HotRot project update: The end of this chapter

With heavy hearts, we have made the incredibly tough decision to shut down our HotRot operation and site. While we were making awesome compost, despite our best efforts we couldn’t see a financially viable future for the operation, as was our goal.

So, we are sadly moving out of the Cairns Street Hub, the shared warehouse and office space we set up, and selling the HotRot. While the HotRot hasn’t worked for us in our current site and business model, we see great potential for it with a different context. If financial circumstances weren’t a factor, we would be continuing the operation. However, given the reality that we would require substantial external funding to keep it running, that it’s getting harder to secure external funding with funding cuts and economic pressure, and without a viable pathway to bridge our financial shortfall in the foreseeable future, we agreed it was too risky to increase our reliance on funding and made the decision to shut it down. The HotRot operation required more money to run compared to our manual operation, and we just weren’t seeing enough added benefits to justify this extra cost and risk for our specific context.

Kate with the HotRot in the Cairns Street Hub

The main drivers of this decision were:

Major delays and disruptions to our operations. We had a 12+ month delay in becoming operational due to a drawn-out building consent process. Then we only had four months in operation until we had to stop as the HotRot needed repairs, and it was over two months before they were finished. It’s a real shame to end the project after only four months in operation; we hoped we’d have a lot more time to trial and test things to develop efficiencies, but the delays meant we just couldn’t afford to spend more time optimising things.

Labour costs being higher than anticipated. Surprisingly, we weren’t seeing our labour going down thanks to using the HotRot, even though it automatically turns the compost for us. There were a few reasons for this, including that the compost was peaking in temperature after leaving the machine and taking a long time to mature outdoors, meaning we were still turning manually after coming out of the machine. It’s possible we may have needed a bigger HotRot and site to get the economy of scale we had envisaged, plus extra machinery like a front loader for turning and moving maturing compost.

Difficulties growing our customer base. We started working on growing our customer base long before the building consent process was finished, however this was a lot harder than we had anticipated. We believe the changing economic and policy context here in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and nationally were major factors. We had also made the decision to move away from providing household collections, as it was very hard to make this break even, and as Council looks to roll out kerbside collections in the next few years. Our focus shifted to collecting from CBD businesses and our drop-off service for households during the project.

Space restrictions of the site. Our approach was retrofitting an existing space into a composting facility, as small as possible to keep rent down. With the benefit of hindsight, what the HotRot system really needed was a more significant investment in setting up a dedicated site and potentially additional machinery, and the space and ability to easily increase capacity to compost more organic waste.

Breahn and Liam P with a glorious maturing pile of HotRot compost

We still see promise for using in-vessel composting systems in urban areas, but we have learnt that our manual composting system is really well suited to Kaicycle’s current business model and foreseeable scale. We’ve returned to manual composting at the farm, and will be pursuing our original “scaling out” approach of setting up more smaller composting hubs over time. When we were investigating this approach a few years back, it was difficult to make progress as urban composting just wasn’t included in legislation. We hope that the legislative environment will become more accommodating of urban composting, to enable community-level action on waste reduction, climate action and kai resilience.

Kaicycle has learned a lot throughout this innovative project, which piloted a new model of medium-scale composting in the city. We will develop ways to share our learnings to benefit organic waste management efforts in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and around the motu.

The Cairns Street Hub!

A big silver lining is that the Cairns Street Hub will live on! Setting up this shared warehouse and office space has enabled other waste-minimising initiatives to take the next step up in scale. We so appreciate our Cairns Street Hub buddies Yum Jar, Nonstop Solutions and Organic Waste Management for coming on this journey with us, being awesome space-mates and stepping up to take the reins for the Hub. If you know anyone looking for affordable warehouse and/or office space in Wellington City, please share our listing with them.

