Orlando Sentinel

Worms to the rescue on emissions?

- By Ashley Miznazi

One of Lanette Sobel’s most trusted business partners is a worm.

Actually, she works with lots of worms. They’re essential to her specialize­d six-acre farm in Homestead. While many of her agricultur­al neighbors grow food, her mission is disposing of it in a way that is better for the environmen­t. Fertile Earth Worm Farm is the largest commercial composting operation in South Florida, diverting tons of food scraps from landfills and transformi­ng it into dark, crumbly garden soil.

“Anything that used to live can be composted. We all turn back to stardust,” said Sobel. “To me, this is the basis of what Mother Nature intended. This is about circular economy. This is about keeping things where they’re supposed to be and making a better future.”

Sobel is an ardent apostle of the power of worms to help humanity with its mounting waste problems. But she is also a scientist by training who has studied the process of decay up close. If it began life sprouting or breathing, she’s tried composting it. Fruit, veggies, cardboard, paper, fish, bones, discarded meats, pig heads and all sorts of assorted animal parts.

“I joke a lot that the mafia would hire me because I can turn anything into soil,” said Sobel, who lives in a silver Airstream trailer on a funky farm that boasts organic gardens and things like an old boat hull serving as a worm bed.

Fertile Earth Worm Farm has been in the business for 15 years — at this site for the last several — and it’s quite possible some of your leftovers have ended up consumed by Sobel’s worm force. Big-name enterprise­s across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties — including the Miami Marlins, Miami Heat, Starbucks, Whole Foods and Chipotle — supply Sobel and her staff of six food waste for the compost piles and worms.

“We hope to get bigger, we need to get more people on board, we want to work with the cities and the counties,” she said.

But that’s been a challenge. Climate and waste experts believe more large-scale composting operations like this one could help reduce damaging greenhouse emissions from dumping food waste into traditiona­l landfills. But composting remains a tiny part of the waste industry and operators like Sobel struggle with confusing regulation­s and a lack of government support — Miami-Dade, for instance, failed to secure a federal grant last year that could have helped expand composting efforts across the county.

Not stinky or gross

Composting may seem mysterious and off-putting to many people. For starters, it sounds like it might be a stinky business. But the air is surprising­ly pleasant at Sobel’s farm — the decay happening beneath the pile or soil.

Worms also come with a decided gross image, That’s a perception Sobel often strives to correct.

Sitting on the kitchen table of her Airstream is a portable tank display of worms she brings to farmer’s markets. It helps her explain the many ways worms can deal with waste. She also keeps a bucket of seaweed-eating earthworms in her shower. Reaching in, she pulls up a handful of these “special worms” — they look like pink linguine squirming in her fingers — and talks about how they might be a potential solution to disposing of tons seaweed piling up on Florida, Caribbean and Mexican beaches, organic material now mostly trucked to landfills.

Though she can sometimes sound like a philosophe­r, Sobel comes to her business with academic credential­s. She has a master’s degree in forest pathology and a doctorate in plant medicine from the University of Florida. And after more than a decade of raising earthworms, she also has gotten really good at understand­ing worm wants and habits. She knows some don’t like milk or meat, but will eventually eat it. If they crawl out, it’s time to check the moisture. And that “red wigglers” are less likely to flee.

“I find the other earthworms harder to raise,” she said. “These stick around unless there’s an issue.”

The potential benefits from expanded, well-run composting systems are many — and the threat of climate change has renewed interest for researcher­s looking for ways to reduce damaging emissions.

That’s largely because when living things are composted, the carbon is stored in the soil rather than released into the atmosphere. When that food gets thrown into landfills instead, it also generates methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

In the U.S., food is what’s most commonly sent to landfills, making up about 24 percent of solid waste. When wood and paper are included in the count, these organic materials make up 51 percent of landfill waste, according to the U.S. Environmen­tal Protection Agency.

Studies also show compost grows taller and tastier plants. Compost is rich in organic matter like carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus that boosts the health of the soil, said Florida Internatio­nal University microbiolo­gist and soil scientist, Krish Jayachandr­an.

“It is recycling materials into a renewable resource Miami can use,” Jayachandr­an said. “If we use compost, we don’t have to rely on chemical fertilizer­s that can leech into our waterways.”

Apart from carbon sequestrat­ion and improving soil health, Jayachandr­an said most of South Florida was built on bedrock so the region could use more of its own organic soil.

The soil from Fertile Earth helps support a community garden. Every few days, volunteers come out to tend to garden beds bordered by bamboo tree cutting. Last month, they were blossoming with kale, dill, Cuban oregano, cranberry hibiscus all planted in compost.

“The idea of this is to use the Earth’s materials to help families self-sustain themselves,” Shae Waits a leading volunteer at Fertile Earth Worm Farm’s community garden said.

Windrows and worms

The composting process at Fertile Earth Worm Farm isn’t reinventin­g the wheel. It’s mostly letting nature take its course. After trucks bring thousands of pounds of organic material back to the farm, the composting happens in a few stages.

It starts with mixing the “browns and greens” which is mulch and living material, like food. That’s flipped and rotated up to six times.

The organic material is then put into rows of long piles called “windrows” that heat up as billions of tiny microbial bacteria break down the organic material. The ideal pile height is between four and eight feet with a width of 14 to 16 feet, according to the EPA.

On an early November morning when the Herald visited Fertile Earth Worm Farm, some 11,000 pounds of raw meat were buried under one mulch pile. There was not a single fly in sight. A farm next door had black vultures circling the air over some unknown decaying thing but the birds ignored the vulture dream buffet under the compost.

