How We Turn Food Scraps into Compost in 90 days - Veteran Compost Facility Tour 

Thanks for the compliments! Julie is awesome, we will try to see if she will do some videos with us out at her farm "Oxbow Farm" to show some of the cool stuff she is doing

Working on it🤣

You bet!

Thanks!

Thanks! We are here weekdays from 9-4. Stop in some time and pay us a visit. Happy Composting!

There are some operations that use rotary mixers (like you would use for cattle feed) to blend and crush their initial mix. However, we see this as just another cost and another machine to have to repair. So, we just ensure that our loader operators get a good mix when then are doing the initial mixing of feedstocks

@@veterancompost I see. Thank you for the information.

Our mixing/receiving pad is roughly 1,200 square feet, 8 inch thick with wire mesh reinforcement. We made it pretty rugged because we knew we would have a lot of loader and truck traffic on it. We sloped it so that we can collect any liquids and pump them onto the active pile. It’s definitely a great investment for a compost operation!

@@veterancompost Great, thanks for the information. I love the slope idea for liquids to pump back into the active pile. Good to know it's a great investment - there are always so many things we could be investing in, seems this one pays for itself in time.

We haven’t covered the piles in the past, but it is something we have talked about. If we could find inexpensive breathable tarps, I think we definitely would. We do recommend customers tarp their bulk deliveries if they are going to be sitting for a while to avoid nutrient loss from precipitation and also prevent weed seeds from being dropped by birds or blown by the wind onto the material. Our curing piles at our site get flipped about once a month and are only onsite for 3-6 months. So, given their shape, size, orientation to the site slope and short time in storage - we believe we have been able to minimize loss

@@veterancompost thanks for your answer. We are looking to get into composting at our farm in South Africa.

We do pathogen testing, but have not done microbial testing for beneficial microbes to date. It's something we would like to do in the future, if we could find a cost-effective place to send samples. We have gotten positive anecdotal feedback from customers with soil microscopes, and in our older curing piles you can see some serious hyphae action, so we know there's some good stuff in there!

We recommend 2 parts or 3 parts carbon to one part nitrogen. Obviously, lot's of other factors in play that would cause that to change (particle size, moisture content, available carbon, etc) but that rule of thumb has served us well over the years

The pile generate heat. Also the eggs seems to survive harsh conditions, even if the worms dont.

We now have our worm bins in our hoop house, so they stay warm through the winter. But, back when we kept them outside we would just load up their bins with lots of material so they could insulate themselves from the freezing temps. Back then we would load up the bins in November, and then start to check on them in March/April when things begin to warm up in our area

Unfortunately it's not that simple.

3 years of being a tour guide in college paying off!!

Agreed, working on tightening up our audio game….

@@veterancompost tricky thing giving critique. Not wanting to be harsh or criticize but to be constructive.

Both our sites right now are handling only food scraps and wood chips. We have a site in the works that would handle manure and bedding, but it’s still in the design/construction phase. Once operational, we will be able to share videos about manure composting

Feeding animals is higher on the food waste hierarchy than composting, so always a good idea if you can pull it off. We just haven’t seen a setup that would fit our scale and fit our budget. Certainly not opposed to trying it in the future - it would make a great chicken feed 😀

@@veterancompost start off small, like in a small room and try it for a few years. You can tweak it until it's optimised. I think the only problem with black soldier flies is weather. They need to stay warm and don't like freezing temperatures. But I do like your current set up. And I'm sure there must be a way of utilising that hot temperature created by the compost. Maybe run a few copper pipes through the heart of the pile and see what temperature the water can be heated to. Maybe try heating up a hot tub or bath etc?

We agree 🤣 We bought a microphone for the videos we make now (this video is older but the algorithm seems to love it all of the sudden)

The material we get is 99% free of non-compostable items - but we are always working to make it better so that our compost is even better. The challenge with accepting outside material is that once it's on our site - it's now ours to deal with (the compostables and the non-compostables hidden in there) Micro Plastics are terrible, and getting plastic out of our inbound material is our top priority this year. We are attacking plastics in a couple of ways: 1. Reaching out every month to the Top 2 customers who are putting non-compostable material in their collection bins. Offering more signage and training to help reduce contamination at the source 2. Litter pickup each day - each employee who works on-site spends 15 minutes each day patrolling for any litter or plastic around the site 3. Building a platform on our "overs" conveyor where and employee can stand an pick out any trash, rocks, etc that they see on the screener belt. We are also working on building a new site where we will only handle pre-consumer material for turning into OMRI listed compost. That way we have the cleanest possible inbound material to make the cleanest possible outbound material.

That only applies to America.