A brief pictorial overview of the Cayuga Nature Center Composting Process.
In order to compost food scraps, you must have food scraps.
Getting the scraps means cooperating with a generator such as a grocery store.
The scraps get collected during food preparation and trimming.
Greenstar uses five gallon buckets. Their small size makes it easy to carry, dump, and clean them. However, it is possible to use larger collection containers.
The food scrap generators then have to put the scraps in a different place than their normal garbage. It helps to have locks on the dumpsters to avoid contamination from public misuse.
With conscientious consumers, it is even possible to offer a compost bin for customer use as Greenstar does.
Once the food scraps get to the Nature Center Farm, they are mixed with wood chips and horse manure to help speed up the compost process.
Contamination of the food scraps is problematic.
By working cooperatively with markets, we have been able to significantly reduce this contamination.
The food scraps compost in long windrows.
Composting food scraps give off a lot of heat--you can see the steam in these pictures. This heat pasteurizes the compost and kills weed seeds.
The windrows have to be turned regularly to keep them aerated. If you dont aerate the windrows, the food scraps will compost at a much slower rate, and could become anaerobic.
Once the food scraps have finished composting, large wood chips and other material are screened out.
The compost is then bagged, with the use of a hopper, for sale at local markets.
The bags are filled, then...
...weighed and sealed.
The bags are stored on pallets.
Then they are loaded up for market.