At Hopkinton’s Work Song Farm, a sustainable approach to farming has taken root through the use of household food waste. Every day, residents in town and nearby areas drop their white buckets filled with food scraps which are then turned to compost to feed the crops that Dan and Abigail Kilrain grow year-round at their farm.

“I think composting is the ultimate form of recycling,” said Dan Kilrain. “It’s nature’s recycling.”

In 2022, the farm received a grant from the Composting Association of Vermont (CAV), a nonprofit working to effectively manage organic residuals, to launch a pilot program with the goal of giving locals a means to send their food wastes to designated places for composting. The pilot project involves the participation of four farms in New Hampshire and three farms in Vermont over a two-year period.

When Kilrain brought forth the initiative to the town’s waste reduction committee, they were immediately on board, he said. Ginnie Haines, a member of the committee helped procure buckets for free to help families compost at home.

As part of the program, community members are encouraged to visit the Kilrains’ farm to collect an empty bucket, which they can take home to fill with their food scraps and other compostable waste. Kilrain adds a handful of wood shavings to the bottom of each bucket to help keep it fresh and clean. When the bucket is full or starts to smell bad, they can bring their buckets back to the farm to trade for an empty one.

In the field, he makes rows of food scraps and adds dried leaves to them to aid in the composting process. He carefully tends to the piles, regularly turning them to maintain the temperature.

“Composting gives off carbon dioxide but I think we’re also capturing a lot of carbon and putting it in a stable form in the soil where we are helping plants grow and capture more carbon out of the air,” he explained. 

The program has steadily grown in popularity since its launch in June of last year. More people from nearby towns are also taking part, said Kilrain.

Kristin Cook, who lives in an apartment in Concord, was unsure how to compost her kitchen waste until she learned about the composting program at the Hopkinton farm.

Cook who has been taking part in the program since January, said she finds it to be an easy and rewarding way to contribute to the soil and to the crops that are going to be a source of food.

“It’s nice to know that you are decreasing a part of your footprint on the environment because you are not just throwing things into your trash that is then going to get buried in a landfill,” said Cook.

Currently, the farm receives 60 full buckets each week and expects to receive more as the program expands.

The farm takes not just produce, but all leftovers like meat, dairy and even bread. At the farm, signs clearly indicate which wastes can and cannot be composted.

One challenge Kilrain faces is the produce stickers on fruits and vegetables that people buy at the grocery store, which can get mixed in the bucket with food scraps. He said sometimes people forget to remove them. He also hopes to put in place a new system to help reduce the time it takes to clean the buckets.

To Kilrain, this is a step in an environmentally friendly direction. Instead of food scraps rotting away in landfills and producing methane, he saw this as a way to reduce carbon footprint and at the same time increase the fertility of the soil.

“We are losing out on a lot of nutrients,” said Kilrain about throwing food scraps in the trash. “It’s nutrition for us, plants and animals that are just wasted and even worse than wasting is if it is at a landfill producing methane, a big greenhouse gas.”

In the future, he hopes to harness the heat produced during the composting process to warm the greenhouses during the winter months, which are currently heated using propane.

]]>