Well, it just, your apple core, your banana peel, your coffee grinds, none of that should be going in a trash can.

- There's a lot of adults who don't get it.

- No, they were conditioned.

- Yeah.

Who do you sell a lot of your products to?

Is it people who own homes or people, farmers, industry people?

- All, of the above.

Yeah, we do some bagging.

Just a small percentage of our product is bagged and it's at garden centers for people that just want a couple pots.

We have landscapers that come.

And then farms that get bigger truckloads.

- Yeah, I noticed there's quite a few very, very large piles- - [Jayne] Yes.

- on the property.

- [Jayne] And have you noticed the very large trucks- - [Alex] Large trucks- - [Jayne] coming in?

- [Alex] coming in and out.

And we can hear them.

- [Jayne] Yeah.

- [Alex] The piles are they at different stages in life or is that what we're doing here?

- [Jayne] Yeah.

- [Mike] Yes, of course.

- [Jayne] Just like the farm, there's lots of different stages of life here.

- Yeah, the compost operation is our niche that helps pay all the bills.

But we have an accumulating area for the dumping of the carbonaceous material.

When we call it carbon, we're talking about all this organic matter is food for microorganisms.

- [Alex] Okay.

- They want a balanced diet just like us of carbohydrate and protein.

So, we start with the trucks in one area dumping the carbohydrate, the wood chips, and the leaves and the saw dust, beddings and whatnot.

And in another area, we have the mixing area where the protein-rich material comes in.

The fish scraps or the meat scraps that we're getting from pre-consumer food processing businesses.

It's a science and an art.

Too much science takes the fun out of the game, but you need to know the science.

- You have to, to get to that point of the real healthy type of organic matter that you wanna create.

- And some of the science is really fun.

- Yeah.

- I love looking at the microscope.

- She likes the microscope.

- Yeah.

- And you do a lot of that.

- Back to your original question where I digress.

You have your accumulating pile and you mix it, you have your mixing piles, then you have your turning piles and then you have your curing pile.

So, all these what you look at as little mountains of compost.

- [Alex] Yep.

- [Mike] They're all in different stages as they get to be to the point where they get screened and then cured before they're sold.

And it takes us about a year.

You can read about composting real fast.

I wouldn't buy into it.

- That's pretty much just dehydrated food scraps.

- Yeah.

- To properly compost, we've been doing it for since 1977, and our process takes about a year.

- [Alex] Now, I noticed you have bees.

- Yes, we do have bees, yeah.

- [Alex] And how many hives do you have?

- Just three hives, yeah.

- [Alex] But it's enough to pollinate the area, I'm guessing.

- I rely more on the native pollinators.

That's what I'm really trying to, I'm planting for the native pollinators.

- [Alex] Okay.

- But yeah, the bees, they're great for honey.

They're the only ones that make honey, - I was just gonna say- the honey bees - making honey.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Again, it's terminology in our society.

We use the word pest all the time.

- [Alex] Yeah.

- They're really just insects.

And when they're in balance, when you have the parasites and predators, it's just another insect.

And they're all working together for the bigger picture just like the compost is working together for the bigger picture.

So, what we're learning is the more diversity you have- - Yeah.

- the more, less likely you're gonna have the imbalances that they, one plant is gonna attract some kind of insect that is the predator or parasite of another kind of insect.

- Oh, so they're actually feeding off the other insect.

- Yeah.

- [Jayne] Yeah.

- They're sending signals to each other that we don't understand, but we're just starting to learn that.

- [Alex] That's incredible.

- [Mike] Having the healthy soil with more diversity things keep getting better and better.

- Yeah, because you don't have to, as you said, use pesticides.

- Right.

- [Jayne] Yeah.

- And so everything you grow becomes almost pesticide free.

- Yes.

- Because the soil's so healthy and these so-called pest are- - Just another insect.

- doing their job.

- Yeah - Yeah.

- Yeah, and occasionally we have an imbalance, but we can live with it, because we have so much diversity it's not like you're betting the farm on one monoculture crop.

- Usually just takes a little bit of understanding that pest.

This spring I had a, there was a kind of a bloom of asparagus beetle on our asparagus plants.

- Oh, really?

- And so I like just dove into the research on asparagus beetle and what their life cycle is and when they're in their larvae stage.

- [Alex] Yeah.

- Their biggest predator is nematodes.

And our compost actually has quite a few nematodes all sorts of beneficial nematodes.

And so, I made up a strong batch.

I took an area that I could see, I have a beautiful microscope.

I could see there was nematode rich.

We made some compost tea and sprayed that on the asparagus, the soil around the asparagus.

- That's great.

- And it was took about a week and there was a significant decline in asparagus beetle.

So it just took a little research of who's where, - [Alex] That's fine.

- who's gonna balance who there.

- In our generation, when you studied agriculture, - Yeah.

- You kinda got the feeling that you were always fighting nature.

In Jayne's generation, they're cooperating with nature.

- Right.

- It's more joyful.

- Oh, I would think so.

- I don't wanna fight.

- You know you're doing something good.

- Yeah, I don't wanna fight with anything I wanna bring about more like cooperation.

- The more young people that get on board with that and the more the old people let go of our dysfunction, - [Alex] That's a great idea.

- [Mike] And let them take over, the better off we'll be.

And it's vitally needed, you know?

- [Alex] Yeah.

- [Mike] Back to when we were taught we were fighting nature you are always trying to take something from the land.

Where now we realize you can't just take, you gotta put back.

- So we're learning.

- Yeah.

- We're all learning, we just need to have more people learn.

And so, you're doing a wonderful thing here.

- It's worked for us.

It's worked out for us.

- Yeah, and I wanna thank you for explaining all this great information to us.

- Thank you for what you do.

- Yeah.

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