ILSR Honors Benny Erez with Local Self-Reliance Lifetime Achievement Award

Benny Erez is the former Director of Urban Agriculture and current board member at Eco City Farms in Maryland. After years working in an academic setting doing agricultural research, Benny Erez brings knowledge of theoretical and practical farming technology to ECO City Farms. He is passionate about the need to wean ourselves off the gas-guzzling commercial fertilizers and replace them with sustainably produced compost. His experience with composting technology comes from years of managing the University of Maryland Central Maryland Research and Education Center Compost Facility and visits to Austrian compost enterprises. Benny’s first-hand knowledge of the power of community comes from his experiences growing up on a Kibbutz in Israel. He recognizes that the human race is facing many environmental challenges and that local, sustainable food production is a key part of the solution.

ILSR honors Benny for:

• His outsized influence on our composting work
• Developing and launching with ILSR our neighborhood soil rebuilders composter train-the-trainer program, now 10 years old
• Integrating composting as an essential part of organic urban farming and growing food to serve those traditionally left out of healthy food distribution networks
• Being essential in modeling local self-reliance by guiding the development of ECO City Farms, now with three urban farms, including an 11-acre site serving as a farmer incubator site
• Showing that self-reliance can be do-it-yourself with repurposed materials, whether old shipping containers for compost systems and buildings, or aeration pipes you found on the side of the road
• Being a peacemaker, traveling to the West Bank – more than once – to promote peaceful co-existence and nonviolence as the basis of improving soil and growing food together
• Having a vision of what’s possible, sharing that vision, showing people it’s possible, working to make it a reality and doing it with respect and continued learning
• Being an all-around mensch
• Teaching so many people to carry on this work before his retirement

It is our pleasure to present to Benny Erez, composting guru at ECO City Farms in Maryland, this Local Self-Reliance Lifetime Achievement Award.