Reducing food waste is a calling of mine. My subreddit r/noscrapleftbehind has 10,000 passionate followers, I’m writing a book about running a waste-free kitchen, and my family’s food waste is virtually zero.

Why? Because food waste contributes to global warming and deforestation, among many other environmental problems. It’s an enormous waste of resources like water and fossil fuel. Plus it’s unethical, considering how many food insecure people are right here in our own country.

A household with zero waste comes with challenges. One such challenge is food that is edible, but not really edible. Take kitchen scraps, for instance: apple cores, carrot peels, onion skins. That bio matter shouldn’t go in landfills, but it can’t be eaten, either.

There are two options, and each comes with it’s pros and cons. We can compost our kitchen scraps, or feed them to chickens.

Compost Pros: It’s Better than Landfills

When bio matter decomposes in the open, oxygen helps it decompose and the material releases carbon dioxide.

Most of our food doesn’t decompose in the open where it can release carbon dioxide. It goes in landfills. Food in a landfill is buried under layers of garbage, which prevents it from getting the air it needs to rot safely. That means methane, and lots of it. Landfills are the third largest source of methane in the US, right behind gas emissions and cow farts (seriously, cow farts: look it up).

Methane is ten times worse for climate change than carbon dioxide.

Throwing food in a landfill is the equivalent of pressing CTRL+A DELETE. Those nutrients are gone forever. Composting saves those nutrients and reduces our carbon footprint by creating carbon dioxide instead of methane.

Compost is a popular hobby for non-environmental reasons, too. It’s fun. Creating dirt is satisfying — it feels almost god-like.

Composting gives you an emotional high because healthy dirt releases chemicals that make you happy. That might be one of the reasons gardening is so therapeutic.

Compost Cons: Composting Edible Food is Bad for the Environment

Composting is great for bio matter that can’t be eaten. It’s also great for tiny bits of food that fell through the cracks, like stale French fries and broken crackers the baby threw on the floor.

Most people don’t compost only inedible food. They throw in food they could have eaten, like rotting pears and old casseroles.

The production of food is bad for the environment because of the resources it takes to grow, harvest, transport, and package it.

When edible food is composted, it hurts the environment because it perpetuates a system of waste, and composting only recycles 1% of the energy it took to produce that food. Composting puts a negligible amount of nutrients back in the earth that shouldn’t have been taken out of the earth in the first place.

Not to mention that composting does nothing to help world hunger.

When it comes to seeds, peels, and cores that you don’t plan on eating, there’s no reason not to compost it. Unless, of course, you have chickens.

Chicken Pros: I Get Free Eggs and Compost

I eat eggs. The chickens who make the eggs need to eat. If they have to eat anyway, it makes sense to give them my extra food instead of letting it rot in a bin.

If a human can eat it, a chicken can eat it. There are few exceptions, like avocados, chocolate, and uncooked rice. Feeding them chicken is morally shady, if you ask me. For the most part, there’s little in your kitchen that can’t be fed to a chicken.

Chickens convert the waste into eggs, which makes me feel like I’m still eating the waste, just in another form.

Chickens also convert food into compost, and harvesting chicken poop is faster than waiting for food to decompose.

I also love that the chickens producing my eggs live in humane conditions. The cages that farm chickens live in make me sick.

Backyard chickens seem like a win-win all around. It almost is a win-win…almost.

Chicken Cons: Backyard Chickens Have a Dirty Secret

I wish I didn’t know this. Once I tell you, you’ll wish you didn’t know it, too. But we should have figured it out on our own.

For every female animal you eat or buy for food, a baby male was killed.

My local zoo feeds its predators male calves exclusively. Farmers have no other use for them. Male chicks are thrown in a macerator.

Why does it have be a macerator? It’s hard enough to justify eating chicken when the male babies are killed, but to macerate them. Yikes.

Chickens come with other challenges. The upfront costs, for instance. A compost bin might cost $50-$100, or you could make your own with a plastic storage bin or with pallets.

Chickens, on the other hand, need a house and fencing. You have to buy feed for them, and bedding, and then you have to deal with them possibly getting sick.

Since they’re living animals, they’re a responsibility. You can throw scraps in a compost bin and forget about them, but you can’t forget to feed and water chickens. If you go out of town, you have to find someone to take care of them.

You even have to worry about social feuds. Not every chicken is nice to the others. My sister has a time-out cage for when one of her girls bullies the others, which works pretty well.

Options within City Limits

If you live in an urban area with a tiny backyard, or if you live in an apartment, you might think neither chickens or composting is even an option.

