09/25/2026
I took a tour of Hammond Farms composting facility the other day and have to say, I was quite impressed with their operations. I’ve used tons of their compost over the years, so it was really cool to see what goes into it all.
While I appreciate having access to quality compost at a reasonable price and think they are doing an amazing job at diverting enormous amounts of materials from landfills, I did come away thinking it would be better if industrial composting facilities like this weren’t necessary.
A few things that really stuck out to me are that during their peak season, they go through roughly 9,000 gallons of diesel per week! Do the math on that…
Also, they mentioned that a few years back during the bird flu outbreak, MDARD reached out to them to help with disposing of all the chickens that were killed. In total, they composted 11 million chickens. That’s insane!
They also showed us a “depackaging” machine that takes all the food waste that is delivered to them daily from grocery stores and other organizations and somehow separates the food from plastic packaging. That machine alone cost $1 million. It definitely got me thinking about how much of that could be avoided if more people grew just a portion of the food they consume at home.
For safety reasons—and, I imagine, to speed up the process—their compost piles reach around 140 degrees and are turned many, many times, which causes large amounts of toxic gases to be released into the atmosphere.
I’m an advocate for slow composting, which means not turning your compost. This is not only better for the environment, but is also much less work and creates a compost that has more diversity of life in it.
Better yet, if you raise chickens at home, you don’t even need a compost pile, you can just feed your food scraps to the chickens! Not only is that much easier than managing a compost pile, but it also helps create less demand for mega chicken factories that are the main cause of things like bird flu and murdering of millions and millions of chickens every time there is an outbreak.
So, if you’re concerned about the environment, compost at home, keep chickens and grow more of your own food! Oh yeah, and don’t go bagging up those leaves this fall. Save them for the compost pile or chicken yard.