 I want to really thank everyone for being here and it's we're a small group tonight but that's very important to us that you're here. We really appreciate your support and we're going to talk about hopefully get you really enthusiastic and excited about the composting program. We think the environmental benefits from the composting program are really big and numerous and we're really excited about soil health and if you guys feel that same way then then you can help other people in San Francisco also feel the vibe and so we can get more and more stuff into that compost bin and and do improve that soil health and more and more farms and really help our environment and our climate. I work I'm the spokesperson for Recology which is your recycling and composting company here in San Francisco. It's an employee-owned company so on recycling we have a funny saying down there where we're sorting out your bottles and cans we like to say life's a mess and we sort it out but tonight we're going to talk mostly about composting and this is the 20th anniversary of the compost program starting composting collection program starting here in San Francisco and it's a real game changer because it's keeping materials out of landfills and it's returning nutrients to the soil and it's giving farmers an alternative to using chemical fertilizers and it's helping save water and there's other things too. This is this is one of my favorite places in San Francisco by the way it's Fort Funston and it's a beach just to the west and south of here and this is at low tide and I encourage you all to go there at low tide and this is an example of the kinds of places we're trying to protect and what we'd like to have. This is another beach so if we don't do right by the environment this is what can happen. This is a vineyard and there's a whole lot of photosynthesis going on here and we want to see a lot more of that that's much better than sending stuff to a landfill. We don't need much of that we've got too much of that going on in this country and in the world and also a lot of incineration. Here's a picture of the three bins now how far we've come so now property management companies are trying to get them into public spaces and do it in really elegant ways and so like Jack Macy from the city here Jack is a leader in the compost program and he's done a lot of things so that every property in San Francisco is participating in the compost program. Here's a picture of our finished compost the the pieces are nice and small so our compost is more developed than in other places around the world. Here's an older picture of our compost facility in near Vacaville it shows this is an older picture when we started with Nigel and we were using a tarp system at that point we don't use tarps anymore we use biocape now and we've made other improvements. This is a picture in the middle of that that facility and here's a picture of when the compost is a little further along this machine is called a windrow turner and so there's lots of microorganisms in that long row of compost and like Nigel and Diana will tell you this is essentially a microbe farm there's billions upon billions of microorganisms in those piles and they just like us they need water and they need air so that's what this machine is doing it's turning them and it's adding some water and this is our blending pad at the end and so we we make special blends we have other soil amendments that we blend together with the immature compost and then we send it off to the farms. Here's a vineyard and they're broadcasting it across the vineyard okay here here is after they pick the grapes and then they're growing a cover crop in this hallway between the rows of vines this hallway is eight feet or two meters wide and here then you know and come this time of year in April then those cover crops are like this one's mustard they're very big and Nigel commented a little earlier that a lot of the vineyards most almost all the vineyards are doing this now. I can't show you a picture of carbon in the atmosphere but I can show you a picture of plants that pull carbon out of the atmosphere so here it is. A year ago on a Sunday night at eight o'clock the vineyard managers called me and they said you have to come tomorrow because the cover crops are peaking and we want you to photograph them so I went and I took this picture it looks kind of like a Monet painting it's hard to tell that that's a vineyard but you can if you look closely you can see the vine you can see the different types of cover crops there and you can just see the life and the diversity and you can imagine the bees that were there and the worms and the snakes and the other creatures the biodiversity that is happening there like Nigel is saying this is how far we can take it and this is what we need to do a lot more of and as Diana said it's not just what you see above the soil there's all kinds of life there's a life web in the top soil that we can't see but it's there and so when we do these types of things that's what happens this is Chateau Montalina they've been using our compass for a long time that's Dave Vella the vineyard manager and he had the tallest mustard crop this year that he's ever had and he's this this man is six feet one or six feet two so you can imagine how tall that mustard is those are the roots and so when that plant dies those roots die and they become food for the animals of the microorganisms in the soil they can eat them and then make the nutrients more available to the roots of the plants there's a there's a good one Nigel remember that now look at now it's not just it's not just the beautiful heirloom tomatoes but look at the health of his plants I mean they're really