We’d like to share our enormous gratitude for all the funders, organisations and people who have supported this project. To our funders, Wellington City Council, Clare Foundation and the WLG Community & Environment Fund - thank you for enabling us to try an innovative new model for helping to get food scraps out of the landfill and into doing good for our communities and ecosystem. To our key volunteers Tod and Warren, and our wider support network - thank you for all your contributions in bringing this project to life. We look forward to expanding our mahi and impact in other ways, informed by our learnings. With our efforts to make this project work, the core of Kaicycle Composting is in a stronger position going forward.

Breahn and Liam D with wheelies to go into the HotRot - food scraps underneath, mulch on top to keep flies off, and flowers from our collections to top them off!

Mahi māra Māehe

The summer abundance is still upon us - our zucchinis and cucumbers have had a truly bumper season, tomatoes are ripe, and we look forward to harvesting sweetcorn and blue corn soon! Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the sun is setting earlier in the evening and we’re starting to transition our garden beds to their autumn and winter crops, or a nitrogen fixing cover crop where heavy feeders had been.

We’re pleased to say that we’ve had more volunteers than ever generously sharing their time and skills with us, and we’re stoked to have composting back on the menu at our Thursday evening volunteer sessions. Recently volunteers have helped us to upgrade the seedling hardening-off area, harvest oats and make a raised bed for asparagus.

If you’ve been to the farm recently, you might have noticed that many of the plants are going to seed. Fear not, this is not neglect but intentional. Seeding plants make a great talking point for school and education visitors and we can do seed saving activities with them and volunteers. We are saving and reusing more of our own seeds, to increase our self reliance on the farm.

We enjoy everyone’s company and time so are pleased to offer them some of the tasty produce from the māra. It also feels wonderful to donate masses of produce to the Newtown Community Centre’s meals and the Home of Compassion Soup Kitchen - sharing the aroha and nutritious fresh kai with those in need in our community.

Recent projects in the māra

Team work really is dream work! We have many examples of what can be achieved when we work together. Recent achievements, with the help of wonderful volunteers include the up-graded and raised the seedling hardening-off area.

Over a week, many volunteers helped make this raised bed for asparagus, which was fun and fulfilling! Asparagus originate from coastal areas, so we mixed pumice in with our compost for improves drainage and added a thick layer of seaweed. This is a long term commitment, as we won’t be harvesting any spears for a couple of years. On the advise of Kahikarea Farm, where we purchased the organic asparagus crowns, we’ve planted wild strawberries as a productive green mulch on top.

Something a little different at our urban farm...

At the back of the farm, to the left of the wash-station, is a bed full of a huge variety of plants; fruit trees, rhubarb, beans, herbs, flowers, guavas plus pumpkins running through!

Our forest garden

This is an example of a Forest Garden - diverse planting of edible plants that attempt to mimic the ecosystems and patterns found in nature. Its less than a year old and will grown into a wonderful little ecosystem!

Food Forests are three dimensional designs, with life extending in all directions, up, down and out. Generally, seven layers are recognised:

1. tall canopy tree layer

2. lower canopy tree layer

3. shrub layer

4. herbaceous layer

5. ground cover layer

6. root layer

7. vine layer.

Growing at each of these layers, means we can fit more plants in an area, without causing failure due to competition. As our sample plot is relatively small, we chose to skip the tall canopy layer and opted for dwarf apple, peach and cherry trees as the lower canopy tree layer. Shrubs include guavas, rhubarb, cape gooseberry, comfrey, achillea and calendula. The herbaceous layer includes chamomile and pumpkin. For ground cover we had garlic and more recently dwarf beans, also chives as root crops plus runner beans and sweetpeas as the vines.

Garlic from the forest garden

Preparation is key to establishing a forest garden i.e. removing grass - pasture tends to consist of bacterial-dominant soil and for a forest we want fungal-dominant soil.  For a large area it is best to cover with tarps etc to kill the grass and then cover with woody mulch (at least 10cm thick) before planting.

Wellington City Libraries have several books on Forest Gardens. An excellent resource is the book Temperate Food Forests for beginners by Dana Thompson. Start with her wonderful website, full of information and resources: https://foodforestplants.co.nz/

Zero Waste Solutions to Planetary Crises: Expert & political perspectives

Zero Waste Solutions to Planetary Crises: Expert & political perspectives, Monday 18 November, 5:15pm-7:30pm, at Rutherford House.

