Interview with the Evanston Valley Enterprises Founders (part 5)

Q: Is there anything else you wish people knew about composts?

Doug: Yeah, where we're located.  We need to make Evanston, Indiana the center of the universe for soil. You can start here and build any soil that you want for any particular plant that you want.  So, the first name that comes to mind when my garden's not doing well, or my field is dying out there; I want that name to be Evanston Valley Enterprises.  When a customer says, “Our field is all white with clay rather than dark, rich chocolate-looking soil; and there are no earthworms in the soil!  Oh, I know. We'll go to the center of the universe to get what we need and build our soil back from there.  EVE will get our program built, and then they'll take care of us throughout the whole procedure for the next five years, and they’ll educate us so that we no longer need them, we can do it all our own.”  That’s what we want to be for our customers.

Q: So how do you see Eve benefiting the community?

Robin: Well, for one thing, I feel like we're doing a lot of recycling of the wood products that are in the area that people don't want.  Waste products like tree scraps, yard waste and grass clippings. Things that might otherwise end up in the landfill, we recycle.  We help do that.

The product that we make with EVE; the compost and our soil amendments, they benefit the community by providing better gardens, better quality soil for farmers, and just through a community coming in and going, "Oh, this is really a good product and our tomatoes are so big”, and so the community as a whole is seeing the value of what we are doing here.

Doug: Jobs. Definitely jobs.  Gardens, yards. You see from the government websites about all the soil erosion and they say we’re polluting the water and Louisiana down there is just filling up in the Gulf with silt.  Well, there's nothing holding the soils anymore.  We need to do different farming practices, even in our gardens.  We need to put the health back in the fruits and vegetables that we are growing.  You read in the news were people die at a much earlier age in this country than they do in other countries.  One of the reasons for that is that we are poisoning them with glyphosate and chemical fertilizers.  We can get away from using them and produce better, healthier crops.  At least that's what the experts say.  I'm not an expert in that field.  I can't say that's exactly how it is. but from all the soil biologists that I've been reading and listening to their podcasts, that seems to be the word from the herd, if you will.

I don't know that we could do without the chemicals with the number of people that the farmers feed nowadays.  Maybe we couldn't do it.  It's not going to be an overnight thing, you know, just like that.  We had a meeting with a farmer once, and the guy wanted the compost application to be one and done. That's what you can't do is a one and done solution.  It takes five or six years to get the soil’s health back.  I mean, it didn't go away in a one and done application.  You know, it took years to destroy the soil.  Well, we've managed to get the soil rebuilding accomplished in some places.  Let's put it back everywhere.  Let's go back to the way it was intended to be.  Let all those microbes do their thing, and give the plant what it needs.  Everything heals and gets better.