“They Can’t Compete with Community”: How One Oklahoma Composter is Building Alternatives to Big Waste (ft. Terry Craghead)

Jordan Ashby:

Across the country, the community composting movement is growing. Locally-based composting provides communities immediate opportunities for reducing waste, improving local soil, creating jobs, and fighting climate change. You’re listening to the Composting for Community Podcast, where we’ll bring you stories from the people doing this work on the ground and in the soil. I’m your host, Jordan Ashby, from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. In this episode, I have the pleasure being joined by Terry Craghead, founder and CEO of Fertile Ground Cooperative, a worker-owned business based in Oklahoma City that offers innovative recycling and composting services for both residential and commercial clients. Terry is committed to transforming waste and community wealth by repurposing compostable and recyclable materials. Under his leadership, Fertile Ground has significantly expanded its services, making composting and recycling more accessible across Oklahoma City Metro Area, while also producing high-quality compost, mulch, and compost filter socks for local farms, schools, businesses, and more. Welcome, Terry. It is so great to have you today on the podcast. To begin, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into composting?

Terry Craghead:

Hi. Yeah. Glad to be here today. My name is Terry Craghead. And I am a member of Fertile Ground Cooperative in Oklahoma City. Started this 13 years ago as a side project of an urban farming project called CommonWealth Urban Farms. And I started as a backyard gardener. Shortly after purchasing my first home, wanted to start a garden. Was like, “Hey, I should be making organic fertilizers, reusing my kitchen waste to make compost.” I’d never really composted before, but I just got into it. I found out about some people in my neighborhood who were starting this urban farm group. It was kind of a combination of a community garden and an urban farm. And I started volunteering, showing up on Saturdays, initially helping compost beer grains from a local brewery that we were using as a base for the soil. Shortly after starting with the beer grains, we were approached by Whole Foods Market. And we started composting three days a week on this vacant lot in our neighborhood food waste from Whole Foods.

We had neighbors in the neighborhood who would show up to volunteer. And really, half the food that they were throwing away in the early days was edible food. And so we’d have tons of volunteers coming, sorting through food, and then taking the spoiled food and making compost piles on a few different lots in our neighborhood. It was really a transformational experience for me, both kind of being elbow deep in compost and organic waste, but then also in this community project that didn’t have a lot of structure in the early days.

I had an interest in economic development, community development. I was in a master’s program and urban studies. And at the time, also interested in becoming an organic gardener. And I had this convergence of interests kind of aligned by meeting these neighbors who were starting this urban farm. And that was kind of the birth of the idea of Fertile Ground, was we have this one grocery store producing this enormous amount of waste. We have environmental problems in Oklahoma City. We have this need for sustainable jobs and for dignified workplaces that build on people’s humanity and build equity in our community. And here’s an opportunity to start a business with these neighbors, community members I’ve just met. And we could do it in a cooperative way and we can help solve problems, environmental problems in our community.

Jordan Ashby:

A lot of the things that you touched on there are how a lot of different people come into community composting, right? Or there are different sides of it that draw different people in. Some people come from the community, engaging volunteers, and wanting to do that kind of side of it. Some people are more on the business side. Some people are on the environmental side and the economic development side as an entry point. But I think what Fertile Ground, as you’re describing, or the beginnings of what became Fertile Ground, as you’re describing, really shows is how it can all be happening in one place. You started to talk a bit about community and the role of that in Fertile Ground. But could you just tell us a little bit more about who your community is and what the role of other local businesses is in collaboration with Fertile Ground?

Terry Craghead:

Yeah. So the early days of Fertile Ground, my community was this urban farm collective, CommonWealth Urban Farms. There was a nonprofit urban agriculture youth group called Closer to Earth. They were really kind of the organizations that I started to meet a lot of people in the community through CommonWealth and Closer to Earth. I started to meet people in the sustainability community in Oklahoma City. And it’s a pretty small group. Within the sustainability community, there was a transition town movement who I plugged into. And as we started operating Fertile Ground at the tail end of 2011, is when we were founded, we started meeting local businesses in spring of 2012, really knocking on doors of restaurants, just pitching this idea of, “Hey, let us recycle your organic waste.” It was all the locally owned restaurants that gave us an ear. They were easy to get in touch with.

As we grew, we started making more and more connections in the community. And there have been some institutional partnerships where people found out about us at a zero-waste event and they said, “Hey, can you bring … Help our hospital or our library system introduce zero-waste principles?” And I would just say if anything has led to our longevity, it’s really been our focus on being in the community, meeting people, holding events where we just make connections with our community.