healthy that's a lot of times I'm told farmers look at is the is the plants these are some big ones that capay fruits and vegetables but again look at the plants look at the health of the plants look at this these are table grapes look at the weight of that of that and they use compost and to help get there this is a again Chateau Montalina there's two different cover crops here this is rye and barley and and and oats and this is a cover crop that attracts beneficial insects so they they want to attract insects that will then eat pests that are a threat to their vines look at the leaf on that plant when you have healthy soil you can grow healthy plants and then you don't need pesticides to chase bugs away because the plant and look at the look at the stem leading down into the grapes the supple purple stem it's like the veins in your wrist okay that's because of healthy soil and here's another picture you can see their soil this is the day before they pick the grapes but look at the size of that leaf that's an enormous leaf it's the biggest leaf I've ever seen on a on a grapevine for wine plants and with that large leaf it can do a lot of photosynthesis also compost saves a tremendous amount of water a good quality compost by weight is 50 percent humus and humus is a natural sponge both attracts and retains water so you can imagine if we do this all those regions around the world that Diana was showing on her map we can help them survive droughts we can help them survive the double whammy of of drought and higher temperature which can kill soils so here's from our compost giveaway here we're using it in golden gate park so a lot of this compost comes back to the city and here are bins and I'm going to end it there I just want to encourage everyone to put all their coffee grounds and all their eggshells and all their food soil paper anything that we can compost please put it in that green bin and then we can make compost and help these fine people do the good work that they do we can do a very brief Q&A but what who's got a question who can kick us off with a question as one application of compost creates this system system of change that just continues for year to year without doing compost well we always used to think of compost as providing nutrients for the soil so we'd take you know I would send the vegetables to the city people would put them in the in the food bin and the green bin and then we'd make the compost over in Vacaville and then we'd kind of return the nutrients to the soil but what has really changed since the year 2000 is our understanding of soil and the role of microorganisms and the biology of the soil so we no longer I no longer think of the compost that Japson Prairie produces from the food waste in San Francisco as really returning nutrients I think of it in terms of this is this amazing material that you can put on all the fields around the whole Bay Area and really bring those soil back back to life so that we can use a natural biological processes and techniques that we've learned with cover crops and everything to enliven those soils so we can bring the nutrients from the release them from the soil and photosynthesis and sequest carbon so it's like thinking of compost is a different thing you know what San Francisco is producing is this magical stuff that farmers can use to enliven and reenliven their soils and once they're alive then they're alive yeah and so I don't longer have to keep having truck loads of compost come to my farm because we've got it going okay maybe sometime I need to add a bit more or something like that but now another farmer can do it you know yes every every soil is different I and that's the skill of the farmer and the agronomist and people involved in determining a program for your particular soil there are many many different soils I happen to have a pretty good soil but it's still taken me and all the teaching of other farmers a long time to work all this out and we have a lot of very smart people involved in this so it can be done it depends on each different soil the techniques and the time and how much but it's good that I give my allotment to compost stuff so somebody else can use it I mean there's still a huge demand for the compost everything everything goes out the facility nothing gets wasted we can't meet the demand right exactly so as soon as I can give it up as soon as a farmer can say okay my soil is great okay next farmer can work on this that's really great that's a that's a wonderful thing I think it's a I think it's a success story of story to actually stop using the compost so he's created a closed loop system yes so it's kind of like in in a functioning ecosystem in a forest or something there's nobody going out and applying compost it's just nature regulates it and it works so now that he's you know tinkered with it and jump started the the microbiology it's working so he's able to keep it not bring inputs from elsewhere so you had a question do I still plow no no I don't plow anymore um yeah well what what you do when you cultivate soil is you oxidize soil and you release carbon okay into the atmosphere okay what we want to do is to minimize that okay so we want to disturb soil as least amount as possible because also in under the ground it it disturbs all the soil life now I do cultivate my soil but I only cultivate enough and only deep enough so that I can actually put a plant in the soil you know so I'm not I'm not ripping it really really deeply I'm not I'm just cultivating that top three or four inches so that I can sow my seeds I can easily get my seeds in the ground I can come along and you know we have a little machine that helps us transplant and and then we cultivate any weeds