compost windrows on Stevenson Road
Agricultural Composting is a project of the Farm Services Department in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. The primary goal of the program is to reduce the amount of waste Cornell sends to landfills and manage animal waste while producing a quality soil amendment product. The program is currently composting approximately 8,000 tons annually (20 tons per day), of animal bedding, greenhouse plant and soil waste, food scraps, and other agricultural crop residue on a compacted gravel pad with a runoff collection pond.
Farm Services is an enterprise department (meaning it must earn the funds it needs to operate) so it charges its customers a small fee, which is less than the cost of landfilling. This fee covers labor and equipment costs, and is low enough to provide incentive to other departments to compost their agricultural waste. No waste is accepted from off-campus, and all of the compost is used on Cornell's property.
Cornell's composting operation does more than turn food scraps and animal bedding into nutrient-rich compost: It reduces the university's total waste stream by half, making it Tompkins County's second largest recycler.
For these efforts, Cornell's eight-acre composting facility received a 2009 Environmental Quality Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency April 24, 2009.
Cornell Farm Services Staff accept Environmental Quality Award from the U.S. EPA
Cornell Farm Services, which runs the operation, trucks some 8,000 tons of organic garbage from 57 campus waste streams -- from dining halls to greenhouses -- each year to its composting site a mile off campus. Time was when that waste would travel 65 miles to a landfill, incurring fees of more than $50,000 a year.
Beneficial Impacts of Program:
- Approximately 6000 tons of material is kept out of landfills annually.
- Waste disposal costs have been reduced for several departments on campus.
- Compost can be used on farm fields in place of chemical fertilizers.
- Farm Services soils are improved and enhanced by the addition of compost.
- The site provides a working model for others interested in large scale composting.
- Composting is a useful tool in nutrient management.
For more information, check out the web sites in the sidebar above or contact Bill Huizinga , Farm Manager, at wh48@cornell.edu.
Related Articles:
CU recycles half its garbage into high-quality compost
5/29/2009 Source:
The Cornell Chronicle