Jordan Ashby:

That makes a lot of sense and I think gives us an idea a bit more of the social fabric in which Fertile Ground is embedded and all of the different pieces of the local community that enable Fertile Ground to exist. Something else you’ve talked about a bit, but I’d love to hear you talk more about is the cooperative structure of Fertile Ground and how important that is for the organization. So could you share a bit more about that?

Terry Craghead:

Yeah. So I mentioned an interest in economic development, this master’s degree program that I was working on in urban studies. And I, through that program, became aware of cooperatives, of working around cooperatives as a model for economic development. And so as I was getting to know some of my neighbors and seeing a business opportunity, I really was fascinated by the possibility of regular people owning their labor and working together cooperatively to build something. I alluded to a quote, and I didn’t quote the quote, and this idea has been important for me, that there are two kinds of power in the world. To change the world, you can have organized money and you can have organized people. And knowing that I’m not with the organized money, organizing people is just critically important if we’re going to make those things better for the rest of us. So for me, thinking about how can we build resilient economies? How can we build ways of being that are collaborative, that are kind, that look after the well-being of our neighbors?

Cooperatives seem, to me, to be a way to not only have a job, but to make the world better for the long term with the long view in mind. When people own their labor, when they have a say in the place that they work, where they spend most of their time, they’re going to try to create working conditions that are beneficial for their life. They’re going to put in effort beyond just showing up and clocking in.

When people feel dignified, that they’re really respected and that they’re a crucial part of something that’s so important in their lives, I think it just has so many benefits for them as individuals, for their families. But then just kind of growing out in concentric circles for the community all of the skills that people build when you own a business on your learning about, oh, gosh, we have to have a business plan. We have to think through all of these aspects of work that we don’t tend to think about. And we respect people doing different roles within the business. At the heart of being a worker-owned cooperative, that’s having a voice in the organization, it’s sharing in the profit of the organization.

Jordan Ashby:

I loved what you said at the beginning there about organized money and organized people. And you sharing a bit about how you’re actually organizing people within your organization, I think, is really interesting and definitely a model that I know a lot of other community composters are interested in as well. So thank you for sharing that. Speaking about the organized money side of things, though, I wanted to get into the status quo of waste in Oklahoma City as it currently stands. And Fertile Ground exists within the broader waste context of Oklahoma City. So I was just wondering if you could share what happens with most of the waste in Oklahoma City? Who controls that waste and recycling and organics?

Terry Craghead:

Yeah. So most of the waste in Oklahoma City is privately controlled. We have the large players nationally, Waste Management, Allied Waste, GFL, Waste Connections. They own the only landfills that we have in the city. We have four landfills. And they also own the recycling infrastructure in the city. Oklahoma City proper subcontracts out some of the hauling of the recycling to Waste Management, and then the recycling goes to their Waste Management MRF, where the single-stream recycling is separated. Some of the suburbs surrounding Oklahoma City have a different hauler. Allied Waste hauls a lot of those recycling accounts. And that has shifted recently. There used to be another single-stream MRF that within the last year has stopped operating their MRF, Pioneer International. They had a facility …

The company locally was called Batliner. Batliner is still here, just not focusing on single-stream. So we have these large corporations that control the waste that’s generated in Oklahoma City. And right now, they really have a lot of power and influence just due to their overwhelming presence just everywhere, the relationships they’ve built over the decades working with city staff, and just being a known entity. We’re really kind of one of the few locally owned waste providers. There are a few smaller hauling companies that primarily focus on hauling waste that is landfilled. But that’s kind of the zoomed out picture of waste in Oklahoma City.

Jordan Ashby:

Thanks for giving that context. And I think something that you mentioned is Waste Management having a hauling contract and then also taking that for recycling and then taking those recyclables to their MRF, which is, for listeners tuning in, a material recycling facility. That type of vertical integration is something that we see across different cities and all across America and is how these big waste companies maintain their chokehold on the waste stream. We have a lot of writing from ILSR’s side on single-stream recycling and how single-stream recycling came to be, which we won’t get too far into in this episode.

But we can definitely link those resources in the show notes because the takeover of these large corporations happened intentionally and with a lot of lobbying, vertical integration, and a variety of monopolistic tactics that has led to a landscape like you’re saying in Oklahoma City where most of the waste is controlled not through local businesses, but through these large corporations. So yeah, I just appreciated you sharing a bit about that. My next question for you has to do with Fertile Ground’s interactions with Waste Management, in particular. I know you do different things, so you’re not competing directly, but understand that there was a contract that you had with a hospital, and Waste Management had got involved. So I was wondering if you could tell that story.

