Interview with the Evanston Valley Enterprises Founders (part 4)

Q: How would you say the process of producing compost is different now than it was when you first started EVE?

Matt: Well, as far as laying out the windrow of material with organic Matter, that's the exact same. We're still doing windrow compost. The difference is in the equipment that we utilize.  We went from just using a backhoe with a front loader where we would make a windrow and then when we'd go to turn it by picking it up and fluffing it. That's how I oxygenated the windrows, and they were crude, they weren't tarped. It was just trying to figure things out at first, I don't even know that we were adding any water, maybe a 250 gallon tank, and I'd put on some water. I don't know that we were even using water. Today, we've got, and of course, that all came in parts and pieces throughout the years, but now we have a turner, a tractor, and a water tank dedicated for managing the windrows; we have tarps to cover the windrows with non-woven fabric tarps. We have a tarp roller that pulls the tarps on and off.  When we originally upgraded to having tarps on our windrow, I had to manually pull those things off, and I had to manually pull them on, and my fingers hurt so bad after doing that. So now we have a machine that takes the tarps on and off.

Recently, we've purchased a mixer wagon for taking the ingredients and mixing them and synchronizing them better. We've got a skid steer, we've got a loader, we've upgraded our screening machine.  We started with a very small screen because we didn't know if it was going to take off and go well. It was new, but it was fairly inexpensive. We've since bought a Morbark screen, which is a 27-foot trommel screen, so things in the equipment area have upgraded through the years as either the need has demanded it or in reality it was when Dad didn’t want to have to do it by hand anymore.

So, our biggest hurdle now, I think, is finding feedstocks. We've got plenty of wood chips, but you need more material than just wood chips to make humus compost.  We don't have a big farming operation, so we need to find nitrogen sources and find other materials: leaves, hay, yard waste, all that different stuff.  We've started cutting our own hay, trying to get that built up.  But a lot of composting operations start out from farmers needing to get rid of their waste, but they've got all the crop residues, whether it's bean stubble or corn fodder, cow manure, or whatever their operation might be, they're able to have all those kinds of inputs in-house, where we have to seek those.  And so that, to me, is our biggest challenge right now. We've got the equipment laid out, basically. Now it's just making sure we have enough input materials to produce for the compost demand.

Q: What have you learned over the last several years that you wish other people knew about composting?

Doug: The way it helps soils; the way it works; how you can take a dead piece of dirt and turn it into soil, life giving soil.  One thing that's really impressed me is that everybody talks about global warming, and that we need to get sequestration of carbon, to put it back into our soils.  Well, what I found out through biology is, you can put anything you want to on the soil.  It's not going to change a thing.  It's the plant that does the work.  The microbes feed the plant what they need, and the plant gives the microbes carbon, and they put it back in the soil.  That's how it works.  So, people who are really concerned about carbon sequestration should start using compost.  Build your soil, make your soil healthy again.  Let God's creation do what it was designed to do.  You know, and let's get this thing back to where it should be.  Drive down the road, and look at all these dead spots in the fields. I'm thinking, “Oh man, if that guy would just let me do it, I could bring that soil back to life."