Composting Food Scraps, Your Way

Rogue Produce has been collecting food scraps from homes and businesses in Southern Oregon for over a decade. Recently, we’ve added new service options to make it easy to get your kitchen scraps off the path to the landfill, and on the road to local farms. Our local farms place a high value on your food scraps, because it lowers their costs by providing needed nutrients to their soil, and their animals.

Our farmers regularly express their gratitude for our Community Compost program, and everyone who makes the effort to participate. This appreciation continues to inspire us to be innovative with our service, so that we can get the greatest amount of food scraps diverted from the land fill and delivered to creative and hard working farmers.

Check out our latest innovations, and explore our traditional service options, and see if they might be a good fit for you! We’ll get started with the latest in Community Compost Creativity!

Belview  Grange  Drop  Site

Every Thursday, between 9:00am and 1:00pm, we set out bins to collect your scraps. This service costs you only $10 a month, and you can learn more, or sign-up by clicking here.

After you sign-up, we’ll be in touch to go over logistics and answer any questions you may have.

Ashland Grower’s Market

This option doesn’t cost you a dime! Through the efforts of the Ashland Climate Collaborative, and with funding from the Ashland Food Co-Op, we’ve been providing food scrap collection bins at the Ashland Grower’s Market (behind Science Works) every Tuesday, between 8:30am and 1:00pm.

We are so grateful for the support of local businesses and non-profits that have made this service option come alive. We currently divert 8 large bins of food scraps every Tuesday! That equates to around 100 households that utilize this option to get their scraps to local farms.

Medford Grower’s Market

With inspiration from the Ashland Grower’s Market project, we’ve started the same operation at the Grower’s Market in Medford, at Hawthorne Park. Bins are out from 8:30am to 1:00pm every Thursday, if you’d like to take advantage of this option!

Direct Pick Up

We understand that it’s not always easy to get to a drop site, so we also offer direct pick up at your home. Currently, this service is available for residents living in Ashland and Talent. On your designated pick up day, just leave out a container with your scraps. We’ll come collect the contents, leave you your container, and get the scraps to local farms!

If the direct pick up option sounds right for you, here’s where you can sign-up.

But Wait, There’s One More Way!

To lower costs for customers, we have Neighborhood Drop Sites at some locations in Ashland and Talent. You may have a neighbor that hosts a community collection bin that lives nearby!

If you’d like to explore this option, give us a call (541) 301-3426, and we can see if there’s a convenient Neighborhood Drop Site near you. Or, perhaps you’d like to start one?

If you want to read a fun story about a resident in Ashland who started a Neighborhood Drop Site in his area, have a look at this recent article he shared about his experience: The Millpond “Compost Man.”

Other Ways You Can Support, and Enjoy!

At Rogue Produce, we make the effort to go “full circle,” by purchasing produce from our local farms and selling it to you at our Online Farmers Market. You can support our Community Compost efforts, and enjoy the best of local produce, delivered directly to your door!

When you become a Farmers Market Member with Rogue Produce and begin purchasing local produce from our Online Market, you immediately support our community-building, soil-sustaining, farm-helping, and small-business-partnering efforts.

Stay in the LOOP!

If you’re not currently interested in our services, you can still sign up for our weekly newsletter to stay informed. We’ll keep you posted on farm events, local food stories, compost lore, farm work parties, promotions, and so much more!

Subscribe to the Rogue Produce Newsletter Today!

Food-Scraps to Farms

The Neighborhood Compost Project makes it easier and more affordable than ever to get the food-scraps from your kitchen to local farms. Community Compost transports the food-scraps to local farms that use the material to make compost to feed their soil. Instead of this valuable resource being dumped in the landfill, we make sure it completes the natural cycle and becomes nutrition for locally grown produce.

How it Works

The way the Neighborhood Compost Project works is simple. We provide you with a 5-gallon bucket to collect your household food-scraps. Each week, you bring the bucket to the designated drop-site in your neighborhood. There will be a clean bucket for you to pick-up when you drop off your scraps. This new model enables Community Compost to pick-up more food-scraps from fewer locations, which allows us to lower our rates to customers.

How to Join

To participate in the Neighborhood Compost Project, simply sign-up here. We will determine the ideal drop-site closest to your home, supply you with a bucket, and get you started with our service. If we don’t yet have a drop-site designated for your neighborhood, we will pick-up directly from your home each week until we do (this is part of our current promotion to build our Neighborhood model)! The monthly rate is only $14.95 ($3.45 per pick-up).

