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Urban compost: From fork to field
GREELY — Farmers feed cities, but urbanite table scraps and yard waste are helping return the favour.
Orgaworld Canada LTD’s Hawthorne Rd. facility is the initial destination for all of that biodegradable household waste material collected by the City of Ottawa’s sometimes-controversial green bin program. But after a 31-day composting process inside the $25-million processing plant, the dark and rich-looking material is ultimately destined to fertilize farmland in the region — a fact that hasn’t garnered as many headlines.
The British-owned company intends to ship out all of Ottawa’s municipal green bin compost as a bulk product sold to farmers, with no plans to make the stuff available in smaller, bagged quantities — although it is technically approved for that particular use as well — said Orgaworld’s Travis Woollings.
As the company’s sales and marketing manager, he’s been promoting the compost at local farmers’ meetings, including county soil and crop associations, to get the word out about the product’s availability in the local agricultural community. According to Woollings, relying on farmers to absorb the material has already proven effective in the countryside around London, Ontario, where Orgaworld’s first facility in the province began operations in 2007.
"This compost already gives you $30 per acre in fertilizer value, plus you get all the organic matter," said Woollings at the Ottawa site, where he led a visitor on a tour of the sprawling steel plant building inhabited by large, brightly lit payloaders trundling around through clouds of steamy fog created by the decomposing waste.
A sophisticated fan and ductwork system constantly draws all air from the building through odour-removing equipment, before exhausting up the tall stack that towers over the structure, punctuated by a plume of steam visible on a frigid day.
The material yielded at the end of the carefully controlled, accelerated "in-vessel" composting process undergoes pasteurization as it rots. Within six enclosed concrete bunkers or tunnels — each 30 meters long by about six meters wide and about four meters tall — the compost is remotely monitored and aerated through a series of breathing tubes in the floor to ensure the temperature rises high enough for long enough. "It’s pasteurized because we’re able to manipulate the environment to 55 degrees (C) for 72 hours. Then it’s cured for 21 days," he explained. "And it’s tested every so many tonnes for pathogen levels. This gives them [farmers] a lot of comfort that what they’re putting on the field is free of e-coli."
Wearing a hard hat and bright orange safety coat, Woollings scoops up some of the finished product from a large pile and holds it out in his cupped hands. The material has a trace of a musty odour, similar to old leaves with a whiff of silage.
Two types of compost are available, a regular kind marketed as "Orgapower" and a coarser variety uniquely available from the Ottawa operation — spawned by the city’s insistence on having the facility process leaf and yard waste, unlike the southern Ontario municipalities served by Orgaworld’s London plant.
Last year, when the Ottawa site went on line, the company distributed about 10,000 tonnes of compost to several farmers in the St. Isidore area, according to Woollings. Most of that was purchased and spread in the fall of 2010, so the impact on crop growth won’t be seen until this coming season. But a couple of early birds did take delivery last spring, allowing them to look at results on the field last year.
He said, "You could see the difference in the height and colour" of a crop grown with the product on an Eastern Ontario field last year.
Woollings’s history with the agricultural spreading of Orgaworld compost predates his employment with the company. Running his own equipment and transport business when the London plant opened, Woollings worked with a farmer in that area, John Killins, who bought and applied some of the compost on his fields.
"His yields went up 15 to 20 bushels per acre. The second year was even better and his quality went up," he said.
Especially in southwestern Ontario, where some cash-crop land "hasn’t seen manure in 50 years," the product has proven especially valuable, he said.
"I have farmers in Western Ontario that have completely eliminated chemical fertilizers from their plans. One customer is planting 1,400 acres of corn [in Orgapower] this year."
The product’s features include "disease suppression, building soil structure and moisture retention," he said, adding those attributes should help it compete against the sewage biosolids that the City of Ottawa — ironically — provides at no charge for agricultural spreading in the same region. "All of these things help me demand a premium for this product in an area where biosolids are free."
And being compost, farmers may buy it, stockpile it, and spread it when they wish — another feature in an era of otherwise increasing regulations.
"It’s considered an unrestricted-use product," he explained.
He acknowledged that area farmers "love the concept" of using compost, although the price typically leads to experimental use at first.
Depending on the volume purchased, Orgaworld charges $8 to $10 per tonne for Orgapower and $4 to $5 per tonne for the coarser compost referred to as 10/100. Trucking and spreading is the farmer’s responsibility, although Woollings can put buyers in touch with people in the industry.
In a recent article prepared for the Thames Valley Regional Soil & Crop Improvement Association, Christine Brown, OMAFRA nutrient management specialist, noted green bin compost as having a "good balance of available N-P-K and micronutrients" and easier to apply than most solid manure types. Material analysis showed the product at 47 lbs/ton total nitrogen, 19 lbs/ton in both potash and phosphorus, and 1,002 lbs/ton organic matter, according to the article.
Orgapower compost "meets all the MOE guidelines for finished compost," said OMAFRA environmental management specialist Steve Redmond.
"I’m really supportive of this composting process. It’s such a great way of saving micronutrients and phosphorous," added Redmond.
St. Isidore cash cropper Marc Bercier, one of the only farmers in the area to use Orgapower during 2010 growing season, said he was taking a wait and see approach to the product. He would need two to three years to accurately measure the benefit, he said.
"Right now, on our corn and soybeans, we saw practically no difference, but there was no disadvantage, too," said Bercier, who spread 1,500 tonnes on specific areas of the farm with sandy loam soil. On those particular fields, he also divided the crop — half with compost and half without — to see any difference.
He said he intends to follow up with soil tests to measure increases in organic matter anticipated over the next two to three years.
Gatineau-based crops consultant Bob Dalton, a member of the Agri-Trend Agrology network, said he viewed the compost as a "win-win situation" for city residents and farmers in the region. "Specific fields where nutrients need to be built up, that’s where the focus needs to be, in my opinion," said Dalton.
Based on the current incoming stream of raw material from Ottawa green bin users, the company expects to produce about 50,000 tonnes of compost for farmers in 2011, according to Woollings. But the Ottawa facility could produce up to about 105,000 tonnes of compost, taking into account its current MOE approval to process 150,000 tonnes of raw green bin waste annually minus a 30 per cent weight reduction that occurs after composting. And that figure could theoretically rise even higher if the company has reason to seek MOE approval to take in the 250,000 tonnes of waste the facility is actually built to handle.
The firm is confident it will find farmers to take all of it.
One fly in the ointment is the city’s insistence that residents can’t put their green box contents in tidy and convenient plastic bags, which leads to a lower participation rate, according to company officials.
In fact, the Orgaworld facility serving Ottawa is capable — and does — handle waste arriving in plastic bags. They are shredded and screened out by a machine at the beginning of the composting process.
In London, where plastic bags are openly permitted by the participating municipalities, Orgaworld is about to embark on a trial with St. Mary’s cement. The latter company will use the screened-out plastic scraps as fuel for cement kilns, Woollings said.
Prospective compost buyers may contact Woollings at 519-649-4446 or 519-317-6756 (cell).
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