The story below is from our November/December 2022 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
The Harvest Collective shares their plan for a composting facility in Roanoke.
The Harvest Collective is a worker-owned cooperative that has organized community ownership in sustainable agriculture for the past three years. Now they have begun a project not yet attempted in Roanoke: establishing a composting center to divert organic matter from landfills.
Craig Coker, an environmental engineer with over 45 years of experience developing composting facilities across the U.S., helped build the 60,000 ton/year solid waste composting facility at Royal Oak Farm in Bedford County. He is mentoring Davey Stewards, W. Hunter Hartley, Katie Struble, Erin Boettcher and Thomas Sieber, co-owners and workers of The Harvest Collective, as they navigate the process of building the composting center in Roanoke. He is helping to design their new facility and get permits from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
Stewards was inspired to initiate work on this project partly because San Francisco has diverted nearly 100% of its compostables over the past 12 years. The Harvest Collective has raised funds for this venture by selling compost, private investment, acting as a consultant for garden organization, and taking odd jobs such as building chicken coops and installing fences.
This money has allowed them to begin planning a start-up composting facility. “We want to generate environmental and ecosystem resources,” says Stewards. “The backbone of ecological abundance is good soil. Miracle-Gro is a finite resource. We need to use other resources, and there’s nothing better than being able to reduce food waste at the same time.”
Stewards hopes the composting center will eventually be municipally supported. Until then, there will be a fee of about $120 per year to drop off food waste at designated sites in neighborhoods. They plan to begin accepting compostable material in February 2023.
Hartley sums up the importance of investing in the future by saying that “our common intentions shift into focus” when we “embrace how we all must share in stewarding the environment.” He and the other members of The Harvest Collective believe we need a “shared vision of a sustainable Roanoke.”
The Harvest Collective will host a fundraiser/business proposal meeting at the CoLab on Grandin on Friday, November 4, 2022. They will have live music and serve food grown in the co-op gardens. For more information as the date nears, check out their website at thc.coop.
The story below is from our November/December 2022 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