Food-Scraps Feed the Soil

When you participate in Community Compost you are providing a real and substantial benefit to local farms. Evers Ridge Farm, in Medford, is one of our newest partners. Evers Ridge is planting acres and acres of drought resistant fruit and nut trees. They just finished planting their first 500 trees! Every row of trees is being nourished from a compost mixture produced with the help of food-scraps collected from residents and local businesses. Check out this video interview (or view the video below) we created with Evers Ridge Farm to see how the process works.

Contact us today to get started in the Neighborhood Compost Project by Community Compost, and please share this post with your friends and neighbors!

Happy Dirt Veggie Patch is a drop off point for Community Compost. We are a small 3 acre farm in Phoenix that grows a wide variety of vegetables. We maintain healthy soil with compost made on site. Your peels and pits, leftovers and less-than-their-best veggie scraps arrive at the farm in trash barrels that get dumped into big piles for processing.

The first thing we do is look through the fresh droppings for anything that doesn’t belong. Almost any naturally produced item can contribute to building healthy soil – but plastics, metal or any other questionable trash that won’t break down is picked out and put in the regular trash. Meat and dairy products can theoretically be composted, but as a practical matter we exclude them as much as possible because they attract critters that we would rather not have to contend with.

Packaging items that are labeled as “compostable” typically don’t work very well in our system, so we pick most of those out too. Thin green compostable bags work ok, but compostable cutlery and dishes, etc that are more substantial take much too long to digest in our small operation. So into the trash they go.

Another indigestible item is the plastic stickers that come on produce. We have to let these go through at this early point in the process, because trying to remove them all is impractical. We have found that it is easier to remove them from finished compost than at the beginning of the process. Still, this is the biggest contamination issue we deal with. Thousands of stickers, still sticking to their morsel of compost! It is a huge headache trying to remove them all, not to mention hours of labor. We would love it if customers could remove stickers from their produce before tossing them. An even better solution would be  for the industry to go to paper stickers. After all – the entire purpose of the sticker is to exist for a fraction of a second to speed things up at the checkout stand. After that nobody cares. So why do we make stickers that last for generations? The simplest thing with a very simple solution ends up being a blight upon the land. Paper breaks down easily in compost – plastic does not. 

One more irksome item is plastic teabags. They absolutely do not break down, and pop up in otherwise finished compost with amazing frequency. Each one requires bending over, emptying their enclosed contents, and getting it to a proper disposal receptacle. Much easier would be for everyone to use paper tea bags which easily return to the Earth.

Once we have the compost spread out on the piles, we let it sit in the sun for a day or so, weather permitting, to dry it a bit. In Winter we often cover with tarps to keep excess rain off the piles. Compost needs some moisture to work properly, but too much moisture prevents enough air from getting into the pile. While the food is drying in the air, it is very attractive to a variety of birds in the area. Throughout the day, flocks of birds come visit the compost – taking some and pooping some – stirring it up and speeding the digestion process. Some come for the ripe fruits, some for the multitude of bugs and worms.

At night, there are other critters which visit the piles, mainly skunks, raccoons, and opossums. Feral cats are also on the prowl. These animals also like to feed on rodents, so there are no rats to be found and only rare sightings of mice.

When the latest dump load has dried, we cover it with straw, leaves, dry grass clippings or other farm clippings. This introduces the “brown” component that gives microbes the balance of nutrients they need to activate the digestion process. We layer the pile with additional loads of “fresh” produce until it is big enough to start cooking on its own. 

At this point we take our trusty old tractor and turn the pile and mix all the ingredients together. Once it is all mixed, the composting process really accelerates. Within 2-3 days the temperature of the pile will soar, eventually reaching 140-150 degrees. Thermophyllic bacteria do the work of eating it all and gradually turning it into beautiful brown humus. These bacteria also eat and digest any pathogenic microbes that may happen along the way. It takes a few weeks until the temperature goes back down. We then turn the pile (which is considerably smaller by now) one more time. The pile heats up once again , but reverts to ambient temperature more quickly. After the second turning, piles are left to finish for several months. This allows the beneficial fungi and earthworms to infiltrate and leaves us with a beautiful, rich, sweet-smelling compost that is pure nutrition for our crops and essential for maintaining healthy soil.

We are very thankful for all of those who contribute their compost through Community Compost. We are also very excited to now be getting leftovers from the new Market of Choice in Medford. This will increase our supply of home-made compost significantly, which will help increase our production of local veggies! All of the compost we make is used on-site to fertilize our crops and maintain healthy soil, eliminating most of the need for expensive fertilizers from faraway places.

Thank you for your support!