We are located right now in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island.
We're at the farm of Eat More Sprouts and Greens.
We grow year-round three products in soil.
We grow sunflower greens, pea shoots, and microgreens.
And today we're focusing on composting.
So welcome to Eat More Sprouts.
Our structure is a five-bay composting facility.
We set it up that way because it seemed to be what was the best for us.
And everybody's going to have their own choice about what they want to do, how many times
they want to turn their compost and so on and so forth.
But you have to decide this is what my compost structure is.
We use the first bay over there for our raw materials.
They go in there from our greenhouse stream.
We just use these compost bays for greenhouse products and from waste from our sprout facility.
So that would be the alfalfa hulls and that sort of thing.
The second bay is the big white one over there.
And what happens there is we take the raw material over there and we let some of the
water settle and be contained and then drained away.
We don't want to put excess water into the system and cause wheat shape to be flowing
out our drains and stuff like that.
So you all know we usually leave our compost in each bay for about six weeks and that's
pretty relevant.
In the summertime it could be a bit faster because it's warmer and so the environment
is more able to speed things up a bit.
Well, when I come in in the morning or start my day I would first off check the traps, see
if there's any pest activity.
We do get some holes in the mesh to redo things.
Bay one would be the bay with the most activity because it's the fresh compost, the food for
the rodents.
And the stuff back there is the hottest right now.
It's the hottest temperature so that would be nice for them to go and live in.
For our pest control system we have netting around all the entrances, the windows, and
we have doors with screening as well to keep out birds.
For rodent control we have trap situated around the compost bin, around the farm.
We're checked daily while I'm here and we kind of have a yearly system with the compost
where I graph all the temperatures and the weather and everything for the year, rodent
activity, quality of compost, anything we're doing differently and then just my weekly
work is temperatures and pest control.
Five T's of composting are temperature, timing, turning, testing and trapping.
It's important that when creating a food safe compost you consider all these five T's because
they all play important roles in what you're trying to do.
We've never had anything bad in our compost, any bad test results, but we like to do it
monthly for our rodent records and for peace of mind.
The sampling just like doing the temperature or the pH test will do kind of a V or a W
shape so I get all different points of the pile.
I usually turn my bag inside out like this so I don't need a lot of soil to make a sample
composite about this much.
Around each part we need about half a pound of soil for a good test result.
We're just sampling for E. coli 157 in Salmonella.
Testing if you're growing for a commercial market is pretty important.
You want to make sure that there are no food safety issues and you want to make sure that
you're creating a product that is as healthy as you can make.
Before I do a screening I always do the pH test just to see if we want to lime it.
If the pH is 6.0 to 6.5 is kind of optimum pH for plant growth.
So I'll start out with my demineralized water, a little test tube and a pH test indicator.
I'll do usually three or four just to get a good sampling, take a little pinch of compost.
Just add about three drops of this pH indicator.
There's a little color guide on there, gently tap the side so I'd say that's yellow to
yellowy green.
It's a pH of 6.5 so I'm happy with that.
I don't need to lime this, this bay, this turn.
After we're in the third bay we actually screen the compost with the big red screen in the
background there and that allows any lumps and anything that hasn't been broken down
to sort of be put back into one of the earlier bins and so we incorporate it as a top dressing
on the compost in the white bay.
After the screening it goes into the fourth bay where it sits for another six weeks and
after that we turn it into the finishing bay.
We still get, even with all of that, we still get a little bit of heat on the finished compost
for about the first week or so, just a tiny, tiny little bit.
Each step along the way the rest of the time there is a huge amount of heat so we're creating
big temperatures up to 130 degrees so nice big hot temperatures for any kind of anything
to be killed and allow the microorganisms to work.
This bay has been dewatering but it's still a bit moist and it goes through a hot cycle
and gets partially cooked and then once it's turned here it cooks the rest, pretty much
all the goopy stuff gets cooked out of it and so it's usually the hottest in bay one
here three weeks after I turn it.
So I'll take a temperature sample.
The composting process incorporates heat and microorganisms and air and it breaks the raw
material down and it ends up with this beautiful rich nutrient source.
We really have a great waste stream and if we didn't compost it it would have to go somewhere
else and that would be hard, that would cost us a lot of money so there's a financial benefit
number one which is great, number two is the environmental benefits and the third, once
again financial benefit is that we create our own medium for growing our own products
and that means we do not have to bring that onto the farm so that's huge.
Some of the hazards associated with not composting properly is the potential food safety challenges
that lie there, you may end up with plant diseases which are not useful for anybody
who's trying to grow things because you don't want to have to plow in a whole crop because
you had a plant disease and you didn't kill it in your composting process and it's very
similar for human diseases.
You want to make sure you have all those five teas, the time, temperature, turning, testing
and trapping in hand so that you are able to really create the best product you can
create.