Terry Craghead:

Sure. Yeah. Really, in the early days of Fertile Grounds, as we were starting to talk to more corporate clients, I had mentioned this hospital that we had a community connection to. The person that I had met who had reached out through an organization within the hospital that doctors were involved in, like a sustainability committee within the hospital that were requesting composting service. And so went down, met with their operations people. And it was one of our first institutional arrangements. We were thrilled to have such a large well-known customer in the community. They wanted to compost organic waste that they were creating daily from the buffet within the cafeteria of the hospital. And it went great. We started off operating, doing a swap route, bringing material to a commercial composting facility in town. And after about a year, we got a notice that Waste Management had bid on the contract for all of the waste within the hospital system, and that we were now forced to become a subcontractor of Waste Management if we wanted to keep the account.

For context, we’re the only organics hauler in Oklahoma. There are some large-scale haulers that might haul food processing waste to specialized facilities out of state. I know Walmart will haul material down to Texas where there are some food waste composting facilities. But kind of on the smaller scale organics, there’s not any other options. So Waste Management, they were kind of told by the hospital, “Hey, we want this service to continue.” But Fertile Ground was then forced to become a subcontractor of Waste Management. And for us, that was a loss of control of this contract where we were asked to deal directly with the hospital staff that we had been … We had a relationship with. That all the customer service was to flow through Waste Management’s channels. And I very quickly could see that this was a very unstable position for us to be in, and the loss of control. You have issues, things that come up.

“Hey, we need more compostable bags. Hey, there’s a problem. A cart is leaking. And we need a problem solved.” And just that practical operational concern of now that being filtered through another company before us hearing about it. I said, “This is going to be hard for us to sustain.” And this system, the way that waste contracts work, it was … My first interaction that, “Gosh, this is going to be a big challenge for us if we’re constantly having to be a subcontractor of these other providers that don’t really understand our service.” Especially the local people, the day-to-day people, sales staff that manage these contracts, they don’t really have a concern for our service being provided at a level that is high quality, responsive, but then also even looking at reporting the volumes of material contamination. There’s just a disconnect for us that led to some thinking. We need to start trying to win contract, the whole waste contract, so that we can have control over the thing that we really care about, is performing a high quality organics collection service and really getting food waste diverted.

Jordan Ashby:

You really shared a lot about the challenges of becoming a subcontractor for Waste Management and how that didn’t allow you to provide the quality service that Fertile Ground is used to providing. So could you share a bit about how you pivoted away from that model of being the subcontractor for Waste Management and are now winning contracts?

Terry Craghead:

Yeah. So that insight of trouble with customer service led us to think through, “Gosh, what if we could go into restaurant groups or to institutions and just have control of the whole waste contract?” That would help us provide better organics recycling service, better recycling if we’re able to go in and provide this value where they don’t have to have two or three different waste providers. The operation people there have one point of contact. And so we started thinking through, okay, are there any local waste haulers that we could partner with that we trust that would be willing to subcontract for us? We started learning about waste brokers kind of early on. Yeah. That’s kind of what we’re doing in a way. We’re working with some of these restaurant groups to provide all the waste services that they need. So many of them are interested in start trying out recycling, nowhere near ready to take on zero-waste principles. But for us trying to build a sustainable business model, we were just like, “Yeah, we got to have more control.”

And so reached out to some local waste haulers and started winning contracts by providing front load landfill waste service. We can also subcontract out front load recycling, like cardboard recycling dumpsters. That’s a large percentage of a lot of the waste that takes up a lot of space in landfill dumpsters. So we can get that material, put in another container, reduce the amount of landfill waste that these places have, and then we can add organics recycling, or we can add the other recycling services that we provide. So we do a single-stream service where we take it to a third-party MRF, but we also have a dedicated glass collection service for bars, restaurants, and we can make sure that that glass gets collected separately from the rest of the recycling stream. But it just gave us a big value add to be able to say, “Hey, yeah, we can not only provide the organics composting piece, but we can cover all of your waste needs.”

It just makes us a more attractive company to work with. And by the way, when you start adding these other recycling services, yeah, initially there’s a cost, but we’re going to reduce the amount of waste and the number of hauls that you’re having to have come out just to take everything to the landfill. In addition to that, we now control the customer service. We’re not at the mercy of another broker or another waste company telling us not to communicate with the client that we’re trying to serve and do the education and that community touch point of giving people tours of our facility, bringing them out, and just making that human connection with the big picture about why organics recycling is important.