so we don't turn soil over 12 inches deep every year or rip it just because it's Wednesday we do it very purposefully and very minimally and there's still a lot of improvements you have a winter that goes over the soil it is not valid I believe it is not valid yes I really believe there are a lot of farmers in the midwest a lot of big farmers and huge acreages in the midwest where they're doing what they call no till farming now some of them are using herbicides to do that some of them are doing it organically and some of them are doing a little bit of both so you know it's there's a lot of work being done on very big scale farming you know huge areas to develop this and I think rather than you know that it's it's it's a work in progress if it's sorry yeah oh if the topic is of interest to you there's a great book I'd recommend called dirt the erosion of civilization by David Montgomery who's a professor of geology at the University of Washington and he goes through and systematically looks at all these different civilizations that ultimately collapsed and his thesis is that by over plowing they made themselves vulnerable to you know attacks from the outside or when there was a drought or something and the one exception that he finds is the Egyptians because of the Nile the Nile replenished the fertility on an annual basis so that civilization was able to continue for thousands of years uninterrupted whereas all these other civilizations kept disappearing or collapsing so yes the the the new wisdom is that plowing is actually quite detrimental and there are all sorts of ways to get around it you were talking about the cover cropping and you can just now go through and and squash the plant down but leave the stock there and then come through with these you know the name of them I can't remember the name of it right now but these drills that will just go straight down into the soil and plant the seed without all the tillage yes we're talking about tilling the three or four inches of soil are you call that do you consider that no till or is that still tilling well there's various different types of no till I mean I think for a farmer when you're planting a crop you have to look at your particular situation and minimize the soil disturbance and that's really all that you're really doing and now people are trying different techniques as to how to achieve you know my job is to at the end of the day harvest the lettuce or harvest strawberries so I have to get the crop into the ground I have to protect it and from weeds and and allow it to grow and flourish on my farm so we've been all the time experimenting with different ways of doing that and so each farmer whether they're growing corn or watermelons or chickens and producing eggs they have to find different ways to get the plant into the ground or to use perennial crops or so it's it's a it and it also depends on your climate and what particular soil you have so I'm not going to say that you shouldn't plow or should only do no till or you should only do this or not do that farmers are very skilled at getting their crops in the ground and bringing them to your table and that's really what we're trying to do and I think if we had applied the same amount of skill and knowledge to that has been applied to lots and lots of chemicals and making money out of the kind of scorched earth farming that we've been doing we would be a long way towards solving a lot of those problems and I believe that there are many farmers in this country and all over the world who are getting a long way on that but there's still I mean this might sound a little crazy but I believe I'm maybe 25 percent of the way on this journey and I'm being very serious there because I am hoping one day to have my farm into a complete diverse cover crop perennial plants that we just make a little slice in the soil and we plant the seeds we need you know looking for and we just grow the crops and harvest and then we come along with with maybe a tractor and a mower to clean everything up or animals come along and eat and then we plant another crop through that soil that will use a lot less water because the ground will be completely covered all the time it will absorb all the rainwater because you know we talk about reservoirs and saving water and what's the level of this lake or that lake we really need to soak in everything that falls on the on the fields you know I don't want to see brown soil and water coming into the bay you know okay we got a tremendous year all the water comes in the bay the bay turns brown we don't want that we want the soil to stay in the fields in the mountains and rehydrate the landscape if we rehydrate the landscape then the plants can take the water as they need it with the roots down deep level deep level and we can all flourish which is another argument for not plowing because when you plow you destroy the aggregation the soil structure and so when it does rain it's harder for the water to infiltrate and go down deep where it's supposed to go and so now we see with climate change this oscillation between drought and then flood and the reason we get the flooding is because when the soil I mean when it does rain the water doesn't percolate down into the soil it just runs off and sheets off because of the aggregation is is missing um more clay too yeah yeah I mean there's you know I mean there are many ways to do this I mean you have a situation in an urban environment where you don't have huge amounts of water rushing down of a hill or in a field to wash the soil away I mean there are people who are doing gardening in cities who are doing it without digging no dig farming okay there are people who are double digging there are