A Tribute to Benney Erez: Compost Guru Extraordinaire

This tribute was written by Benny’s dear friend and Composting for Community Initiative Director, Brenda Platt

It is with deep sadness that I share the news of Benny Erez’s passing. Benny was the Compost Guru (yes, his real title!) at ECO City Farms in Maryland. He was a friend, mentor, teacher, and he made the best compost. 

I first met him in 2004. At the time, he was running the dairy cow composting operation at the Central Maryland Research & Education Center, part of the University of Maryland’s College of Agriculture & Natural Resources. I was taking my first week-long compost operator’s course and he was one of the teachers, but true to his nature, he taught not in a classroom but in the field. He was always in the field! At one point, citing budget issues, the University cut the composting activities and directed the cow manure to be directly applied to the land. Soon thereafter, following numerous odor complaints, they asked Benny to restart composting. He went on to help launch ECO City Farms, a nonprofit urban teaching and learning farm that grows great food, farms and farmers in ways that protect, restore and sustain the natural environment and the health of local communities. Benny’s first-hand knowledge of the power of community comes from his experiences growing up on a Kibbutz in Israel. He recognized that the human race faces many environmental challenges and that local, sustainable food production is a key part of the solution. 

In 2014, our collaboration with him and ECO City deepened when we developed and launched a Neighborhood Soil Rebuilders (NSR) composter train-the-trainer program, which we piloted in the DC metro area. That marked the beginning of a decade of ongoing partnerships: replicating the NSR program in Baltimore, Atlanta, and Philadelphia; building trommel screeners for community sites in Baltimore; starting a demo solar-powered site; teaching worm composting workshops; and so much more. Graduates of our programs are now running sites all over Maryland, District of Columbia, and beyond.

In 2024, to mark ILSR’s 50th anniversary, we honored Benny Erez with a Self-Reliance Life Time Achievement Award. I can’t think of anyone more deserving. In presenting the award, I noted these reasons for honoring him:

• For his outsized influence on our work; 
• For developing and launching with us our Neighborhood Soil Rebuilders Composter train-the-trainer program;
• For integrating compost as an essential part of organic urban farming and growing local food to serve those traditionally left out of healthy food networks;
• For being so essential in modeling, local self-reliance by guiding the development of ECO City Farms, now with three farms, including an 11-acre new site that serves as an incubator farm for other farmers;
• For showing that self-reliance can be DIY with repurposed materials whether old shipping containers for compost systems or buildings, or erosion pipes found on the side of the road; 
• For being a peacemaker, traveling to the West Bank more than once to promote peaceful co-existence and nonviolence on the basis of improving soil and growing food together (we all need food!);
• For having a vision of what’s possible, sharing that vision, showing people it’s possible, working to make it a reality; 
• For being an all-around mensch; and
• For teaching so many to carry on this important work before he retired. 

In accepting the award, he acknowledged,

“I’m not a good speaker, I’m a doer.”

That he was. And we are so grateful for all the seeds of knowledge and life he planted in his communities and far beyond.

You will be forever remembered, my friend.