So it’s been a big change for us and really helpful for us. To not let perfect be the enemy of the good is another kind of controlling statement that stays in my mind. It’s like, yeah, we don’t really want to be in the landfill industry. We’re not interested in starting a landfill collection service. So it was a little bit weird to get used to the idea of offering those services to some of these corporate customers under our name. But seeing that as just a stepping stone to get more and more influence and community touch points has been really helpful for us.

Jordan Ashby:

Yeah. Was wondering if there’s anything else you wanted to share about what you learned from the experience of being a subcontractor with Waste Management before we shift into kind of the alternative paradigm that you’re trying to build.

Terry Craghead:

Yeah. I’d just say practically that the disconnect with not communicating directly with the customer was a real lost opportunity because we’d go on to develop kind of a corporate training model where we come out to corporate cafeterias and we meet the staff that work day to day in these kitchens and we do trainings for the employees. But having that kind of corporate subcontract arrangement really made it difficult for us to maintain the connection with the community and help people understand what … It’s not just, “Oh, put the food waste over here, the organics over here.” It’s like we’re making soil. We want people to understand the big picture of what we’re doing and make the connections for why it’s important.

I think that’s one of the crucial parts of the community compost network around the country. We’re having … As a group, we’re trying to build businesses and nonprofits that are financially sustainable, but we’re also trying to do it in a way that’s thoughtful. And it’s beyond just making money. We’re trying to make a difference in the world, so we see the big picture. We need to have more direct relationship and communication with the customers and the employees at some of these institutions and corporations that end up purchasing our services.

Jordan Ashby:

We’ll be right back after a short break. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast. If you’re enjoying it, please consider supporting our work with a donation by going to ILSR.org\donate. Your donations make this show and all the work we do here at ILSR possible. Visit ILSR.org\donate to make your contribution today. Any amount is sincerely appreciated. And if you’re looking for other ways to support us, consider rating or leaving a review of the show wherever you listen to your podcast. These reviews help us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening. Now back to the show.

Thank you for sharing what you’ve shared so far. And what I’m really hearing is that you’re not competing against these big companies on their terms. You’re instead trying to create a new set of terms altogether. So could you just explain how you are doing that?

Terry Craghead:

I think for us, with community being at the heart of what we’re about, we just realized we need to be out building value, creating connections for talking about zero-waste strategies in a lot of different ways. We’re not just an alternative waste provider. And so I might’ve mentioned before that we started, in the early days of Fertile Ground, doing zero-waste events. We realized we can provide the service that a handful of people think is really cool, but it could be an introduction to our community about zero-waste principles and about trying to be better stewards of the resources that we have. Yeah. In the early days, we had a food truck festival, music festival that we worked with. It started off with a couple thousand people. And it was a monthly festival. And we were contracted to provide recycling and composting and landfill services for this event.

And I think that experience kind of … We were looking for work, but as we started to do the service, I just kind of realized this is a huge marketing opportunity and a way for us to connect to the community because so many people that are coming to this event, they’re just coming to eat, food truck, street food, listen to music, have fun. And now they’re faced with, “Oh, I have options of things I should do with the waste that we’ve generated at this event?” Some of the vendors had compostable plates, most of them did not. And so we were in a tough position as Fertile Ground of, okay, this is not very well-organized. We didn’t have a lot of experience yet helping events design and think through the waste stream before.

But that experience, seeing so many people interacting with their waste and pause as they go to throw away their plate or their cup and think about it, to me, was this touchstone of we need to do more of this. We need to be out in the community making connections and just providing the service. We’re getting paid to be here and take the waste from this event, but we’re also educating the community in kind of a sneaky way. Yeah. Just being the first introduction to recycling and composting at public events.

Jordan Ashby:

I think that shows that there’s a lot of ways that you can be educating the community. I think sometimes people have this idea of community education means I get a whole bunch of people to come to watch a webinar or go to this event that is specifically on zero-waste or something, but sometimes it’s about meeting people where you already are and where they already are as well, right? And that can be the most impactful type of community education. And it’s really great to hear that you’ve had success doing that and kind of turning that into part of your strategy. I was just wondering if you could now talk a bit more about how you’re utilizing commercial sales and diversifying your revenue streams.