Join the Zero Waste Network (of which we are a proud member) and the Aotearoa Plastic Pollution Alliance for not one but TWO panels, facilitated by legendary broadcaster, Kim Hill, to discuss some of the most challenging issues facing our planet.

Experts will speak to some of the most promising zero waste solutions to the waste and plastic pollution crises (and their impact on the climate, biodiversity, human health, social justice and so much more), while also highlighting false solutions such as incineration that we must avoid. These solutions include Bottle Deposits, Product Stewardship, the Right to Repair, using organic waste to restore degraded soils, and a global agreement to end plastic pollution. 

​After a short break, MPs (politicians) will get a chance to respond to what they heard and discuss their position or policies on the key topic areas raised by the experts. We’ll be joined by MPs from across the political spectrum.

Spaces are limited, so grab your tickets now to avoid disappointment!

This event is part of the Zero Waste Aotearoa National Summit in Te Whanganui a Tara/Wellington this year, on 18-20 November. There are lots of great topics and speakers on the programme, and day 3 includes an optional visit to our new HotRot composting facility in Rongotai! If it sounds like you or you want more info, check out the programme and get tickets here.

HotRot composting trials: Three months in, our first update!

Been just dying to hear how composting with our HotRot has been going? It’s still a work in progress, but here’s what we’ve learnt so far!

We’ve been composting with our HotRot machine at Cairns St for three months now, since our auspicious beginning in Matariki 2024. This has meant lots of experimentation and learning by trial and error - quite fascinating for compost nerds like us!

The HotRot is quite a simple machine: it turns the material inside to keep it moving through and make it break down faster, blows pressurised air through to keep the material oxygenated (and stop it going anaerobic and smelly), and extracts the exhaust air, which passes through a biofilter to remove odour. While the body of the HotRot is insulated, it doesn’t heat the material inside - all the heat comes from the composting process.

Our challenge is finding the perfect balance of ingredients - food scraps, arborist mulch and coffee chaff - and the right amount of aeration and turning by the machine, to achieve:

1. The right amount of moisture

2. A good carbon-to-nitrogen ratio

3. The thermophilic peak (hottest part of the composting process) happening inside the machine - rather than after the compost comes out.

Food scrap to mulch ratio, moisture content, temperature and aeration all affect each other, and it can take at least a few days to see the effect of any change, so it’s quite a slow process finding this perfect balance!

We’re doing highly technical “squeeze tests” (take a small handful and squeeze hard to see how much water comes out) most days to check the moisture balance of our recipe. This is our best tool for checking if we’re on the right path, as it takes 3 weeks for us to see the end results when the compost comes out the other end of the HotRot.

Checking out compost coming out of the HotRot after 3 weeks of composting

We started out with a high proportion of mulch to food scraps (1.5:1) for our first month - much more mulch than we’d been using for composting at the farm. Erring on the carbon-heavy side is safest, as the worst thing that can happen is a slow composting process. On the other hand, having a mixture too high in food scraps (nitrogen-heavy) can lead to bad smells and sludge - not ideal.

With the 1.5:1 ratio, the compost coming out was pretty mulchy, unsurprisingly! It was also quite dry. After moving a bunch of this compost into a big box to mature, we added some water and saw the temperature shoot up by about 30 degrees. If the compost gets too dry, bacterial activity slows right down and compost temperature also goes down, which can make it seem like it’s ready to use… but adding water sparks that activity right back up, which can damage plant roots if it’s been applied to the garden already. Adding water to the maturing compost was also a bit of a time suck. Efficiency is super important to making this operation financially viable.

So for August, we trialled a 1:1 ratio of mulch to food scraps. This also worked pretty well, but the mixture still seemed on the dry side. We started adding plenty of water to our mulch wheelie bins before tipping the wheelies into the machine, and let our mulch pile get well soaked by all the rain. Turns out hosing into the bins of mulch wasn’t a good idea… the unabsorbed water went straight to the bottom of the machine and got into the air injection system (which would cause corrosion over time). And a few weeks later, compost coming out of the Hotrot was too moist, potent-smelling and compacted - and very steamy! 

