How Composting Can Create a Regenerative Food System (Feat. Rust Belt Riders)

We’re recording from the sixth national cultivating community composting forum in New York city. And I am joined now by Michael Robinson, who is the co founder of Rustbelt riders in Cleveland, Ohio. He’s also an active member of the community composter coalition, which ILSR convenes. And Michael has been a very valuable member of the coalition steering committee for a number of years. So it is our pleasure to introduce you to him today. So Michael, say hello. Hello. And Michael, tell, tell our listeners about vest belt riders and how composting fits into your work.

I fell in love with its food. Um, the, there was a really awesome community garden infrastructure there too. There’s a lot of, uh, properties that formerly had houses on them that now, uh, they demo the house and it’s a land bank property and a lot of those are being used for community gardens, um, supported by the OSU extension there. So seeing the support from institutions and also from the communities around taking, uh, this land, um, and turning it into a place to be able to provide healthy food for the communities was really sounded really awesome to me. So he made a half joke of an offer we had at the time. He was actually working on one of these community gardens and could use an extra set of hands. So he made kind of a half joke of an offer at the time. There were two people staying in a one bedroom apartment and there was an attic and he said, if you want to, you know, move back in the springtime cause I came through in the fall, he’s going to want to come back in the springtime.

We can, uh, you know, we could use a set of hands in their community garden and you can live in the attic. And a few months went by and I gave him a call and I said, Hey, that attic, is it still available? Can we still do that? And uh, it all worked out. I ended up moving to Cleveland and, um, it was through working on the community gardens. And then, uh, we both started philosophy. So naturally, uh, after graduating with philosophy degrees, we were working in the service industry. So we were working at restaurant and bar tending and saw the, uh, we were working on this really awesome restaurant called spice kitchen and bar. It’s a farmer table restaurant in Cleveland and they’ve got a seven acre farm out in the Cuyahoga national Valley, uh, in the national park. I mean, so working in that restaurant really inspired us to figure out other ways to close loops and also seeing how depleted the soil was.

Uh, it was basically a really tiny layer of topsoil that they’d put on top of the fill for these old vacant lots. So we saw an opportunity to start with a very tangible, very tangible thing that we could take action on to be able to help cultivate healthy soil for these gardens while also solving, uh, a whole bunch of other problems. Uh, we take a systems thinking approach to our work and in kind of considering the places that composting connects to food, it connects to, to water retention. Uh, it connects to community. It connects to a waste diversion from, or material diversion from landfills. So decreasing the greenhouse gases that are being given off by the, by the landfills. We saw this one really high leverage point in composting food scraps from, from these restaurants. And then making sure that those got back to the community gardens to cultivate food for the neighborhood.

So we raised some money on a Kickstarter campaign for, from some family and friends and we bought a bicycle and a trailer. And, uh, we started hauling material 300 pounds at a time from the cafes and restaurants to the closest community garden and then helped work with them to, to process that material into compost. Um, that was, we, we were on bicycles for only about a year or so and we needed to meet the demand that we saw in, in the city and in our region. So today we haul 160,000 pounds a month. We run two box trucks, so we’re no longer on bicycles. We’re, we’re running box trucks and, uh, we got a Bobcat last year, which was huge for us. Our backs much appreciate it and also helped us to increase our processing capacity. So yeah, that’s the, you know, the, in a nutshell, that kind of trajectory from starting small scale on bicycles.

And then scaling to meet that demand. There’s a number of programs that we went through. Um, incubators, uh, went through C changes, social entrepreneurship accelerator jumpstart as a business accelerator in our region. So we had gone through those programs, a Goldman Sachs, 10,000 small businesses program. Uh, we went through and it was going through those programs that really helped two people that started this without any lick of business background through the support of our community. And these, uh, these people in our communities, uh, really helped us take this idea and turn it into a, turn it into a business. So it was really the support of our region, its resources, our awesome advisory board that we pulled together immediately because we knew that we needed to have people smarter than us to be able to help us learn how to do the things that we needed to do to make sure that this had staying power. So now we’re doing compass production. We’ve got soil blends under, uh, the name Tilth. So Tilth soil.com is where the soil blends are. And then we’ve got rust belt riders, which is the hauling company.

Uh, you know, he was doing similar work as we were around the town and as we continued to grow, he’s, he’s been just an awesome, awesome person to work with. And then Joe, uh, joined us, uh, most recently he’s a botanist. Uh, Nathan also has a philosophy degree and Jesse has an environmental studies degree. So I think scope and this kind of generalist approach and kind of systems thinking perspective and understanding the interconnected nature of all of these things, like our team all takes that to heart for share. And, uh, when you’re bringing that to, you know, a team meeting where you have everybody kind of plugged into this approach leads to some pretty remarkable solutions to really hear your problems.

Everything from food security to water retention to fight runoff, uh, you know, helping to mitigate. Some of the algae blooms. Um, we see that as a resource that, you know, can be leveraged. And with this new approach to be able to bring a lot of these positive outcomes to a city that, you know, this is actually the 50th anniversary of the Cuyahoga river catching on fire. That event that really spurred the Genesis of the EPA. So a city with this kind of like background, it’s, it really means a lot to us to kind of help to show that we’re trying to use the assets that it has and there are many to be able to create a prefigurative model of what a regenerative food system looks like.

Just as important as, um, you know, the other technical aspects of the work that we do. Uh, so having all these people in one place, um, I really love the idea of emergent properties. One plus one equals a thousand. In this case, there’s something magical that we can’t even wrap our heads around. So if we can bring all of these people together from all over the U S Canada and Costa Rica, at least today, to be able to get all of those people in a room, the immersion properties from that are something that I think we all try to wrap our heads around and the weeks after this conference because there’s so many ideas and just evolving, uh, methods and approaches that come from everybody. Just being able to get together, share space, share time. And it’s, it’s really important that we continue to do that for our movement, but also because this work needs to be done if we want to continue to have a habitable planet.

As far as Rustbelt riders, we’ve got the, uh, really the Tilth soil.com site is the one where we’ve got all of the soil blends right now. And then a Rustbelt riders.com is the, the hauling website. Uh, if you want to learn more about the hauling efforts and some of the metrics there, you can find them there. Um, and then we’ve got the Instagram and the Facebook and all that. So all those links are on the website and stuff. Don’t you have some sort of soil biology testing? Uh, yeah, so we do offer soil biology testing as well. Um, if there are even we do it for industrial scale or community composters. Um, our approach to making compost is about cultivating a diverse number of beneficial soil microorganisms and it’s kind of a unique approach in that, uh, most of the time people are doing mineral testing and stuff like that. Um, but we throw compost under a microscope and go through and count literally the ratios of bacteria to fungi and then a search out for beneficial soil microorganisms. So if there’s anybody out there that’s interested in the biodiversity of their compost, you can send a test and we’ll do a, uh, an analysis for you.