I am loving Will Allen.

I haven't seen this movie Fresh the Movie but this fellow is in it.

He was in the Times too.



He took in 6 million pounds of food last year to make compost, making more than he needs. I bet there is space in cities for companies doing nothing but on-site large-scale composting. Seems like there's no reason that compost have to go all the way from San Francisco to Vacaville and back. Seems like it would mostly involve diverting waste streams. To build a dam to harvest energy, as it were, would be grand so long as the farms outside the city could maintain fertility as well. Then maybe MyFarm really could cart its fertility around by bicycle. Chris Shein, permaculture teacher of many MyFarmers, said that a restaurant supplies his personal garden with a 55-gallon drum of food waste every week...I think that's right. It's a lot. Much is eaten by the chickens, faster than any compost pile would.

This raises a lot of questions regarding the role of inputs in a sustainable system. I said a word before about looking forward bringing into the farm as much organic material as possible, to jump-start fertility. But maybe I want to prove that the land is fundamentally capable of healing itself with only onsite plants and onsite solar energy. Seems like it is sensible to think of it like plowing - at the outset, a lot of progress can be made with relatively little harm to the developing soil ecology. But it shouldn't be treated as a long-term strategy to the extent that the activities (e.g. a tree-trimming company or grain grower) that produce these inputs are capable of returning them to the biological systems that produced them in the first place. At the same time, there are possibilities for a healthful input cycle: nothing could seem more natural than a farm/woodlot-sawmill and farm/woodlot-restaurant nutrient cycle, which would produce concentrated inputs that can and should be depended on on a long-term basis.

It seems like the goal of land management should be to return biological matter to the actual area of earth where it originated, whether in an agricultural setting or a forest or some other wild system. It will be a challenge to be flexible on the emergency-stability continuum of fertility.