Terry Craghead:

Yeah. So in the early days, we started really knocking on restaurant doors to see if there was interest in organics recycling service. We started from this place of, “Let’s see what kind of interest there is for organics recycling.” And in our early experience, we had responses from some of the restaurants that, “Look, this sounds really cool, but we’re not even recycling our bottles. We have no recycling going on. The city doesn’t provide that for commercial businesses in Oklahoma City. Can you help us do that?” And I saw that as an opportunity to help us build the organics recycling business. Look, if we can provide this other service using some of the same equipment that we need to do the organics recycling service … In the early days, we were using a Toyota Tacoma and a landscape trailer and a hodgepodge of trash cans and waste bins that we cobbled together. But we just realized we can help out the organic service by starting a recycling service. And we didn’t have a great plan in mind.

We were working with really just, I think, two restaurants in the very early days, helping them recycle their material. Some of the experience of knocking on doors was, “Composting is neat, but we’re not interested.” And so I saw that it’s a new idea in Oklahoma City, organics recycling. And if we want to exist and help educate the community that this is something that is a needed service that solves so many problems in our community, we need to add some things into our business that make us financially sustainable. And so recycling was one of those first things. Yeah. Let’s collect glass bottles. We’ll take them down to the MRF where we can just drop things off by hand. But it was a learning experience. We had to learn how to get into the recycling industry. But we really developed a value for diversifying the things that we offer in order to one day hopefully be able to build a market through this ongoing community education for organics recycling.

We started with commercial services first. And then shortly after that, then we started offering residential food scrap drop-off program. But really, I was influenced by permaculture principles, designing landscapes with these guilds where you have different types of plants working together, having these overlapping benefits and contributions to the system. So yeah, commercial recycling, commercial composting, residential composting. And then we learned about small municipalities within Oklahoma City that didn’t have residential recycling. And so we were able to take our model of working with small offices. After our experience with restaurants, we started reaching out to office places that maybe their property managers didn’t provide recycling. And we’d be like, “Hey, we’ll come into your office. We’ll provide you a toter. We’ll come and get your recycling and bring it out to our truck.” Well, now we could extend that to residential, kind of municipal recycling. And so each of those different markets have contributed to helping us build a more resilient and sustainable business.

It offers challenges when you kind of divide your attention among different options, different services that you provide. There are challenges that come with that. But for us, the ability to keep a driver busy … If we’ve only got one compost route, it’s hard for that person to make it on four days where there’s not a route. And so it just helped us build resiliency into the toters that we had, the administrative marketing expenses that we had. We could kind of overlap and share some of these costs by spreading out some of the services that were associated.

Jordan Ashby:
Thank you again for everything that you’ve shared today about Fertile Ground Cooperative and your own composting journey. Before we close, do you have any final thoughts or lessons learned that you’d like to share?

Terry Craghead:
I just encourage people to build that community. Start looking for people who could share similar concerns. There are people that have started a lot of initiatives from community gardens to community compost systems. But for me, the big picture, my experience working with Fertile Ground has really been invest the time in making relationships. Don’t feel like you’re all alone out in the world, like you’re trying to save the world on your own, but look for the people who are already at work doing good. Join organizations, volunteer your time.
Just make connections with people. And in the long run, that people power, people getting together and getting organized is what’s going to help us as we continue to challenge capital, continue to challenge this entrenched corporate monopolization of the waste industry. They can’t compete with community. We’ll have more resilient structures, more resilient organizations that over time will continue to challenge the monopolized waste industry. So it’s kind of vague, just saying, “Go find community,” but it really is … It’s that simple, but it’s also that hard. It’s a long-term process of doing good in the world. And we just got to find the people that are on our team and just keep trying to expand that circle wider and wider.

Jordan Ashby:
You say it’s vague, but also you’ve just spoken on how you’ve done that. And that is a very hopeful example that inspires me and inspires hopefully some of the people tuning in today. Thank you again so much for joining us today. I wanted to also just put out there that ILSR has recently released a graphic called Transform Your Community’s Waste to Wealth, which demonstrates the status quo of big waste, as well as highlighting some of the benefits of community composting. So recommend everyone go check that out in the show notes. Thank you again, Terry, for joining us today. It’s been a pleasure.

Terry Craghead:
You’re welcome. It’s been awesome. Thanks, Jordan.

Jordan Ashby:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. This episode was produced by Drew Birschbach and the ILSR’s composting team. Our theme music is I Don’t know from The Grapes. Be sure to check out the rest of the ILSR podcast family, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and Community Broadband Bits at ILSR.org.

Transforming Your Community’s Waste to Wealth: Infographics