Tag Archives: compost

Taking Out the Trash — Where Does It Really Go?

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Once a week we will be featuring a fun and/or educational activity you can try at home or in the classroom.

Animals forage in trash on the southern edge of Port-au-Prince.

Animals forage in trash on the southern edge of Port-au-Prince, eight months following the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that stuck January 12, 2010. Heifer International is part of the recovery efforts there.

With Earth Day only a week away — April 22 —  my mind is on garbage and what it does to our awesome planet. This experiment is a great way to find out what happens to garbage when we throw it in the trash.

When we throw something “away” does it really go away? What kinds of garbage break down the easiest? The fastest? The most? Let’s find out.

What you need:

  • A plastic container (like a yogurt cup)
  • 3 types of garbage (for example: vegetable peels, egg shells, mushrooms, nut shells, paper, aluminum foil or plastic)
  • Soil (from your yard, not potting soil)

Directions:

  • Fill a plastic container halfway with soil.
  • Add a little water, but only enough to make the soil wet, not watery.
  • Bury three kinds of garbage in the soil, one from each of the sets below:
    1. Vegetable peelings, bread, food leftovers
    2. Egg shells, nut shells, paper
    3. Aluminum foil, plastic, a penny
  • Make a list of the garbage and check it every day for changes.
  • Be sure the soil stays damp. Add a teaspoon of water each day, if necessary.

Make a chart to record your observations. Which materials break down the fastest, the most and the easiest? Which materials show no signs of breaking down?

After this experiment, think about the garbage you throw away. What can you do to lessen the materials that are hardest to break down? One way to lessen the materials is to compost. We will be offering several composting activities in the upcoming months like this blog post about worm bins and their valuable fertilizer.

Or read this article about food waste in America and what you can do about it.

You can find this and many other fun and informative activities in the Classroom Resources section of Heifer International’s website.

African Worms Make Compost in the Philippines

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Jirnani Bedrijo displays worms she uses in her compost pile at her home in Los Arcos, Philippines. “Before we didn’t have much knowledge or skill, but after Heifer’s trainings we have more knowledge of animal management and feed formulation,” said Nakue. The Bedrijo’s received seven goats, vegetable seeds, fruit trees, farm tool and African night crawlers from Heifer International.

Photo by Russell Powell, courtesy of Heifer International

Training Makes the Difference

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I wrote in August about Heifer’s trainings in Sierra Leone, and I’ve always known that it makes a huge difference in our project participants’ lives. But a report on a Heifer project in Kenya just crossed my desk that really brought that home.

But first, a side note: I’ve seen and heard comments that ask why Heifer animals cost more than the animals that some other NGOs offer. There are several reasons usually cited by Heifer staff: we also include extensive training in Earth-friendly agriculture; our projects last an average of three years; extensive measurement and followup are always included, which adds to the cost…

But this report that I read today… whoa. It concerns the Homa Bay Orphans Livelihood project in the Nyanza Region of Kenya. The project seeks to address high poverty rates among 5,000 family caregivers of an estimated 30,000 orphans who have lost one or both of their parents to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

The project story in the report is about Mary Akinyi Ondiek of the Many Mari women’s group. Before joining the group, Mary harvested about 198 pounds of maize from her 1.5 acre plot annually. She habitually depended on buying all the vegetables for her family from a nearby market. As a member of Many Mari, she received gifts of training and later, livestock.

From the report: “Mary and other members planted vegetables and Napier [grass] using the sustainable organic agriculture (SOA) skills they had learned. Mary made compost and used it for planting her crops. Mary was then able to stop buying vegetables from the market, saving her almost 40 cents a day. She sold her surplus vegetables and earned a steady monthly income of $33.33—$200 total during the reporting period. She managed to get about 595 pounds of maize from her land—more than a 220 percent increase!”

Whoa, right? So, even though the prices for Heifer animals via The Most Important Gift Catalog in the World have not been raised since there’s BEEN a catalog, I think you can see that what some consider a higher cost definitely yields a higher impact.

Happy New Year.

Heifer Supports Healthy Soil

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Dolores shows us her composting recipe.

Today is World Soil Day. As you know, Heifer’s mission is to end hunger and poverty and care for the Earth. When we say “Earth,” we mean “earth,” too. It’s kind of a no-brainer that, as an organization promoting sustainable agriculture around the world, we’ve got a stake in helping our project communities improve their soil.

When I was in Peru, I visited the small farm of a woman named Dolores Delgado. The very first thing Dolores showed us was a poster illustrating the agroecological cycle of her farm. Part of this cycle was the  elaborate recipe for liquid compost she and her husband learned through the Heifer project. You could really tell Dolores has this science down. She collects manure and urine from her guinea pigs and adds it to her vermicomposting (composting with worms, in case you didn’t take Latin) pile. When that compost is ready, she puts it and a whole long list of other ingredients into a big drum to ferment into a product called “biol.” Then, instead of spraying chemical fertilizers (which, let’s face it, aren’t good for anybody), she and her husband us a simple spray backpack to apply the organic biol fertilizer.

