COMPOST EARTH!

The mingling of soul and soil, for us, begins here at the compost yard. Compost Earth! is a venture grounded in simple values: beauty, diversity, health, and reciprocity. We believe that our best opportunity to address both carbon drawdown and microbiome health is to produce, utilize, and sell the highest quality humus compost available.

Our FOCUS

Our focus on humus formation is what makes Compost Earth! different from the others. We consider humus to be the life force of soil. It is the end result of organic matter decomposition and recomposition by microbes. Humus is extremely important to the health of soils, physically, biologically and chemically, and contributes many benefits. Building up humus levels allows soil to store more water than it previously could, and bind more CO2 that would otherwise thicken the atmospheric greenhouse blanket. The delivery of minerals to the plant is largely a biological process and the higher your humus levels, the more active your soil biology and the more nutrient-dense your produce. Humus is a true thing of beauty, and for us, is an example of a bountiful and reciprocal universe. Extractive agriculture has seriously depleted the mineral and microbial base of our food producing soils. We know the microbiome is essential to the evolution and ongoing prosperity of advanced life on Earth…we would not be here without the microbes, nor can we thrive in their absence. It’s time we behave in ways coherent with, and supportive to the unknowable complexity and generative abundance of nature.

compost methods

For us, it made sense to adopt an on-farm method of composting developed, and proven over generations, by close family friends in Austria — trained microbiologists and humus farmers that have deep roots in the worldview of Rudolf Steiner. Compost Earth! humus compost is produced according to a standardized method with clear and replicable process parameters using consistent high quality raw materials, free of contaminants and sourced locally in Trout Lake, WA (within 10 miles of our facility). All organic wastes need to be recycled, from small homestead scale, to large regional industrial facilities that divert tens of thousands of tons from entering the landfill, where it would end up as methane emissions to the atmosphere. Our compost is a living soil supplement that functions, literally, as a whole food and probiotic for soils. Humus compost is the best tool to retain nutrients in soil and deliver them to plants in available forms. Our highest quality material may be added directly to the soil in the planting hole at the time of placement, or it may be used as the primary live ingredient for preparing liquid extractions and actively aerated compost teas.

Our business model

Our Business model is two fold; medium-scale commercial production of niche-craft microbial compost, and research and development of innovations at the intersection of compost manufacturing and utilization, and regenerative agriculture. We partner directly with local Organic Valley Cooperative diary producers to source fresh, contaminant-free raw materials. Our primary market is local bulk deliveries, and we are developing a set of packaged products for online retail. Farmers, orchardists, viticulturists, home gardeners and specialty growers that understand and regenerate their soil as the soul of their work, probably follow the latest microbiome science that connects soil health with the human gut. These folks will have a competitive advantage (in health, not just business) for decades to come.