Rural Vermont has been actively involved in a campaign over several years to support the innovative agricultural practice of compost foraging, where farmers import clean streams of food residuals onto their farms and allow chickens to forage on compost piles. This agricultural practice generates an egg supply that relies on fewer inputs (and expenses) and valuable soil amendments, while establishing a local and decentralized way for communities to recycle and make use of their organic “waste.”
Since July 1, 2020, Vermont’s Universal Recycling Law (URL) requires every household to separate and recycle all their food scraps. The Poultry Farmers for Compost Foraging (PFCF) is a stakeholder group of farmers and ally organizations that promote the practice compost foraging in the management of food residuals and successfully advocated to define composting food residuals as farming, overturning a 2018 decision that is would be solid waste management, and bringing this innovative agricultural practice back in the jurisdiction of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets (Act 41 2021). For farmers who want to get into the practice of compost foraging and composting food residuals this means that all legal ag exemptions or presumptions in Vermont and under federal law apply also to the farming practice of composting imported food residuals (up to 2,000 cubic yards and incl. tax and zoning laws, water quality laws like the RAPs, Act 250 exemption, eligibility for support programs, etc.).
The PFCF gathered partner organizations to build the Protect Our Soils Coalition with the goal of advocating for clean, contaminant free, streams of food residuals to ensure agricultural soils are safe for food production. The increasing consolidation of the market trends to utilize mechanical depackaging technology to separate food from packaging – uprooting the requirement of the URL that holds generators of food residuals accountable to separating organics from trash and recycling.
Rural Vermont is encouraging more poultry farmers throughout Vermont to incorporate food residuals into their operations and is encouraging consumers to care for supplying their organics in a clean way to contribute to composts that enhance the quality of soil in Vermont. If this description speaks to you and you’d like to get involved contact caroline@ruralvermont.org or visit the Protect Our Soils Coalition website linked below.
“Brabant-Gordon-Kempner: Farmers need protection against PFAS” - Vermont Digger, Sept. 29, 2023
Protect Our Soils Coalition website – learn how to join and support this work.
Factsheet – On-Farm Composting of Food Residuals
Farm To Plate’s Food Cycle Coalition - 2022 guide: Partnering Farms with Communities - a regulatory and start-up guide for on-farm food scrap composting