Dolores has crafted her guinea pig cages so collecting their manure and urine is a relatively easy task.
Dolores shows us her worm composting pile.
Although the project she’s participating in was fairly new at the time of our visit,
Dolores had already taken composting and improving her farm’s soil to a scientific level.
In addition to knowing they’re improving the soil and protecting the environment,
Dolores and her husband don’t have to worry about exposing themselves or their livestock to dangerous chemicals.
This is what a lot of the terrain looks like in the parts of Peru we visited–a bit on the barren side.

Improving the soil on Dolores’s farm–and on any other–has many implications. In the part of the world where she lives, the soil is generally pretty poor. Instead of neglecting the soil, leading to soil erosion, Dolores grows nutritious fodder for her guinea pigs, which also means she doesn’t have to spend as much money feeding them. Her vegetable garden yields significantly better results than before she began using agroecological practices.

Compare this with the photo above. A huge difference, right?

World Toilet Day: Give a Crap

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Ugandan biogas toilet. Photo by Dero Sanford.

Happy World Toilet Day, everyone.

Wondering why there’s a day for toilets (I mean, there’s a day for everything, right?) around the world? I’ll let the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation explain that one. For those of us who take toilets for granted, it’s hard to believe that 2.6 BILLION people poop on the ground because they don’t have any other place to go.

Although we’re not exactly The Toilet People, in many of our projects, sanitation and hygiene are key objectives for the community. We include these topics as part of the training we provide, where needed. In our biogas projects in Uganda, we help participants build composting toilets that connect to their biogas units, helping them contain and then make the most of their family’s waste products.

I took this picture of one of the Ranch’s
composting toilets (a “squatty potty,”
if you will) during my last stay in the
Global Village.

Two of our Learning Centers, Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Arkansas, and Overlook Farm in Rutland, Massachusetts, have composting toilets on their campuses to both educate about toilet conditions around the world and put the compost to use on the growing trees.

So dig in to World Toilet Day and see how you can help make the world a cleaner, healthier place. And while you’re at it, try giving a crap this holiday season.

This Week in Food: Making a Lasting Change

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This post is the final in a series of posts by Heifer Senior Coordinator of School Programs Kim Machnik. If you haven’t already, go back and read each week’s post. Heifer Celebrates the Harvest Season: Food Systems at Home and Around the World; Finding the Source; What’s Your Food Culture?; Your Choices Matter; Food on the Move.

Thismonth on the Heifer blog and out in the world, food has been the topic on thetip of everyone’s tongue (yes, pun intended!) We’ve talked about the sources offood in your community, food culture, seasonality, the impact of your foodchoices, and the food movement. It’s a lot to stomach (there I go again!), butalso too much to avoid. Putting all of this information about food choices towork for you, instead of struggling to manage it all, is possible. As we cometo the end of our month of food blogging, try integrating these simpleprinciples to put what you’ve learned into action:

  1. Food should be savored. Choose foods that aredelicious and varied, and take time whenever possible to make the cookingexperience part of your experience of food. If you can grow your own food,that’s just more time you can spend enjoying the process of food. The fartherback in the process you go, the better the food tastes! Try this cheeserecipe for an easy “from scratch” experience (I recommend seasoning it withoregano, thyme, and a little bit of salt), or use these compostingexperiments if you’re trying out a new garden- even an indoor one for thefall!
  2. Every little bit counts. You don’t have to committo eating 100% local, environmentally sustainable, fair trade foods to make adifference in your own health and the health of the planet and its people.Choose small steps and incremental changes, and give yourself credit for takingaction! Check out BothSides of a Coffee Cup, a lesson on fair trade vs. conventional coffeesourcing, and decide if that’s one first step that makes sense for you.
  3. Share the joy! Reaching out to others and encouraging your community to thinkabout food in a healthier way for people and the planet isn’t about beingpushy, a downer, or a lobbyist. All you have to do is share the best of yournew food experiences to ignite the enthusiasm in someone else. Invite a friendto the farmer’s market for the goodcompany and free samples. Experimentwith earthworms in your classroom to get students thinking about food as acycle. Bake something delicious with fruit from your neighborhoodand share it with your co-workers. If you get ambitious, think about hosting alocal lunch or a 100-mile meal (where everything you serve comes from within100 miles) at your school, church, or community center. Check out these actionideas for some thoughts on how to educate your community in a positive wayat such an event. It doesn’t take much to make people think- and have fun doingit!
Don’tforget, you can always goback to this post for tons of great ideas and resources, and reach out tous at Heifer anytime (through this blog, Twitter,Facebook, or bysending us an email) withquestions, inspiration, or wonderful stories. Our mission is to work withcommunities to end hunger and poverty and care for the Earth, and we thank youfor being a part of a community taking action to do just that.

