Foodies Eye A Citywide Soil Revolution

Now that the city has rolled out new municipal recycling bins, could curb-side compost pick-up be the next frontier?

A citywide composting system was one reverberating idea among dozens to come out of an inspirational ​“New Haven Food Summit,” an afternoon conference of cooks, gardeners, and food policy wonks at City Hall.

The event Friday marked the debut of the New Haven Food Action Plan, a document created by the New Haven Food Policy Council as a blueprint for a city with better access to healthful food, a strong local food economy, and more education and marketing to promote healthful food choices.

Read the plan here.

The summit was the first event in two days of food- and garden-themed events featuring Will Allen, a visiting recipient of a 2008 ​“genius grant” from the MacArthur foundation. Click here to read about a garden tour he took on Saturday.

Allen’s organization, Growing Power, has helped start farms and gardens in cities across the country. His first urban farm in Milwaukee is now a powerhouse of agricultural production featuring vermiculture, aquaculture, year-round crops, chickens, and goats. The key to it all, Allen stressed, is healthy soil. In a presentation to the Food Summit, he showed image after image of huge compost mounds, the key to producing crops in cities where the ground is often contaminated.

Much of the soil in New Haven is contaminated, said Rebecca Kline, the head of New Haven Farms, the local urban agriculture organization. She said the resultant need for compost is the biggest expense involved in starting and growing the gardens New Haven Farms has installed in vacant lots in the city.

Kline said she’s on the cusp of convening a group including people from Yale and the city Department of Public work to talk about how to create a city-wide composting system.

“I think we’d be interested in it,” said Rob Smuts, the city’s chief administrative officer. He said the first stage would be to get downtown restaurants on board, along with Yale, the hospitals, Gateway Community College, the Southern Connecticut State University, and the public schools. He said he’s spoken with Yale and the Town Green Specials Service District about it already.

While West Haven has a system for composting collected leaves and allowing residents to take the resulting soil, New Haven does not. New Haven trucks its leaves out of town to be composted elsewhere, Smuts said.

Kline mentioned the idea of a large, shared composting system during one of the conference’s brainstorming groups following Allen’s presentation. That and other ideas will be fleshed out by several new working groups that emerged from Friday’s event.

The Gospel Of Compost

The food summit opened aptly — with food. Eight local chefs set up at cooking stations in the atrium at City Hall Friday. Food Summit attendees pitched in and were guided through on-the-spot preparation of a massive communal meal, with dishes including sweet-potato sushi, black-eyed pea salad, and fresh pulled mozzarella with grilled vegetables.

Westville’s Mary Faulkner donned and apron and joined the SoNo bakery table to help make rustic open-faced tarts (pictured above). ​“I hope I never get called that,” she said.

At noon, the event moved down the hall into two adjoining meeting rooms, where people feasted on the fruits of their labors amid presentations about local efforts on food, cooking, and gardening. The culmination was a presentation by visiting genius Allen. Larger than life, he stood to address the crowded room in his trademark blue hoody.

Allen, a 63-year-old, 6‑foot‑7 former basketball player and son of South Carolina sharecroppers, is a pioneering urban farmer who has been spreading the gospel of eating healthy and growing food in inner cities across the country. He was in town thanks to the New Haven Land Trust — he spoke at the organization’s 30th anniversary dinner Friday night. And he was a guest on a citywide garden tour and garlic-planting — dubbed ​“The Big Stink” — on Saturday.

On Friday afternoon, Allen (pictured) earned a standing ovation from the over 100 people crammed into the City Hall meeting room for the Food Summit. People rose to their feet after he sped through 1,000 photographs charting his 20-year journey from Proctor and Gamble salesman to White-House-recognized urban farming visionary.

“We’re in a situation where we’re eating really bad food,” he said. People don’t have access to healthy food; they live in ​“food deserts.” The food that is available isn’t local.

The good news: ​“We do have a good food revolution in this country,” Allen said. People are beginning to grow their own food in urban areas. The key to doing it well is soil, Allen said repeatedly. Soil on farms is 50 percent less fertile than it was 50 years ago, and soil in cities is often contaminated, Allen said.

People need to be growing good, healthy soil. But most of the food waste that could be composted to create it is just ​“going into a big hole in the ground,” Allen said.

After Allen’s dizzying PowerPoint slideshow, laying out the exponential growth of his organization, the food summit broke into five working groups to dig into the Food Action Plan.

Citywide Compost?

The plan lays out three goals — Increase access to healthful food for all New Haveners, strengthen the local food economy, and encourage ​“healthy food choices” — and 16 strategies to meet those goals. The task of the working groups was to come up with specific actions to take next.

In the ​“Urban Agriculture” working group, people tossed out a number of ideas: More community gardens, brownfield remediation, a system of shared gardening tools or shared trucks and tractors, harvest festivals, a community seed bank, local-food potluck dinners, hoop houses, an aldermanic resolution to make farming a land use priority.

Out of a total of 32 suggestions, many of the most popular had to do with composting, including the notion of city-wide organic recycling. Kline told the group that she is ​“about to launch into a conversation about municipal composting.”

Compost is the biggest expense for urban gardens, Kline (pictured) said later. All the ground in the city is contaminated and needs to be covered over with healthy soil, she said.

One dump truck of good compost can cost as much as $500, with a not-for-profit discount, Kline said.

She said her organization, New Haven Farms, wants to start producing its own. She said she’s been talking to staff at Yale, the city’s public works department, and the Livable City Initiative about cooperating on a large-scale compost system.

A lot of food waste goes to waste, she said. New Haven has lots of restaurants that would be happy to hand off their table scraps to be composted, she said.

Some restaurants in town already do that. Miya’s, for example, donates its food waste to Washington’s Waldingfield Farm’s composting efforts.

Stacy Spell (pictured), the West River neighborhood activist who this year started the Little Red Hen community garden, said municipal composting is a good idea. He said Hamden and West Haven already have systems for collecting and composting leaves, accessible to any resident. New Haven should do something similar, he said.

“It’s hard to leave a Will Allen talk without being obsessed with compost,” said Mark Bomford, the head of the Yale Sustainable Food project. He acknowledged that there has been ​“plenty of optimistic discussion” about large-scale compost cooperation in town, but declined to give any more details.

Smuts, the city’s chief administrative officer, later said that while he’s interested in city-wide composting, the city doesn’t have someone to spearhead the project right now, since the director of the Office of Sustainability stepped down a couple of months ago. He said the city currently pays for collected leaves and tree limbs to be trucked out of town and composted elsewhere. Yale does the same with its food waste, he said.

Asked about household compost pick-up, Smuts said, ​“That’s where we would probably look for this to head.” The city would need to get the system started with restaurants and institutions — including schools and universities — in order to have it make economic sense, he said.

As the conference wrapped up with a desert of rustic open-faced tarts, New Haven Food Policy Council Chair Tagan Engel (pictured) said composting has captured the imagination of a lot of people.

“This composting thing definitely has some teeth,” she said. ​“There is definitely so much interest in it.”