We stopped adding extra water stat, switched to using dry mulch, and started trying out a 2:3 ratio of mulch to food scraps.

Up to this point, we’d only measured temperature a few times, finding we were getting to around 50 degrees - the low end of our ideal range, 50-65 degrees. Temperature of at least 50 degrees for at least 3 days is needed for pasteurisation - killing off any nasty bugs.  

Then one fateful day when we were taking temperature readings, the machine started up on an automatic rotation cycle, pushing compost along and bending the long thermometer, getting it irretrievably stuck in the machine… a very silly $200 mistake, in a week of silly mistakes!

The very stuck thermometer... (with the 60 cm long probe bent inside the machine). The inbuilt faulty temperature probe visible below.

Our HotRot is meant to measure compost temperature at three points along the machine as well as exhaust air temperature. But up to this point, all the temperature probes were reading 855 degrees Celsius - meaning an open circuit. Kate’s dad Jim, who’s handy with electronics, kindly stepped in to help solve this mystery. We knew that temperature readings had stopped making sense sometime in 2021, in the machine’s previous life in Auckland. Eventually we figured out the problem - that the probe wiring inside the legs of the HotRot had been chewed through by rats! Jim rewired the probes and we calibrated them, and we could at last start measuring temperature constantly - important info for getting our compost mix right.

There was plenty of room for improvement: the temperatures were too low, the mix was too wet, and the smell wasn’t great. So we started experimenting with machine parameters - turning more frequently and blasting a lot more air through - alongside going back to 1:1 mulch to food scraps and adding coffee chaff to soak up excess moisture. 

This saw our temperatures go up by 10 degrees in the middle and end sections of the machine, and compost output get less moist and compacted - great progress!

We’ll be continuing to try and bring down the mulch proportions, leaving more room for food scraps - meaning we can take on more businesses and households as composting customers. Another focus is reducing smell as much as possible in the warehouse, especially before we get into summer, and the new set of challenges the heat will bring… This project has suffered huge delays, but turns out that starting operations in winter was pretty ideal!

Worms and fungal mycelium getting stuck into our maturing HotRot compost - a great sign!

Protecting your garden from the heat

We’re heading into spring and before we know it, it’ll be summer. Rose, one of our wonderful Community Farm Managers shares some tips to look after soil and help it retain water, that you can try too.

The basis of healthy soil (and healthy plants) is a healthy soil ecosystem. This ecosystem includes bacteria, fungi, nematodes, worms - the list goes on. Our role as gardeners is to create a welcoming environment for as much soil biodiversity as we can. We look after the microbes, and they look after our plants.

Try no dig, or minimal dig. When we dig in soil we disturb the soil structure, dry out our soil, and leave it vulnerable to erosion.

Instead of weeding, try the ‘chop and drop’ method by using a sharp knife to chop the stem of your weeds at soil level leaving the roots in the ground. You can then use these cut weeds as mulch. Note there are some pesky plants like grasses and creeping buttercup that can grow back from their roots, so these ones we do pull out.

Keep the soil surface covered with plants or mulch. In nature, we don’t see areas of bare soil and we want to replicate this in our gardens. 

Add a bit of ‘living compost’ to your soil to boost the microbial life. Home compost is living.

If you are planting out seedlings, aim for the end of the day so the plants don’t suffer in the midday heat. You can also make a temporary shade above them, see Kath Irvine’s shade bivvy write up on this.

Grow a variety of plants together in a bed. Biodiversity on top of the soil = biodiversity below the soil. It’s great for keeping pests away and keeping the nutrients in your soil in balance. If you want to get nerdy about this you could read up on poly-cropping or planting in guilds - it’s really cool stuff!

