A Wisconsin farm tucked away in a tiny village near Lake Michigan may offer a glimpse of the future for farmers dedicated to growing crops with fewer contaminants. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel profiled Mighty Wind Farms on Tuesday, highlighting its use of food scraps from restaurants to keep its soil nutrient-rich while also reducing emissions from scraps that frequently end up in landfills. For Mighty Wind Farms, that means receiving up to 500 pounds of food scraps per week to be naturally broken down in a process that takes at least 15 days—the amount of time needed for microbes and decomposition to generate enough heat to kill bacterial threats to humans.
It’s an inexact process for Mighty Wind Farms, but one that could certainly be scaled up, given that millions of pounds of food waste hit landfills in the U.S. annually. According to the EPA, that number in 2018 alone was 35.3 million pounds of food waste, accounting for nearly a quarter of municipal solid waste. It’s a much safer bet than the wastewater sludge many farms rely on—the same type of sludge that was recently found to contain substantial amounts of “forever chemicals” known as perfluoroalkanes (PFAS), which pose significant health dangers—as long as the scraps themselves are found to not be contaminated.
As the Sierra Club notes, “there are no known methods for removing PFAS chemicals from composts other than to stop accepting feedstocks that contain PFAS.” This is a harder ask for more industrial-level composting operations that may have a larger infrastructure, which also means more opportunities for cross-contamination. “Given the long residence times in some composting facilities, it would take many months, if not longer, for compost qualities to improve to the point where no PFAS were found,” the Sierra Club continues. Mighty Wind Farms is lucky in that it can act as its own composting facility and directly monitor what it's putting into the farm’s soil as soon as the compost is deemed suitable as a soil additive.
Mighty Wind Farms also notes the other environmental benefit of snapping up food scraps instead of leaving them to rot in landfills: lowered emissions. “It's not a big operation,” Mighty Wind Farms co-owner Dan Fatke told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “But what we're doing is trying to help the locals, and preventing [it] from going to the landfill. When it goes to the landfill, it does generate methane, which isn't good for the environment.” Statistics on food scraps vary from state to state but in Wisconsin, 20.5% of the state’s landfills are composed of food waste—70% of which is food that is still edible. Composting is just one component of addressing food waste issues and reducing emissions in the process, which is a win-win for farmers looking to feed their communities and preserve their way of life for generations. Compost is proven to help with water retention in soil as well as sustaining nutrients in the soil that are beneficial for crop-growing.