Wriggling into a new school year
Farmer Amanda and the E.A.T. South worm farm at Alabama Cooperative Extension Services STEM in the Classroom event at Park Crossing High School. Photo courtesy of Alabama Cooperative Extension Service.
Thousands of red wriggler worms have new homes in classrooms near you. With the support of the City of Montgomery’s Grants Office and a National Conference of Mayors Environmental Sustainability Award, we are sharing our love of composting and celebrating the humble red wiggler worm with teachers from around our region.
In June, the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service invited Farmer Amanda to teach about composting at their STEM in the Classroom workshop at Park Crossing High School. She brought along our trusty worm bin (one that has literally gone through the fire with us). The teachers were so excited by the worms, we promised to teach a vermicomposting class before they had to go back to school.
There are compost bins and then there are compost bins. This one at Bear Elementary has to be one of the nicest ones we’ve ever worked on.
On Tuesday, we made good on our promise. Teachers from Sylacauga, Montgomery, and Bullock County built worm bins for their classrooms at Tuskegee University’s Urban Agriculture Innovation Center. Along with worm farms, we were able to share curriculum provided by Alabama Cooperative Extension Service.
Worms and curriculum are great, but teachers need money, too, to realize their outdoor classroom dreams. Joyce Turnipseed from Big Cedar Education Foundation joined us to share possible funding opportunities from her organization along with the RC&D Councils and Soil & Water Conservation Districts.
In other school composting news, we worked with teachers from Bear Exploration Center to build one of the prettiest compost bins ever. It now has a home in the Bear Outdoor Classroom, and students will learn about recycling food waste into plant food.
Why all this focus on worms and compost and schools?
Each pile represents about a pound of worms waiting for new homes!
Food scraps are real, critical resources - Our grandparents (o.k., maybe great grandparents) didn’t waste food. If there was anything left of a meal, it went to the hogs who would feed entire families in the fall or the dogs they used for hunting or security. Maybe I’m reaching too far back, but recycling food scraps into useful resources isn’t new.
Leaves, grass clippings, your coffee grounds, all contain valuable nutrients (nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus). When recycled through composting, these nutrients stay in the food chain, feed more plants, continue to feed us. When they go into the landfill, that’s it. No plant or animal will ever have access to those nutrients again. It’s gone. It’s a huge waste of resources that we actually need to keep feeding us on this planet.
Jobs, yep, there’s gold in food waste. Hauling and composting food waste are business opportunities. Educating about and normalizing food scrap recycling creates future job opportunities.
Math and Science - Building bins, weighing food scraps, making graphs of food scraps by day or month, these are all math applications of having a compost system.
Compost piles are homes to entire ecosystems of organisms which can be seen with your eyes or under the microscope. A compost pile is a great place to learn about bacteria, fungi, and all the other creatures that turn food scraps into plant food.
Then there’s the climate. When food scraps decompose in a landfill, they break down anaerobically (without the presence of oxygen-see, science!). The creatures that like the anaerobic environments make methane which is even worse than carbon dioxide for the climate. When we keep food waste out of the landfill and compost it, we decrease the amount of methane our landfills produce.
Climate Grief and Anxiety - Have you heard about climate anxiety? We’ve burned up most of the fossil fuels, altered the climate, and are handing a planet of catastrophic storms, fires, heat and floods off to our kids. Some of them are looking at all of this and are feeling a lot of stress. Composting is a hands-on, tangible action that kids can do to give them positive ways to address problems in the community and on a planetary scale.
We started composting because we could not find quality compost locally. In two years, we have learned so much about making compost, the science of composting, and the ways composting will benefit Montgomery into the future. We are excited to share this with schools and the community.
If you would like to talk more about composting at your school or in your community, reach out to Farmer Amanda. We’ll get you started.