Hello world,
In these precarious times we find ourselves in, the good news is seemingly harder and harder to come by but I’m here to share with you just that: good news!
For the past number of months, we have quietly been working on brokering a partnership with an organization we have worked with for years, the Kurtz Brothers. More on this in a bit…
The uninitiated will be forgiven for not knowing but as a refresher, the State of Ohio and its division of the Ohio EPA closely regulate and monitor activities related to the practice and manufacturing of composting and in our particular case, food waste composting. In order to compost at any meaningful scale, one must secure what is known as a Class II Composting Permit along with the land needed to justify such a permit. There are, of course, exceptions to every rule. For example, a person can compost on their property or at a garden, or on a farm but that compost pile must not ever exceed 500 square feet. That number, 500, is actually something of a point of pride for us at Rust Belt Riders as we played a small role in a rules change that took effect just two years ago after our constant calling of the Ohio EPA asking them to expand their long-held 300 square foot exception to something larger, they arrived at 500, much to our delight and surprise. This, at the time, represented a significant improvement for us in what we could do on a single site, we could make 66% more compost on a single site thanks to this change and not only could we make 66% more compost, but community gardens could, other community composters like ourselves could, and more food waste could see it’s way clear of the landfill, this was a boon to us, to this industry we are in, and to the planet.
After getting our feet wet in operating our site at E. 55th and St. Clair, we quickly developed a rhythm and system for churning out amazing product at a pretty rapid rate. With space being our limiting factor we knew we needed a system that was in constant motion, material coming in to be composted needed to be timed up with fully composted material leaving the system. At our most efficient, we were able to go from banana peel to fully finished compost in around 45 days! By way of reference, a very active home composter might complete a similar process in 3 months.
What we learned through this process is that as remarkable as our processes were, we simply could not make enough compost. We would max out our 500 square foot site in one week and have tens of thousands of pounds of food scraps that we would need to source elsewhere to our partners like Rid-All Green Partnership and Kurtz Brothers, both operators of Class II Composting permits and in our community. This limited the supply of compost we could produce, created some logistical challenges, but more than anything, we constantly were running out of inventory. This is, to be sure, a good problem, but a problem we needed to address nonetheless.
So what does a good homebrewer do after their friends and family members keep hitting them up to make more and more beer but they have run out of room in their basement? They get a brewery! So that’s just what we did! Today thanks to months of working closely with Kurtz Brothers, we are now the proud operators of the Cloverleaf Composting Facility just off of Granger Road. This site is orders of magnitude larger than our old site and will allow us to produce more compost in a month than we could in an entire year by a long shot! Check out the to-scale areal shots below.
So now what? Now we are identifying equipment, iterating and developing our soil blends and getting the word out about Tilth Soil. Just last year we were named the Best Small Scale Composter in the United States by the U.S. Composting Council, the University of Kentucky in a formal research paper concluded that our flagship potting mix, Sprout is among the best potting mixes available nation wide, and growers all over Northeast Ohio have been providing us with valuable and favorable feedback about our products.
We are so excited for this next chapter of our companies growth and development and invite you to join us for the ride. We have launched a Loyalty Bond program through an amazing organization, Honeycomb Credit, to issue maturing gift cards to help us in building out and activating this new site. What the heck is a maturing gift card you ask? If you buy $100 worth of Tilth Soil store credits today, in six months it will mature 1.3x to $130. So, in short, there isn’t a better time to get your hands on our soil than over the next 29 days! You can pre-order all the soil you will need for the 2021 growing season. Now you can purchase not only by the bag but also the cubic yard so whether you have a small planter box or a new garden installation, we have you covered.
So join us, pre-order some soil so we can get to work making the best soil we possibly can, all while keeping food out of landfills and supporting local growers who are making healthy food more accessible through their work.