Sorrel Salad Dressing Recipe by Sylvia Lauris

Here at Kaicycle its always salad season! A great salad idea is a variety of leafy greens (microgreens, lettuces, other leaves, edible weeds), other veggies (capsicum, radish, cucumber), herbs (fennel, parsley, basil), and some sort of carb to bulk it out (lentils, noodles, rice). This way your salad can be the main dish or an awesome side for sharing!

With the actual salad constructed, you enter the vast world of dressings. There are so many options and something to suit every palate. Below is a recipe we have made for Kaicycle gatherings in the past and it has been a huge hit!   

You will need a blender and the following ingredients:

- Sorrel (Garden sorrel NOT wood sorrel, although wood sorrel and its flowers in moderation are a delicious addition to a salad)
- Extra virgin olive oil
- Nutritional yeast
- Salt and pepper to taste

Optional additions:
- Yoghurt (dairy or non)
- Fresh chilli or some other form of spice

Simply blend everything up until it’s smooth. No need to remove the sorrel stems as they are as tasty as the leaves. The amount of everything is up to you! Keep tasting as you go along and find what’s good for you. If the mixture isn’t blending well add more oil or yoghurt. If the dressing feels too thin you can always bulk it out with other greens; it’s an especially good way to use up less commonly eaten parts of veggies like the leaves of carrots, turnips, radishes, or beetroot.

Composting hub HotRot is live

Last week, we received the Code of Compliance Certificate from the Council for our composting hub! As did our tenant, Yum Jar’s kitchen! Sounds boring, and this piece of paper doesn’t look like much at all, but it’s what Kate from Kaicycle and Ottilie from Yum Jar have been working toward for over a year. Now that we have it, we can at long last start operating on site. This is great news and much-needed timing.

Matariki Friday was our first day of composting using our HotRot!! This was incredibly exciting. We started this expansion journey by applying for funding about two and a half years ago. To have finally got to this point and past all the hurdles feels fantastic. Thanks to Ro, Baz and Charlie who gatecrashed our first day and helped out!

Now, it’s time to hone our skills using this new system and make more lovely living compost.

There’s quite a story behind the in-vessel composting unit–the big green steel tube–that is the main feature of our new compost hub. 

Our Hotrot’s story begins with its previous life, in Tāmaki Makarau with a company that sells compostable nappies and was investigating collecting them back to compost them.

We got wind that they were selling their secondhand machinery packaging at a bargain. This was before we had a new site. Plan A, B and C for storing it all fell through, but luckily Wellington City Council (our main funders) could help us out with a temporary storage site while we continued our hunt.

We realised that the Hotrot still contained some nappy compost… fortunately well composted with no nasty smells! This posed a tikanga issue, as human waste is tapu, and food growing and food is noa. We’re very grateful to Te Kawa Robb and Ihaia Puketapu who generously gave us guidance on navigating this issue, and gave us the confidence to undertake a whakanoa process.

The first step was to empty the nappy compost. We (Liam and Kate) spent a few afternoons excavating the contents of the Hotrot–we were well inside the machine. A challenge for Liam at over 6 feet! Some spots were rock-hard so we had to use pickaxes! We looked more like coal miners than composters, with our head torches on and covered in grime.

We filled 5 or 6 large wool fadges with old nappy compost and had to figure out what to do with it all. We reached out to Te Waka Kai Ora, our Hua Parakore whānau, and friends and colleagues with tikanga expertise for their whakaaro. We were fortunate to receive so much wise and thought-provoking advice. It was a valuable learning journey for us. Besides the tapu element of this compost containing human waste, we were worried about the likely presence of microplastics and chemical additives in the nappy compost, at levels we wouldn’t know, and their impacts on soil and kai. Ultimately, weighing everything up, we decided the best option (not really a great option at all) was to send it all to the landfill so that those contaminants and the tapu of the compost could be as safely contained as possible.

Huge thanks to Tod Coxhead, our key volunteer for this project, who helped us with numerous practical tasks–including taking off the ends of the machine so we could clean it, sealing them back on, helping us remove and clean a nasty blocked part of the air injection system, and making our biofilter. 

