Fertile Ground

I have the most terrible memory. If it’s not written down, it does not happen. I have a hard time with names. I often don’t remember things that happened a year ago, let alone things from when I was a child. But I have this distinct memory of being very young and watching a Sesame Street episode with a split screen of a kid brushing his teeth on one side and a fish in a pond on the other. The kid didn’t turn off the water while he brushed his teeth and the water on the fish’s side of the screen simultaneously became lower and lower until the fish was left with barely enough water. That was the day that I became an environmentalist.

And now that I have a child of my own, I worry even more about what this world will look like when my daughter is my age. What will it look like for her children? This is something that weighs often on my mind, but it can be hard to know how to make a difference when the problem seems so big. Terry Craghead with Fertile Ground Cooperative offers some doable and important ways to help.

Company Name: Fertile Ground Cooperative

Your Name: Terry Craghead

Website: Fertilegroundok.coop

When did you start your business? December 2011

Tell us a little about what your business does.

Our mission at Fertile Ground is to improve and protect our social and natural environment through environmentally beneficial services and worker-owned jobs. We provide Commercial Recycling and Composting Services for offices, restaurants, churches, apartments, and condos in OKC and Norman.

We provide Residential Compost Collection. We pick up your food scraps weekly, compost them at our site or at a community garden compost site, and provide customers with a portion of compost in return. We have some bike collection routes near downtown, midtown, and uptown. You can find a complete service area map on our website. We also provide Zero Waste Event services. We consult with you to help make your event a green event and we also provide bins, bags, signage, and labor to manage your event. And on top of that, we also manufacture Compost Filter Sock, which is an erosion control device used in construction and homebuilding that uses compost to keep our lakes, streams, and rivers clean.

How did you personally get into composting?

I got into composting by trying it out first in my backyard to complement my new vegetable garden. Not long after starting my backyard pile, I met Lia Woods and Allen Parleir who pulled me into their organizing team for CommonWealth Urban Farms and Closer to Earth. I composted Coop Ale Works beer grains with Allen and his youth group, Closer to Earth, for a summer while we were meeting and planning CommonWealth. At the end of the summer, when Whole Foods opened, I volunteered twice per week composting their produce on a vacant lot near CommonWealth with other Closer to Earth and CommonWealth volunteers. Seeing how much food waste one grocery store produced was the seed for the idea of Fertile Ground.

Fertile Ground is a co-op company...how does that work?

We are a Worker-Owned Cooperative or Worker Co-op. A worker cooperative is a values-driven business that puts worker and community benefit at the core of its purpose. The central characteristics are that 1) workers own the business and participate in its financial success on the basis of their labor contribution to the co-op, and 2) workers have representation on and vote for the board of directors, adhering to the principle of one worker, one vote. Candidate employees must work with us for a year-long candidacy period, go through training, and pay for their share or agree to a payment plan to buy-in to the co-op before they are eligible to be voted in as a worker-owner. Worker co-ops are more productive than traditional workplaces because workers are not just trying to do the bare minimum to get a paycheck; they reap direct rewards at the end of the year through surplus dividends, which can be reinvested in their internal account in the co-op or distributed as cash. They also have control over the conditions of their work, so morale stays high. I love worker-co-ops because they can be a community development tool for redistributing wealth in a way that is empowering to people who are locked out of the mainstream economy. Check out institute.coop for more info!

Can you tell us a little bit about the composting process?

Compost is all about feeding microscopic bugs or microbes. Remember to feed them equal parts browns (leaves) and greens (food scraps), make sure they stay moist (not swamped!), and make sure they have oxygen (turn your pile once/month at a minimum). When conditions are right, the microbes produce heat as a byproduct of eating all that good stuff. In the summer and especially in the winter, you will see steam coming off of properly made compost piles. Piles need to be sized at a minimum of 3’x3’x3’ to create conditions for “hot composting.” If you want to use your finished compost, make sure you have a place to set aside a batch of “curing” compost to finish and place fresh food scraps in a new pile. After compost has cooled down, screen it with a wood-framed hardware cloth screen (1/4”) into a wheel barrel. Throw big chunks into your new compost pile to jumpstart with good microbes.

What types of things can you compost?

For residential compost in backyard or community compost settings, we recommend sticking with generally accepted composting principles. Compost all food waste except for meat, dairy, and grease. Commonly composted food waste includes coffee grounds, tea bags, fruit and veggie peelings, pasta, bread, and egg shells. You can compost food-soiled paper products (no paper cups!), grass clippings, leaves, wood chips, and pizza boxes. Our commercial compost customers can compost all food waste, including meat, dairy, and grease because the piles are so big (and hot!) that rodents and other baddies stay away.