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Waste Profitable for Composting Farm

Posted on: Monday, 3 April 2006, 03:03 CDT

By Ray Reed ray.reed@roanoke.com 981-3351

EVINGTON -- Ken Newman has an enviable business model for his farm.

Industries pay him to accept the raw materials he uses, figuring that it's cheaper than dumping them into a landfill. And most of his workers never complain. They eat for free, turning those materials into a product that can be sold to livestock farms, nurseries, golf courses, landscapers and others who grow plants.

These enthusiastic employees aren't humans, of course. They're microbes.

"We're giving the microbes the best conditions we possibly can," Newman said.

Newman's Royal Oak Farm turns industrial solid waste into compost.

He hopes to complete a licensing process this summer that could make Royal Oak the first fully licensed organic solid-waste composting operation in Virginia.

Royal Oak's raw materials are supplied by food-processing companies with leftover grain products, by builders with unwanted stumps, and by an electric co-op with ash from its wood-burning generator.

For industries whose only option for waste disposal was dumping into a landfill, Newman offers to take the unwanted material off their hands at a slightly lower cost and make it usable as soil nutrients or livestock feed.

Golden West Foods, a Bedford manufacturer, sends bread and other food byproducts to Royal Oak Farm.

Golden West sees two benefits, said Alan Kolodny, vice president of finance.

One beneficiary is the environment.

"You really don't want to be filling up a landfill," Kolodny said.

Second, Golden West's long-term contract with Royal Oak is expected to yield a savings over a 10-year period. "I think the price of landfill is going up faster than my contract" over that time, Kolodny said.

Royal Oak also receives waste materials from Frito-Lay's potato chip plant in Lynchburg and from Flowers Bakery.

"It's all manufacturing waste. None of it is biosolid waste, and we don't use any residential food waste," Newman said.

Newman entrusts those organic industrial wastes to the same little critters that turn leaves into humus in the forest, but he gives them ideal working conditions inside rows of waste mixed with ground-up stumps and pallets.

Laboratory tests on the content of the factories' waste determine how it should be layered with other ingredients into a recipe for the ideal composting procedure.

The resulting row of compost is stirred together, and allowed to "cook" for about 15 days. The working temperature rises to 130 degrees inside a row when the microbes get busy, killing the kinds of germs that may cause diseases.

Before the 7-foot-high rows can get too hot, Newman's human workers turn them inside-out twice a week to keep moisture and oxygen flowing. They use a $300,000 compost-turning machine built in Germany.

Many countries in Europe use advanced recycling techniques, and Germany in particular "is way ahead of Americans on composting," said Newman, who learned the basics of landscaping in his native Great Britain.

He said he has a degree in horticulture, and his office wall is decorated with certificates from the City and Guilds of London Institute, a vocational school.

Newman came to America in 1985 to help landscape a friend's property in Botetourt County and stayed. He met his wife, Barbara, and with her mother they bought the 115-acre Royal Oak Farm property 10 years ago to start a nursery business.

The nursery evolved into raising hogs on deep-litter bedding, avoiding liquid-waste lagoons.

To get rid of the manure, Newman started a composting operation that has now replaced the hogs.

In the forest, microbes would take 30 to 50 years to turn leaves and fallen limbs into humus, Newman said.

"We want to increase their rate," he said.

To step up the microbes' production, Newman sifts and reuses humus-coated pieces of wood from a previous row of compost, much like a saved piece of sourdough is used to leaven the next batch.

Another likely source of organic compost, the leftover short fibers from Georgia-Pacific's paper mill in Big Island, was composted successfully in a test run recently.

When Royal Oak receives full licensing from DEQ, it will start composting that paper waste regularly.

"Composting fits Georgia Pacific's environmental philosophy of 'recycle and reuse,' " said spokeswoman Zoe Miles in Big Island.

"All testing has shown that a good product is produced at Royal Oak Farm. When their permit is issued, normal composting will commence," Miles said.

Sending fiber waste off site will save space in Georgia Pacific's landfill, and that makes it financially feasible for the company, she said.

Although five composting operations are licensed in other parts of Virginia, they use only vegetable matter. None of them is licensed to compost all types of solid waste, as Royal Oak Farms seeks to do, said Aziz Farahmand, who manages waste programs for the state Department of Environmental Quality's Roanoke office.

Another composting operation in Suffolk has applied for permits, said Julia Cole of DEQ's Richmond office.

Before the Royal Oak operation can be fully licensed, a public hearing will be held to gather comments from the farm's neighbors in southeastern Bedford County, Farahmand said.

So far, the DEQ hasn't heard from any of those neighbors, said Farahmand, who noted the farm previously raised hogs before Newman switched to composting.

Newman's applications to DEQ are in two thick binders that contain professional engineers' reports on the farm's soil and other characteristics.

He will spend about $150,000 to get a complete permit, Newman said, to be followed by another outlay of about $1 million for site improvements.

Permitting standards require that the compost be processed on 12 to 15 acres of paved pads to protect groundwater. Surface-water runoff also will have to be controlled, and groundwater monitoring wells will be included.

Besides the compost turner and another machine that sifts the finished compost, separating it from the wood chips that aerate the rows, the farm has five large trucks and several smaller pieces of equipment.

The farm will be capitalized at between $5 million and $7 million when the planned improvements are made, Newman said.

One necessity in the plans: a fire hydrant system -- because of the possibility that piles of compost could ignite themselves.

Source: Roanoke Times & World News

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