Once the machine was empty, we cleaned it thoroughly with wai māori using a water blaster. Wai is often used to help lift a state of tapu. Finally, we held a blessing ceremony with a few of our Kaicycle whānau, to finish lifting the tapu and set the project off going forward through karakia, kōrero and waiata.

As for the purpose of the project: This machine is helping us scale up as it turns compost for us, saving labour and keeping our backs happier, and it can process more on a smaller footprint. It will churn out a thoroughly pasteurised, more consistent product, meaning we can start selling compost to help cover costs. Scaling up means we can help more local businesses and households divert their food scraps from our landfill, saving emissions and pollution. It means we will produce more good, living compost to enrich local soils. It means we can donate more compost to support schools, marae, and community gardens to achieve their food-growing aspirations. We are testing a medium-scale, urban composting model that could be replicated and support a resilient local organics processing system in Te Whanganui a Tara, that advances food sovereignty, climate action, and community wellbeing.

Compost, our superhero

At Kaicycle, we are mad keen on compost. We celebrate International Compost Awareness Week, and sigh with delight as we rake our fingers through a pile of fluffy vermicompost (i.e. worm poop—some of the best fertiliser known to humans). Not so typical of your average Wellingtonian, but we are working on getting more urbanites to celebrate compost with us!

Why, you might ask? Compost is amazing stuff with incredible superpowers, but is chronically underappreciated. Compost is the foundation of sustainable food growing, healthy soil and thus a healthy ecosystem. It’s the missing link in our broken, degenerative industrial food system. With good compost, we can grow our food in a way that’s better for us, and the environment, and even help combat climate change.

These are big statements, and we will explore them in this blog series. This first blog post is a long one in two parts, giving a compost-centric overview of our food system—“The Problem” and “The Solution”. To talk about food, we need to start with soil.

Good food-growing soil is dark brown, crumbly, moist, rich, and smells faintly sweet — not too dissimilar from a good brownie. But unlike your brownie (hopefully), it’s also full of life, from microscopic fungi, bacteria and protozoa to larger critters like worms and insects. To put it in fractions, this nice brownie-like soil is roughly 45% mineral matter (broken-down rock), 25% water, 25% air, and 5–10% organic matter. “Organic” here means anything that is or was once alive — the aforementioned critters, broken down leaves and wood, etc. All organic matter is made up of carbon-based molecules, which come in an astonishing variety of arrangements and flavours.

Soil is a lot more complex than mere fractions can suggest. It is a dynamic living system, with countless biological and chemical transactions happening constantly, mediated by a thriving ecosystem of organisms working together. We call this biological machine the soil food web, which works tirelessly to break down nutrients from the mineral part of the soil and dead organic matter on the soil surface, and transform them into food for plants. In return, plants send sugars and other things down through their roots and into the soil to feed these organisms and keep the machine humming.

Plants build these nutrients into their biomass, and eventually the plant will be eaten by an animal higher up the food chain, transforming these nutrients again; or the plant will die, and the nutrients will be returned to the soil by “nature’s recyclers” in the soil food web. Our planet has a finite amount of nutrients, so for life to keep going, these nutrients must be constantly transformed, built up, broken down, and built up again. Organic nutrients are endlessly being cycled through the ecosystem, always being used or transformed by a living thing. There is no such thing as “waste” in nature; “waste” and “rubbish” are human concepts, and pretty recently invented ones at that.

Composting is simply emulating nature’s natural recycling process of breaking down organic nutrients into a form that can be used again by plants, but on a larger scale, with humans helping the process along. Composting is truly a craft — there are many ways to do it, and some methods are better for soil health than others, but that’s a topic to dive into another day.

Adding good compost to soil brings in the living biology and organic matter that soil needs to support healthy, sustained crop growth. This organic matter part of soil, including a happy soil food web, is what cycles and retains nutrients and water, providing crops with exactly what they need, when they need it.

