History of Commercial Compost

Composting is an ancient art, as old as seed gathering and cave painting. Clay tablets from Mesopotamia dating back 1,000 years before Moses discuss the composting process. Composting was popular with the Greeks and Romans and was common farming practice in Europe and America before the chemical revolution of the 19th century. Beginning in 1905, the English agronomist Sir Albert Howard spent 30 years developing composting techniques in India, ideas which were then embraced by home gardeners in America thanks to the efforts of Organic Gardening editor J.J. Rodale and others.

Take your yard clippings for a spin! The Tumbleweed Compost Tumbler is a simple way to quickly turn yard and food waste into a homegrown soil amendment, quickly and cleanly. Drop the materials in, turn them a few times per week, and in months — not years — you’ll have gallons of nutrient-dense organic matter to offer your plants.

The first compost transaction — its transfer from party to party for trade or profit — is lost to history. The commercial sale of compost probably dates back to when some enterprising farmer began trading the fermented remains of his silage pile to a neighboring gardener for grain or produce. Colonial farmers of New England made a practice of throwing the surplus fish catch into piles of barnyard muck and it’s easy to think that some of the potent results were traded among growers who weren’t such able fisherman. Private, usually local commercial composting began on a small scale during the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s (commercial humus, potting soils and such products as fish fertilizer have been around for decades). This practice grew as corporate farm operations, livestock growers, the timber industry and other businesses realized there was profit to be made from the waste of their activities.

As in Los Angeles, municipal compost operations started as an answer to rapidly filling landfill sites. Since leaves and yard wastes comprise such a large percentage of landfill volume, as much as 30 per cent depending on the season, many cities began to see the value of composting their green waste and recycling (Los Angeles reached 50 percent by including food, paper products and other soluble wastes).

The city of Davis, California has had such a program since 1972. Wellesley, Massachusetts began composting its leaves in the early 1970s after its community incinerator was closed for failing to meet air emission standards. At first, leaves were just piled and stored, but then the city began turning the huge piles and making finished compost and using it locally. Sales boomed. In the late ’80s, the town began collecting debris from landscapers and other commercial operations in an effort to triple their compost production. Other states began to see the win-win value of composting and passed laws to keep yard wastes out of landfills. Incentives were granted for backyard composting programs, subsidies were given to homeowners who purchased compost bins and cities were awarded funds for trucks that would vacuum up leaves.