The logistics of moving feedstocks to farms

State grants to stimulate on-farm composting are helping to provide services such as sourcing and hauling food residuals, as well as windrow turning for operations in New York State.

FOR the past four years" the Association for Resource Conservation (ARC), a nonprofit waste reduction organization in Centerport, New York, has been providing farmers in eastern Long Island with yard trimmings and food processing residuals. The main obstacle so far, according to Julie Sullivan, ARC's executive director, has been convincing haulers to take the organics to the farms instead of to municipal incinerators.

In 1993, ARC began looking at bringing yard trimmings from Nassau County in western Long Island to farms in Suffolk County on the island's eastern end. Suffolk County has about 30,000 acres in cultivation, most of which are nursery and vegetable operations. "Long Island soils are very sandy and low in organic content, so the farmers compensate by using a fair amount of chemical fertilizers and pesticides," says Sullivan. "We also have a problem with nonpoint source pollution, so a lot of farms have an interest in obtaining compost, but they can't afford it because it typically sells for $10/cubic yard. If they applied compost at a rate to replace the nitrogen that they use from chemical fertilizer, they would have to pay $400/ acre, compared to about $168/acre for chemical fertilizers."

Although buying compost isn't economical for these farmers, they do have the land, labor and equipment to compost, but need outside sources of feedstocks. Three years ago, villages in western Long Island began hauling their leaves -- around 3,000 tons per year - to the eastern farms. ARC charges the municipalities a $10/ton tip fee and passes on $7/ton to the farmer accepting the leaves. "We thought that if we provided the added motivation of a tip fee, more farmers would be interested in composting," says Sullivan.

ARC next focused on bringing in food processing residuals and how best to compost them. "We wanted to speed up the process because leaf matter takes a long time to break down by itself, and we also wanted to improve the nutrient content in the compost," Sullivan notes. "We looked at food processors on Long Island to see if we could find some companies that had a very steady flow of material. We figured that we would not have any problem finding generators if we charged a $10 tip fee because the average tip fee on Long Island is $65."

Then two years ago, ARC received funding for the project, including a $70,000 grant from New York State's Office of Recycling Market Development (ORMD), $17,500 from the Norcross Wildlife Foundation, $10,000 from the Rauch Foundation, and $5,000 from the Long Island Community Fund. The funds were used to purchase a self-propelled, 80-horsepower Sandberger compost turner for $35,000 and to build a trailer for $5,000 to transport the turner from farm to farm. Twelve farms agreed to take part in the program and received variances from the state's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to accept food processing residuals. ARC's target goal was 1,200 tons/year of food residuals and the organization contacted several food processors, microbreweries, supermarkets and haulers. Since then, the only reliable source of residuals has been a food processor that generates baker's sludge as a by-product. The nutrient rich baker's sludge, which contains calcium, magnesium, fast-acting sugars and low levels of nitrogen, is hauled biweekly by the company's commercial hauler to participating farms. Each farm receives approximately 25 tons per quarter and Sullivan notes that DEC is considering her request to double that amount. The food processor is charged a tip fee of $10/ton, which goes directly to ARC to pay for composting services provided free to the farmers.

The windrow turner stays at each participating farm for approximately two weeks and during that time, the baker's sludge is brought to that farm. Sullivan forms the initial windrows out of leaves and mixes the windrows after the baker's sludge has been spread over them. The windrows measure approximately 200 feet long, four feet high and six to seven feet wide. "Some farmers then turn the piles as often as they can over the next two weeks," she says.

POTENTIAL FEEDSTOCKS

ARC approached a few microbreweries and proposed to accept their spent grain on the farms at no cost. "The microbreweries originally agreed to do this, but managed to find the only cattle farm on Long Island that was willing to pick up the spent grain for free and we couldn't compete with that," says Sullivan. Arrangements to collect produce trimmings from a supermarket also fell through when the local fire marshall failed to approve the installation of a compactor system to store the material.

The farms were able to receive trimmings from produce markets via a private transfer station in the Bronx for a two-month period in 1997. "It worked well on our end but it was a long haul -100 miles one way," says Sullivan. She is looking into acquiring a screw press to try dewatering the produce, which would reduce its volume and weight by 50 percent and make it less expensive to haul.

"The farmers have had no problems handling the produce trimmings or bakery sludge," notes Sullivan. Rather, she says, the difficulty is competing with incinerators for additional compostable materials. "Long Island has the capacity to incinerate 50 percent of the amount of garbage it generates, and some towns are desperate to find enough waste to pay for the incinerators," she says.

In an effort to prevent materials from going out of state, municipalities are providing incentives to haulers to bring materials to incinerators. "The town of Babylon bills businesses directly to incinerate their waste, so the incinerator doesn't charge haulers a tip fee, which increases the amount of material they bring there," she says. Town officials are in cooperative negotiations with ARC to develop composting programs for food processing residuals so that these materials can be diverted from incinerators in the future. The grant funding for the food processing residuals project ends in February, 1998, but Sullivan says that ARC has the financial resources to continue it.

CUSTOM SERVICE

Bob Walker, owner of Terra Nova, a custom composting service for vegetable and dairy farms, received a one-year, $70,000 ORMD grant from the Empire State to promote composting by collecting and hauling food residuals and other feedstocks to farmers in Columbia County, New York. Part of the $70,000 grant was used to lease a turner and a hook lift truck.

Walker is using the hook lift truck, which has a 15-yard capacity, to bring food residuals from the produce and bakery departments of a Price Chopper grocery store in Hudson, New York to Roxbury Farm, a 150acre farm in Calverack that raises beef cattle and 25 acres of organic vegetables. "Roxbury Farm had been composting cattle manure and straw for several years and saw no reason not to add food residuals," says Walker.

Walker tried to find a hauler for the supermarket organics but ended up doing the hauling himself. "We have seven different haulers in the area and none will take a truck around to pick up small amounts of food trimmings," he says. He collects approximately 3,000 pounds of residuals twice a week from Price Chopper. The store pays $51/ton to have the food residuals collected. Walker provides the store with 90-gallon containers and charges extra for plastic liners for the containers.

A second grocery store, Shop Rite, is interested in participating, but Walker is waiting until a rendering-style truck is built by local contractors. (Terra Nova received an additional $50,000 ORMD grant to develop the rendering truck, which will have a hydraulic lift to automatically empty containers into the box.) He plans to use the new truck to collect both food residuals and manure. "Using one truck to collect both eliminates the need to hire a hauler to collect the food residuals and puts the vehicle in use almost every day," he explains. Walker currently uses the hook lift truck to collect horse bedding from four stables and hauls it to Roxbury Farm as well as two other organic vegetable farms. - M.F.