With the industrialisation of agriculture and urbanisation, these natural nutrient cycles were disrupted. We turned away from compost in favour of cheap, convenient synthetic fertilisers to replace natural soil-building practices. But the use of synthetic fertilisers damages the finely-tuned biological machine that is healthy soil. So do other common agricultural practices, like disturbing the soil by ploughing and leaving it fallow, and dousing it with herbicides, pesticides and fungicides. All these human interventions injure the soil food web, and over time can destroy it entirely, turning that brownie-like soil into dusty dirt.

Without the soil food web in action, crops can’t access nutrients from the soil. Instead of giving the soil our attention and some much-needed rehab, we tend to turn to using more fertiliser to get our crops to grow, and more pesticides to combat the diseases that inevitably come with the poor diet of sickly soil and synthetic fertiliser. The soil food web starts to shut down. Delicate fungi are among the quickest to die off, and with less fungi around, conditions are better for weeds to thrive. So then we add herbicides to the mix…

Eventually the soil food web stops functioning altogether, and the organic matter in the soil simply blows or washes away. Without soil’s natural life-support system working, crops need to be constantly dosed with huge amounts of fertiliser and water to survive and grow. It’s like being in intensive care hooked up to an IV — but it’s the norm of industrial agriculture, on large farms in NZ and around the world.

The impact of this is that we are losing soil at huge rates, with good growing land gradually turning into desert, soil carbon being released into the atmosphere, and waterways being polluted with chemical and nutrient runoff, even creating huge dead zones in our oceans. The onflow effects on the wider biosphere, including our own wellbeing, are enormous. It puts our ability to feed ourselves in the future in jeopardy — without soil, we won’t have food. Hydroponic lettuce, lab-grown meat and cricket flour can’t feed eight billion people (and even if they could, I wouldn’t be so stoked with that meal). Meanwhile, the fertiliser industry keeps raking it in.

It’s pretty bleak, but it certainly hasn’t always been like this, and we can change our food system for the better. It needs to stop acting like a line, and start being a circle.

Industrial agriculture is a linear (“take-make-use-dispose”) system: food is grown in one place, transported to other places for processing and packaging, transported again into cities for sale and consumption, and eventually ending its journey as “waste”. It’s also totally dependent on fossil fuels, creating emissions each step of the journey. I heard industrial agriculture defined recently as “the use of land to convert oil into food”. It’s extractive, and doesn’t replenish the land it takes from.

The amount of food wasted by this system is staggering—food that wasn’t deemed pretty enough for the supermarket shelf, wasted as it wasn’t sold in time, or sat at the back of the fridge for too long. It might be surprising, but in our homes is where a huge part of this food wastage happens. These wasted food nutrients are more often than not sent to landfill, where they are contaminated and locked up, so can’t be naturally recycled back into the soil. Instead they gradually turn into methane, which has a pretty staggering emissions price tag as well.

Industrial agriculture has enabled huge amounts of food to be produced and sold cheaply, feeding billions — but at an astronomical cost to the health of our soil, waterways, biodiversity, our own health, and driving climate change. With a growing world population, we have ever more mouths to feed, but it is a common misconception that we depend on the industrial model of agriculture to feed the world. Following this line will eventually lead us off a cliff.

So, it’s time to evolve this line into a circle, and get ourselves a food system that builds soil instead of degrading it. Looking after our soils is our insurance policy for future dinners. With a circular food system, soil resources will be replenished, “waste” will be designed out, and our food-producing days will no longer be numbered. With a just food system, everybody will have access to good food, and it won’t be at the cost of the environment and countless other species we coexist with.

And the good news is that this is completely achievable. The first step is to bring the end of the line, food “waste”, back to the beginning of the food-growing story, to form a circle. How do we glue the ends together? Watch this space for Part Two, in which our superhero, compost, enters the stage…

(P.S. If you didn’t already watch the soil food web video linked above, you absolutely should! Here it is again…)

Want to go deeper into all this good soil stuff? Check out this brilliant masterclass from Aotearoa’s own Regenerate Now.

Author: Kate Walmsley, one of the compost nerds at Kaicycle