The truth might surprise you. Some cities allow backyard chickens under certain conditions. There are rules about how many chickens you can have, how big the coop can be, how you must store the feed, and what you must do with the waste.

As long as you’re aware of the rules, keeping chickens in even the smallest of backyards could be a possibility.

A compost bin doesn’t take up much space. I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to give up precious apartment space for a compost bin, even if it’s a small one, but if you’re determined, an apartment can find room somewhere.

That isn’t the main issue. The main issue is what to do with the compost once it has decomposed. Apartments don’t have gardens, and potted plants on the back porch only hold so much dirt.

Other places will take your kitchen scraps. Community gardens, for example, usually have a compost bin, and I’m sure they wouldn’t mind your contribution. Some cities have compost facilities.

You might even have neighbors, friends, and family who will take your scraps. ShareWaste is an app that matches people who have compost with people who want compost.

It’s not as much fun to fill a bin in your freezer with scraps you will never use. It is fun to feel good about helping the environment.

I Choose Chickens. Which do You Prefer?

For me, chickens were the obvious choice. I didn’t actually have a choice; my mom gave me her chickens before she died, plus the coop and the fence. There were no upfront costs.

I still compost when I have biodegradable matter the chickens can’t eat. That isn’t often. Halloween pumpkins, for instance, since we leave them on the porch until they get moldy. I also compost avocado peels and corn cobs. Not watermelon rinds, though. The chickens love those.

Despite the macerator issue, backyard chickens are still more humane than eating eggs from the store. Farms are inhumane for the females and the males, whereas backyard chickens are only inhumane for the males.

It might be better to not eat eggs in the first place, but that’s an argument for another time.

In the end, I feel it all boils down to one question. Keeping chickens is a fun hobby. Compost is a fun hobby.

What do you think would be the most fun?

Chapters will soon be available from my book No Scrap Left Behind: My Life Without Food Waste. Sign up for my newsletter to be the first to know.

Want more? You can read all my fiction for only $2 on Patreon.

Image by Xuân Tuấn Anh Đặng from Pixabay

Chickens or Compost? What to Do with Kitchen Scraps was originally published in The Environmental Reporter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Disclaimer: This article is about 2 years old and written for the university magazine.

In 2019, Greta Thunberg said “how dare you” and she was right, how dare we! But now we have to dare to reverse this climate change and it may still be an improbable task. Because for all the protests and the media attention that ‘Fridays for Future’ has been getting, there is not much action on the ground where it matters. There are many reasons for this, most of which can be traced back to the opportunism that has been hardwired into our brains.

Humans try to accrue the most beneficial of opportunities, and if none are forthcoming, they will take the easiest way out. The Amazon fires started because of people burning their farms and dashing. They did not have an economic opportunity (read, incentive) or knowledge to try other methods and ‘burn and dash’ was the easiest one available. Urbanization happens because the rural people think that there are a plethora of opportunities in the cities while they cannot find one in their villages. In the past, low opportunity for infants to live beyond infancy resulted in a higher birth rate. The earliest humans lived alongside rivers because opportunities for obtaining food and water were the highest there. If the world provided opportunities to girls as they do to boys, boys would not be pined for and female infanticide would end.

Human beings as a species are intelligent but not responsible. Instead of using our intelligence to exist blissfully with Nature and all its life forms, we use it to keep generating new opportunities for ourselves. What’s more is a human tends to see opportunities as being present only for himself and has to make a conscious effort to realize how that same opportunity can benefit someone else. This is how narrow-minded and opportunistic we are. There was a time when humans used to coexist with Nature (when human survival depended on it), but once they could generate opportunities on their own, they left caring for it. This effectively happened after the Industrial Revolution.

Post-Industrial Revolution, we have only increased the intensity with which we harm Nature. This makes the challenge of reversing the climate crisis very severe. Research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that the greenhouse gas emissions that have long been held (and proven) as the major cause for warming our planet and accelerating climate change will need to be cut to net zero in every sector within 50 years, the efforts for which need to be started within 10 years. The research also gives a breakup of the major sources of these emissions: electricity generation is 25%, manufacturing is 21% and transportation is 14%. This means that within 10 years, we need to be on the way to using only solar and wind power for generating electricity and even this will only account for a quarter of the emissions; we need to more or less start manufacturing products like plastic, cement and steel by pre-Industrial Revolution methods (if that is even possible) and the hype around electric vehicles is not going to amount to much. Add to this that the climate cycle is always late to react so we do not know when the climate had latently reached the bad stage that has now manifested, and how much worse is yet to come.