sometimes I mean I I do every 10 or 11 years because I use tractors on my farm I do come along and I I do cultivate gently at depth because I don't want you know the compaction of the of the tractors and things like that so I would like not to say you know no dig or or all of those different techniques we're not saying they're wrong we're saying what you do as a farmer or as a gardener in the city you look at your soil you think about biology you think about soaking up all the water and you use the appropriate techniques so I'm not saying any of that double digging is wrong but you look around and see what people are doing in your neighborhood with your soil and how they're handling your soil and how they're who's achieving really good results and learn you know it's um it's not about my way or the highway it's about bringing the soil back to life and producing fabulous food without lots of chemicals out of a bag that is just pouring money into a corporate America does that make sense go ahead what you're doing right now would be on the lines of going towards regenerative agriculture well there's lots of names and I try to avoid all those names I try to even use avoid using the organic word I tried I think most people can understand you know the biology of the soil the biology of the gut um bringing things back to life and not just not just taking a pill or you know feeding your soils like they have a disease or plants so yes there's lots of names is sustained I mean these names just get I see trucks driving up the up the freeway with sustainable produced chickens right and those chickens what they're produced in a factory in Petaluma I don't think there's anything anything sustainable about chickens that are produced in a factory we need to get animals back onto the farm we need to get people back onto the farm we need to get children smelling soil getting them tasting food and people cooking in their kitchens you know and really absolutely getting excited about feeding themselves and not just nipping into a store to get a quick burger or a frozen meal or something like that or deli food yeah something in plastic or something that's that's had to have a lot of preservatives added to it because it doesn't last very long we want we want micro micro pollens says we want food that's rotting you know we want to we want to get to eat it and and like our strawberries we always pick our strawberries as ripe as we dare and we always get in trouble with the people we sell them to or the customers because you know sometimes they get a little smushed or something like that but boy they taste good and that's when they've got all the nutrients when things are actually really ripe and that's what the science is telling us now an underripe fruit underripe vegetables do not have the same health giving nutrients and nutrition and something that's underripe we've got to have it ripe so thank you yes thank you i think um i heard Joel Salatin speak over the weekend and one thing that stuck with me is he said that we want to move from um you know a capital intensive model to a knowledge intensive model and i think that that's something that that you were sort of alluding to was that a lot of these techniques they require good management and a lot of thinking and just not just pouring chemicals you know just a cocktail that you just walk away from and come back six months later and harvest it's really you know what what's going on reading the landscape what's going on in my farm what's going on with my soil health what's the weather look like and so there's so many variables that you really need to consider that that that you want it to be less prescriptive so that it can be adaptive i think you have the microphone i do i have a question for you that's going to kind of take this in a different direction and my question is about compostable plastics so compostable plastics are obviously really popular in san francisco people like to have their cake and eat it too so i have something that's convenient and um disposable but also doesn't add to the landfill and not too long ago i was at jepp's and prairie and i saw a lot of these compostable plastics that were not breaking down quickly enough to become part of the compost and so i'm interested in your view on this like are is there such a thing as a truly compostable plastic and is that a viable option i think there's two there's a two part answer to this um and i'll do the first first part sorry i'll do the first part and i'd like to ask jack macy to do the second part okay because he's done a lot of study on this but i can tell you um uh this whole field of compostable cups and compostable bags and cutlery it's a relatively uh young field um and some of these things compost well and some of them not so well um jack has helped create a standard and so if it says compostable you know and and you'll see some of the bags and it says there's a nice big word and all capital letters compostable those ones compost pretty well there's other ones that go through the process and then they get lifted out by this the screens at the end of the process and you and i could use them wash them and use them to eat soup like a spoon um so when i you use the term compostable plastics and when i hear that i hear the word plastic and um and that like bioplastics you know they they have some plastic elements in them so they don't break down very well so uh we certainly understand the need to have that people need to have things like a liner bag or if they're having a picnic they'd like to have something that they can either reuse or it can truly compost so we support uh these types of things but they need to be truly compostable they need to be not made from