Biogas: More than a source of energy

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by Puja Singh  – Heifer Nepal

Poverty has many dimensions. While being poor relates directly to having less to eat, energy is definitely a primary concern for many poor families around the world.  A recent poverty matters blog post looks at how energy directly impacts the poverty situation in many poor countries. 
 
In Nepal, the lack of energy is not just a problem for the poor. The country has continuously had to schedule rolling blackouts for many years now. A general problem intensifies when it reaches the poor. Most of the rural communities are not connected to the grid. Women and girls, primary caregivers for the family, spend hours in a day searching for firewood in the already dwindling forest. These are hours that might have been better spent farming or perhaps, if she is lucky enough, studying.
 
A solution to the current energy situation in Nepal is huge investments in hydro power and solar power fueled by aid and government money. Are they useful? Yes. Are they enough? Probably not. Overlooking the time it will take for these plans to materialize and not addressing the politics that might keep these projects from finishing or even launching, fulfilling the urban energy deficit will still be a priority. People in the cities can pay, enabling the government to pay back the loan from World Bank or some other entity.
 
A better solution is biogas. Many Heifer projects that give buffalos also provide support for installation of a biogas plant. The manure from the animals is used to produce methane gas used as fuel for cooking and to light bulbs. This diagram below explains how it all works, and more information about biogas plant construction can be found here.

 
Heifer’s work in countries with multi-faceted problems like Nepal does not just stop in giving livestock gifts to end hunger. But it can invest in innovative ways which can address other over-arching problems with the use of livestock and agriculture. Yes — biogas provides energy. But it does so much more:
  • Saves time that would be spent in searching firewood and allows for girl children to focus on schooling often neglected due to manual chores.
  • Produces smokeless fire, lessening the occurrence of tuberculosis, impaired vision and breathing problems. 
  • Produces light so work can be done and children can read after dark. 
  • Produces manure slurry which is excellent organic fertilizer. 
  • Aids in managing animal and human organic waste. 
  • Reduces the demand for fossil fuel.

One Girl’s Food Waste is Another Girl’s Muffin

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Healthy Carrot Raisin Muffin looks out over Heifer Village

Friend, colleague and fellow blogger Maegan Clark is on her personal path to living more responsibly with regard to the Earth’s resources. Lots of people come to such a path on their own, but I think it’s especially common here at Heifer. When you work somewhere with a mission to end hunger and poverty and care for the Earth, it becomes really hard to avoid recycling or to throw away food, if it wasn’t already.

A couple of days ago, Maegan asked me if my chickens eat carrots. Sure, I said, they eat just about anything like that. Maegan had bought a big bag of organic carrots that had gone a bit past their optimal state. She knew she wouldn’t eat them, but she knew she didn’t want to just throw them in the trash. Living in an apartment, she doesn’t have a compost pile out back or anything, so my chickens were the first thing that came to mind.

When I got the carrots home, I realized that yes, they didn’t look terribly appetizing for snacking on, especially when I had carrots of my own in the fridge. But surely they’d be good for baking. They weren’t rotten, after all. I did a little searching for a recipe, and I whipped these together this morning for my family to have for breakfast. My toddler loved the mini-sized muffins, and I like them enough to use the rest of the bag to make more and freeze, which I’ll do this weekend before the carrots truly turn.

Healthy Carrot Raisin Muffins
Recipe adapted from this one from the Food Network.


Preheat oven to 350F

Ingredients
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/3 cup raw honey
2 Tablespoons wheat germ
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch fine salt
2 large eggs
1 serving unsweetened applesauce cup
2 cups grated carrots
a handful or so of raisins

Directions
Grease or line 12 muffin cups (I filled 12 regular-sized muffin cups and nine mini-muffin cups with my batter).

Whisk the flours with the wheat germ, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl. In another medium bowl, lightly whisk the egg, then whisk in the honey, applesauce and vanilla extract.

Quickly and lightly fold the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients with a rubber spatula. Stir in the carrots and raisins until just evenly moist; the batter will be very thick. Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups. Bake until golden and a toothpick inserten in the centers comes out clean (20 minutes for mini-muffins and 25 for regular-sized worked for me). Turn muffins out of the tins to cool on a rack. Serve and enjoy.

What about you–Have you ever turned someone’s food waste into your own meal?