Surprising­ly, it didn’t stink either, with just an earthy after-rain scent in the air.

Sobel measures the temperatur­e of the piles to make sure they’re above 131 degrees for over 15 days which kills off disease and weed seeds. To be ready to put in the garden, the piles have to cool down to 80 degrees which can take anywhere from three to six months. The process can stop there, or the compost material can be fed to the helpful worms.

‘A science and an art’

When worms eat they make castings — which is just a fancy name for worm poop. The castings are a more granulated version of compost, richer for gardening.

Sobel’s neighbor in the Redland, Peter Fedele, started a post-retirement career in sustainabl­e farming a few years ago with five pounds of worms. Now, there are about a million at his Lion Fruit Farms. Sobel and Fedele now have a partnershi­p where she brings over food for his worms, and keeps some of her worms at his place too.

“Worm farming is a combinatio­n of a science and an art,” Fedele, 71, said. “Basically, there’s a balance on how you feed them and how you water them.”

The majority of worm farmers live up north and are mainly sell to bass and freshwater anglers. Fedele learned a trick from them that one of the best treats to give worms is cold rabbit “pellets” — AKA poop. So he started breeding New Zealand rabbits.

“We feed our plants, the plants feed the rabbits, which poop and feed the worms like a full cycle process,” Fedele said.

Nestled under a shaded canopy on Lion Fruit Farms’ 15-acre property, eight raised aluminum garden beds, about two feet deep, house 28 different worm beds. The worms take more than 8,000 gallons of feed a week, which is a combinatio­n of things like compost, pellets, avocado and watermelon.

Worm castings can also be brewed into a “worm tea.” You won’t want to drink it but your plants may fruit and flower more from the microbes and plant hormones, Fedele said. Bananas, sugar apples, soursop, avocados and turmeric spice all sprout around the farm seem to thrive on the stuff. Each tree has an irrigation jet that connects to thousands of feet of undergroun­d piping that waters the plants with worm tea.

“We don’t use any chemicals whatsoever, but you still need to bring balance back to the plants,” Fedele said.

Jayachandr­an and his students at FIU are analyzing the turmeric and tomatoes at Fidele’s farm to see assess how much it benefits growth. Jayachandr­an said the results are “striking” so far.

Large-scale composting in South Florida

Other states and some communitie­s in Florida have created robust composting programs. Miami-Dade has lagged behind but last year was selected by the U.S. Department of Agricultur­e Compost and Food Reduction Program to receive more than $200,000 in federal funding to jump-start a pilot composting program that would scale up the three locally-owned compost operations in the county, including Fertile Earth Worm Farm.

The vision was to use the money to make a commercial­ly viable compost that could be used in county parks. But the grant expired before the county could check all the regulator boxes to secure it. Composting is a complicate­d business, falling under a number of agencies. Its classified as a solid waste operation that can only happen on industrial-zoned land, even through the end product is designed to be used in farming and gardening. There are also environmen­tal questions about impacts on ground water and other potential public health issues.

In a statement issued through the mayor’s office, the county said the timeline for the grant didn’t align the county’s review of the nascent composting industry. Over the course of the next year, the statement said the county planned to bring “further code and regulatory changes” to accelerate composting opportunit­ies for agricultur­al businesses. In December, the Miami-Dade County Commission passed a legislativ­e item calling for the mayor to draft a report and recommenda­tions on composting.

“Composting has been very neglected in this county,” Eileen Higgins, the commission­er sponsoring the legislatio­n, said. “I wanted to make sure the mayor was paying attention to this as she brings forward the solid waste plan.”

A USDA spokespers­on said that over the course of six months, the agency met multiple times with the county to discuss adjustment­s. “Ultimately, the county was unable to arrive at a final proposal before funds expired,” the spokespers­on wrote in a statement to the Herald.

Sobel sees the lost grant as part of long pattern of resistance. “What ended up happening is they said they would change the code to make it more permissibl­e for companies like us to compost, and they didn’t even do that,” she said.

A few weeks after the Herald asked about the grant issues, Sobel also received a warning notice citing a DERM visit to her site 10 months ago. They’re giving her 30 days to submit an “Agricultur­e Use Plan” to prove the farm is beneficial and not a threat to public health.

In 2010, Sobel worked with the county on a pilot composting project financed by an EPA grant that brought food from hotels to a mulching facility in Virginia Key. It was just a six-week effort, she said, but it took 18 months to secure a permit. Sobel said that even though it was successful, the program never got more funding.

“We can’t keep doing business as usual,” Sobel said. “These landfills are just holding cells.”

 ?? MIAMI HERALD PHOTOS ?? Owner and operator Lanette Sobel checks on the progress of a compost pile at Fertile Earth Worm Farm in Homestead on Nov. 8.
MIAMI HERALD PHOTOS Owner and operator Lanette Sobel checks on the progress of a compost pile at Fertile Earth Worm Farm in Homestead on Nov. 8.
 ?? ?? Owner Peter Fedele grabs a fist full of earth worms and compost at Lion Fruit Farms in Homestead on Nov. 8.
Owner Peter Fedele grabs a fist full of earth worms and compost at Lion Fruit Farms in Homestead on Nov. 8.
 ?? ?? Sobel, center, along with farm hands Shae Waits, left, and Wolfgang Henao, check on the plants inside the community garden at Fertile Earth Worm Farm.
Sobel, center, along with farm hands Shae Waits, left, and Wolfgang Henao, check on the plants inside the community garden at Fertile Earth Worm Farm.
 ?? ?? Fedele holds up earth worms at Lion Fruit Farms on Nov. 8.
Fedele holds up earth worms at Lion Fruit Farms on Nov. 8.

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