Research
Resource
Growing Local Fertility: A Guide to Community Composting
Almost half the materials Americans discard—food scraps, yard trimmings, and soiled paper—are compostable. Municipal and county governments increasingly recognize the importance of composting. In fact, more than 250 communities have now instituted residential food scrap collection programs, up from...
Compost Heat Recovery - Bill McKibben Endorsement
“The folks at Highfields are alchemists….they’re magicians!” So says 350.org leader and renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben.
Update
BioCycle Conference 2013
James McSweeney and Noah Fishman, staff at Highfields Center for Composting, presented at REFOR13*, BioCycle Magazine’s 13th Annual Conference on Renewable Energy from Organics Recycling, held in Columbus, OH, on October 20-23, 2013.James presented at a session titled, “Science, Biology...
The Compost Genome Project
Two exiting projects came out of our partnership with the UVM Department of Plant and Soil Science this year. The first was a replication of the early blight suppression research testing several distinct compost products in 2011. The second project, which is still on-going, is looking at the unique...
Hacking the Heat
In 2012, Highfields research program embarked on a journey to unlock the keys to successful utilization of one of composting’s most underutilized by-products: microorganism’s metabolic heat. We’ve known for a long time that there was a tremendous energy resource lost to the...
What's Cooking at Grow Compost LLC
Compost ‘cooks’ on schedule“This is my favorite place,” Lisa Ransom says.Walking over to a huge boulder atop a grassy hill, she looks out on a fantasy realized.In the field below sit 17 neat rows of compost, piled high with food scraps, sawdust, burlap coffee sacks and cow...
Persistent Herbicide Update
Many of you are aware that Green Mountain Compost (GMC), formerly Intervale Compost, has ceased sales and recalled compost from retail outlets due to the presence of two persistent herbicides in some of this spring’s product. The composting community is extremely concerned by the...