plastic but be made from plant material um uh i would recommend we would recommend that people try to use real plates and real silverware and real cups whenever possible and make the effort to you know put them in a canvas sack and bring them on a picnic and and just not buy single use materials and we really believe that even though we're part of our businesses collecting and transporting stuff we really believe that that people ought to reuse uh metal and glass and and try to get away from these things and i'll let jack um give you a better answer than i can because he's really literally the expert well i uh like your your reuse answer so reusing is always better than any disposable um there's a lot of confusion around compostable plastics so uh there is a scientific standard and an ASTM which is a sort of organization that's helped create standards and um so we only will consider a plastic to be compostable if it has met that standard and the way we know that it's met that standard is it meets a third party certification for that standard and we were able to get a law passed in california that you can't label any plastic compostable unless they've actually met that standard now verifying that can be a challenge uh we're actually trying to get um you know the plastics to be labeled with the certification logo uh or at least you know the packaging but that's that's helped and you know particularly with cutlery there's there's been a lot of there's a lot of history of misleading marketing where people say oh it's made from plants or it's degradable or bi degradable and if you see that language and you don't see the word compostable assume it's not and only unless you see the word compostable that you should assume it's not and then if you actually see the word compostable on a piece of cutlery or a cup then i think chances are they're actually following the law because there has been some you know enforcement on that and if they do meet that standard you know it's a lab standard but it basically verifies that the material will fully biodegrade uh generally in the time that commercial composting facilities operate but they over time commercial composting facilities like ecologies have moved to shorten the time to make it efficient if you can do it faster it's less costly so you know i know that there are some facilities not not so much of a problem at ecologies so most of that plastic you're seeing is not compostable i think every once in a while if somebody takes a compostable bag which if it's certified compostable will break down fairly quickly but if they tie that bag in a knot suddenly you have like a whole bunch of layers crammed together then that part of the bag might not break down or you see green plastic and there's a lot of green plastic bags that are not compostable out there and then with cutlery has been a really big problem where a lot of most of the cutlery out there for quite some time that people thought were compostable was not and there were companies that were just really misleading and i think that's gotten you know better now there are certain companies that sell a compostable cutlery like with a teardrop you know cut cut through like well centric so just make sure it says compostable but if you can avoid using disposable that's that's even better okay well um i think we're out of time well we have another one more question go ahead center for full safety was the only organization that they come 21 presenting about souls and and after that now in any climate talks in in the world they're gonna talk about salt in the future thanks to these videos that they made that they made and she's organizing a conference in agus that is called soil not oil and i don't know if she wanna talk about it well i'm helping you organize the conference so that's miguel robles with the biosafety alliance and miguel put together this soil not oil conference last year in richmond and he's gonna do it again this year and i said that i would be happy to help organize this soil plenary but there's a lot more that happens at this conference besides soils i would encourage you all to go on the soil not oil dot org website look at the dates are august 5th and 6th um yeah it's a great conference it brings together many speakers on a lot of broad range of topics yeah and i want to encourage you to uh get as many people out in the garden as possible yeah get as many people touching soil as possible there and people in san francisco can use this compost too to enliven their own gardens and grown food in the city it's really good what you say i always when i i go to present to a place and i talk about food justice there is no food justice if you don't try to grow your own food and i teach classes i facilitate watches on urban farming i have a presentation the 28th that is called urban farming and climate change because something that can be really helpful and it's in this alone discussion i hope you can join you i hope you can come to the conference and speak during the conference share your experience with other farmers and the public there is all kind of people in this conference last year we have 1000 people it's a big conference and we're gonna talk about it and i encourage you to to come if you don't have money we have opportunities for the volunteer you know for loincloth thank you yeah let's um let's not criticize other people who are gardening or that particular technique it's getting us getting your hands in the dirt getting as many people connected with food and we can all then learn from each other okay thank you all very much i really appreciate this thanks for coming thanks good questions thank you very much audience thank you to the library for hosting thank you