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Book & Plow believes strongly in long-term sustainability of the land and farm. For the past three years the Book and Plow Farm has been using Organic practices, extensive cover cropping, applying compost, and developing ways to increase soil health and the surrounding ecology.
The Book and Plow Farm is located in Amherst, MA and consists of 50 acres of vegetables, 12 acres of cover crops, and 25 acres of pasture. The focus of the farm is on the production of high quality of foods for the local community, using organic methods.
The innovative technique used by the farm is how they obtain enough material to supply compost for their land. The farm has partnered with nearby University of Massachusetts and Amherst College to help provide much of the needed material. The farm has worked with the schools to install compost bins in the cafeteria. When students are finished with their meals they are asked to scrape plates clean into a composting bin, food that’s typically destined for garbage bins now has a second chance at life through the new food composting program. In the first month of the program, an average of 526 pounds of food waste was readied for composting each day, for a total of 15,780 pounds, or nearly 8 tons, for the month. “This is being viewed as a model program for higher education,” says Richard Lemoine, director of environmental and emergency management at UMass. “It’s all part of our effort to be a leader in sustainability and energy conservation.”
The Book and Plow Farm is the brain child of Tobin Porter-Brown and Peter McLean. Maclean and Porter-Brown are now in their fourth growing season of an endeavor they call “challenging.” Tobin is a graduate from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA with a major in landscape architecture with a focus on local food systems. Tobin says “for years it has been my dream to run a school farm and starting Book and Plow Farm with help from the local colleges has been a perfect fit.” Tobin met Peter while working at another local farm. Peter started working on farms after graduating college; he quickly took to farming and wanted to learn even more about the production of food. Tobin and Peter both wanted to pilot an innovative waste diversion program at local schools with increased consumer education and a streamlined recycling and composting system. When asked about how he feels the last four years on the farm have gone Tobin replied, “We have come a long way since 2013, built this farm up from scratch, and now we are managing 50 acres, with pigs, and a lot of systems and infrastructure in place, not to mention the community we have created. This year we may have overstretched a little and exposed some of the weaknesses of this young operation, and the drought didn’t help, but we are learning and searching for the right balance.”
The program was launched in advance of a state regulation that will ban disposal of commercial food waste by restaurants, universities and other entities that generate at least one ton of organic waste per week. The regulation is intended to reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfills or incinerators. Food waste and organics make up as much as 25 percent of the waste currently buried in landfills or burned in incinerators, according to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. The new regulations require that commercial food waste be shipped to a composting operation, an animal feed entity or a facility for anaerobic digestion (AD), a process that converts food waste into renewable energy. Composting food waste offers numerous benefits, including reducing or eliminating the need for chemical fertilizers, cutting back on methane production in landfills and diverting organic materials from the waste stream.
The farm works closely with local college’s to provide vegetables for the dining hall and educational programming for the students. In addition, the farm supplies wholesale produce to restaurants, food hubs, and other institutions beyond Amherst. Book and Plow works with closely with Myers Produce which has been in operation since 2013. Myers is a regional distributor who buys fruit and vegetables from small, primarily organic farms in Vermont and Massachusetts, and sells to wholesale customers in NYC and the Boston area. None of the products travel more than 350 miles from grower to customer.
By composting food and organic waste, the colleges will be able to reduce the size of their traditional waste containers or reduce the frequency of pick-ups or both, which will lower the cost of waste hauling. This will be a significant savings for the colleges.
Not only do food and organic wastes have large economic impacts in terms of disposal costs, they also have immediate societal and environmental impacts.
Environmental Benefits – There are numerous environmental benefits to composting food waste: (1) Rotting food in landfills is a significant source of methane gas, which has 21 times the global warming potential as carbon dioxide ; (2) The use of recycled food waste as compost improves soil health and structure; increases drought resistance; and reduces the need for supplemental water, fertilizers, and pesticides; (3) Composting eliminates chemical run-off into our rivers, ponds and streams – our source of drinking water; (4) Waste will be converted to a fertilizer that can used to create healthier, local food sources.
Sustainability – The farm is committed to organic farming and long term sustainability of the land and the farm. What this means is that for the past three years the farm has been using Organic practices, extensive cover cropping, applying compost, and developing ways to increase soil health and the surrounding ecology. The farm is currently transitioning to become certified Organic. Organic farming relies on fertilizers of organic origin such as compost, manure, green manure and bone meal and uses techniques such as crop rotation and companion planting.
Community Impact – The farm’s partnership with local colleges has helped them become successful because they are able to hire students who are interested in learning about agriculture and sustainability. They hired 58 student workers this past year – up from just seven in their first season. A total of 2,300 students have taken part in his programs during the farm’s four years of operation. They also regularly bring in the college’s sports teams to help with major harvests.
Students are involved in all aspects of vegetable production including but not limited to greenhouse seeding, transplanting, fertilization, cultivation, harvesting, washing, packing, delivering, etc. Tobin hopes to give back to the community because “During my schooling career the farm provided me with a very valuable experience, both hands on and academic.” MacLean added “College farms are not just helping pioneer new models of providing sustainable, local food that can compete with industrial farms. They’re also on the hook to educate the next generation of farmers and eaters.”
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Tobin Porter-Brown and Peter MacLean, Farmers