Healthy Farms Start With Healthy Soil
When we started the project, we recruited local partners to help us get started. We knew we needed land access, but we could not be sure about the soil quality. In most urban areas, the soil quality will be challenging for several reasons:
- Past uses may have compacted the soil.
- Nearby pollutants may have contaminated the soil.
- Previous agricultural uses may have depleted the soil’s organic matter.
Since all of these could be true for our property, we partnered with Greater Greenville Sanitation, which provides full-service, non-hazardous, waste and recovery solutions to nearly 60,000 residential and commercial customers in Greenville County. We spent time at Greater Greenville Sanitation learning how they recycle yard waste to create nutrient-rich soil. This soil will be donated to our farm in the spring – most of which is made up of 3-year-old leafy materials. They’re already using their yard waste-turned-soil to grow food onsite. This food is then donated to those in need around the Greenville area. Diverting waste from landfills and donating food to local charities – how much better does it get?
Greater Greenville Sanitation know the lay of the land and the quantities of material they can provide. They also have the necessary equipment to haul materials around. Ultimately, by partnering with the people who collect yard waste, you may actually be helping them reduce their hauling costs by allowing them to deliver local waste directly to your site.
Likewise, it’s great to work with an organization that prefers to find alternative uses for our waste rather than hauling it to landfills!