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and Food Systems
2. Compost, Healthy Soil, Climate Change, and Food Systems
Making and using compost from organic waste is a great opportunity for dryland agricultural producers. Dryland soils are typically low in soil organic matter, partially because plant productivity is low due to limited water. Soils may also have other nutrient deficiencies, such as low levels of nitrogen and phosphorus. Compost additions can boost organic matter and serve as slowrelease fertilizers of nitrogen, phosphorus, and micronutrients to increase productivity. Additionally, compost can provide improved soil structure, water-holding capacity, and soil microbial ecology. Thus, diverting organic waste from landfills, turning it into compost, and putting it to work on agricultural drylands is particularly valuable! You can learn much more about dryland soils from Quivira’s Soil Health Workbook: quiviracoalition.org/soilhealth-workbook
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Learning Outcomes
After completing this section you will be able to:
• Describe how compost fits into the
Healthy Soil Principles.
• Be able to incorporate compost additions or compost addition trials into pots, gardens, fields, or rangeland.
• Describe how composting compares with other waste management in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
• Describe how compost relates to other needs in the food recovery hierarchy.
Think back to the Torrance County report of approximately 4000 cubic yards of brush and green waste disposed of in 2019 (page 20). Assuming this refers to the carbon-rich materials known as browns, you would be able to combine all the brush and green waste generated by Torrance County in 2019 with 2000 cubic yards of manure or food waste for a total diversion of 6000 cubic yards of waste from the landfill!
If you are running an aerated static composting system, which takes about a month to compost, it would take you between 2.5 and 3.5 years to compost all of this brush and green waste. Combined with manure or food waste, this amount of green waste could produce around 2000 cubic yards of compost, resulting in 2260 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions avoided. That’s equivalent to removing the average activity of 491 passenger cars for one year.
Organic waste diversion by the numbers