How To Best Use Your Leaves This Fall

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Now that’s it’s fall, it’s time to start raking leaves and sacking them up … or should you?

Sure you can burn piles of leaves (if it’s legal in your state) or you can sack them up to haul them away, but why not put them to better use for your garden, lawn and environment? 
Compost Your Leaves
If you have a garden then consider composting your leaves this fall for a better summer garden next year. The “brown” leaves are a great source of high-carbon material for compost piles. If you already have a compost pile, it’s as easy as adding layers of leaves to your already composting pile (such as vegetable and fruit scraps, plants, weeds) and let it compost over winter. 
If you don’t currently have a compost pile, you can easy build one with some wooden stakes and mesh wire. Check out our How To blog about composting here. 
Mulch

After you’ve gathered your pile of leaves, you can shred them and use them as mulch in vegetable gardens, flower beds, under shrubs or for smaller plants. How do you shred leaves? Well, you can sack up your leaves, and have kids jumps on the pile until it shrinks, put them all in a garbage can and use a week wacker (please make sure to wear eye protection) or mow over them. 
Grow Potatoes

After you have gathered your leaves, you can pick a sunny spot in your garden or yard to prepare for a potato garden. This might be one of the best, easiest things to do with your leaves. Just pile them up about 3 feet high. By springtime, your pile should be a nice rich patch of compost. Pick out the potato seeds you prefer, plant and cover. In a couple of weeks, you should have a new potato garden. 
For more information, click here. 
Mow Over Your Leaves
If you don’t want to rake up your leaves then why not mow over them? Simple put your lawn mower on the highest setting, mow over the leaves to break them up, and let them break down over the winter. This will not only provide your soil with great nutrients, it will also result in fewer weeds next spring. Just do this once a week and you’ve helped your soil and the environment. 

Waste Not, Want Not: Stop Wasting Food

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Today is Blog Action Day 2011. It is also World Food Day. This year’s theme for Blog Action Day is Food. Bloggers all over the world are writing about this one theme, from their own unique perspective. To find out more, visit the Blog Action Day website. Read more of our Blog Action Day posts on Heifer Blog here.

Here’s my disclaimer: my family and I are just as guilty of accidentally letting food go to waste. Typically, it’s produce I’ve purchased from the farmer’s market with very good intentions (I know, I even wrote that blog post about how to stop wasting produce, for shame!). So, this lecture is directed to myself every bit as much as it is to you.

We, the Americans living in the United States, waste 55 million tons of food–40 percent of our food supply–every year. Worldwide, roughly one-third of the food produced is lost or goes to waste. That’s disgusting on several levels. Recently, a software company did some calculations and found that food waste is responsible for 135 million tons of greenhouse gasses each year. That’s 1,800 pounds per average family–400 pounds per individual–every year. That’s not the food we’re eating… 135 million tons of greenhouse gasses per year from food we throw out.

Photo by Dan Bazira

In developing countries, post-harvest food loss is the biggest culprit. Inadequate food storage, poor roads, etc. leads to food going to waste between the field and the plate. While this is a sad fact, especially considering the number of hungry people in developing countries (906 million), these are surmountable obstacles. In Uganda, Heifer participants are building small-scale grain storage containers to protect their harvests from spoilage. Roads can be built. Not only would such investments help cut down on food losses, they could also provide an incentive for farmers to increase their production. If I were a dairy farmer with new roads by which to transport my milk to a milk collection facility or my vegetables to market, I might start raising more livestock or sowing more seeds when I could afford to.

Photo from Flickr/superk8nyc. Creative Commons.

In industrialized countries, food waste comes after it’s hit the grocery store isles, our refrigerators and shelves, and even our plates. With food prices on the rise and 13 million people in the Horn of Africa literally starving, wasting food is an even bigger no-no than usual. Once your checkout at your local store or market, that food is yours. Yours to prepare. Yours to eat. Your responsibility.

How you and I cut down on our household food waste? Well, we can purchase less to begin with. Shop from a grocery list based on a weekly meal plan. We can follow some easy (though sometimes easier written than followed) directions on how to store fresh produce. We can, gasp, lower our standards. I’d hate for anyone to get sick off my advice, but I can tell you I frequently eat leftovers well after “they” tell you to throw them away, and I’m doing just fine. Have a toddler? They don’t know the difference between fresh crackers and stale! Cooked too much for dinner? Invite your neighbors over and make new friends.

Has your food gone bad, despite your efforts? Keep it out of the landfill by composting it. Or get some backyard chickens.

Cut back on greenhouse gas emissions and save some money. That researcher I mentioned above: he found that “if household food waste could be cut in half, a family of four could save $600 a year.” What could you do with $600? I’d suggest a water buffalo, a sheep, a llama, some tree seedlings and a flock of geese.