Extrapolating the human opportunism to climate, the biggest hurdle apart from convincing 7.8 billion people that climate change is real will be to achieve international cooperation in living a life of net zero greenhouse emissions. This will be especially tough because at present, there are no fathomable opportunities to be accrued by living at net zero emissions, and without opportunities the status quo cannot be changed. Because technological circumstances to support net zero emissions have not yet arisen, the governments of the world cannot just enact laws to enforce it and in the process shut down existing industries wholly. People have a tendency to continue living life in the way they have been cultured and habituated to. That is why old people are resistant to change. Generations of humans have been cultured to the Modern Age, and a return to an era preceding it would prove an uphill task. Ask the people supporting Greta how many of them would be willing to abandon their modern lives!

Time does not move backwards, always forwards. What has been done, has been done; there is no going back to what it was. What we can hope for is that the worse that is yet to come from Nature is not much worse than the present and that the late reaction of climate has reached its end. What we can do is try our best to return to pre-Industrial Revolution conditions while also preserving our modern cultural, social and technological ethos in an attempt to realize climate restoration in the long term. It is a long road downhill but we have finally started noticing the steepness of it, and taken steps in the right direction. Let's all work to reach the bottom safely, together!

A Philosophical Look at Climate Change was originally published in The Environmental Reporter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When we think of climate change and agriculture, the first images that come to our minds tend to be yellowish plants wilting under a scorching sun or fields infested with new and exotic pests, now acclimatized to a warmer and wetter weather. What we don’t think about, is that plants are not the only organisms to be affected by the devastating impacts of climate change. While we strive to breed better plants, capable of withstanding the increasingly harsher environmental conditions, there is a delicate component of an agroecosystem that is often neglected, despite being of pivotal importance. Yes, you guessed it: the soil. The soil and its ecosystem are also dying out, and if we do not reverse this process, agriculture as it is today, will no longer exist.

Soil is more than…just soil!

To many, the soil will appear not much more than a pure physical support for the plants. Yes, soils also supply the plants with nutrients, but what else? After all, if the nutrients in the soil were to disappear, we would just need to fertilize our fields and everything would be fine, right? Well, not exactly. The soil is a very complex and delicate biochemical system, not a simple and inert support for plants’ life. It is a living being itself, and, similarly to most living beings, it is not doing very well under climate change. But why is that? And how will climate change impact soil’s life and its capacity to support plants’ growth?

How too much rain affects the soil ecosystem

Climate change is expected to have different impacts not only at the spatial level (different areas of the world will be differently affected) but also at the temporal level, meaning that the same geographical areas will experience opposite climatic events in the Summer and Winter season. Taking Southern Europe as an example (for it being a hotspot of climate change and a well studied location by climate scientists), the Summer months will experience increasingly strong heat waves and drought events, while the Winter months will be ravaged by floods and heavy rains. Now, let’s consider these effects on the soil.

What does it happen when you pour too much water to your plants in a pot? Water overflows (obviously!). However, it doesn’t end up there: there are three major soil components impacted by heavy rains and waterlogging.

1. Humus. Soil organic matter (which you probably know as “humus”) is located in the first upper layers of the soil. Among its major functions, humus gives structure to the soil, increases soil water retention and keeps the macronutrients in place, preventing leaching. Under heavy rains, humus is lost via runoff, causing, as a result, a strong decrease in soil fertility.
2. Nitrogen. Under waterlogging, all the pores within the soil are occupied by water, meaning that there is no more oxygen in the soil. In a oxygen-deprived soil, nitrogen, the main crop macronutrient, undergoes a denitrification process through which it is converted in nitrous oxide and it is lost into the atmosphere. Even if the soil is well drained, we still would have problems: nitrogen, the main crop macronutrient, would be lost via leaching, due to the high amount of water flowing across the soil profile.
3. Soil bacteria. In an oxygen-deprived soil, aerobic microorganisms responsible for the breaking down of plant material (decomposition processes), simply die out.

Temperature and soil, a delicate relationship

Like you and me, also soil microorganisms have their preferred temperature at which they like to live and, similarly, it is not just you and me who complain when the temperature gets too hot. A study found out that in the US

soil temperature (depth of 10 cm) increased by 0.32 °C over 10 years

while in China,

the annual surface soil temperature increased by 1.90 °C (national level) during 1961–2011

Now, soil microbes aren’t exactly overjoyed by the increasing temperature across the soil layers: beyond a certain temperature threshold, soil microorganisms get inactive and eventually die off. This results in major problems at the soil fertility level.

Initially, when the soil layers get heaten up, the organic material in the ground starts to break down in a process called mineralization (the breaking down of bigger molecules of organic residues into smaller ones), and humus is created from a recombination of the organic material. If the temperature keeps increasing, the humus itself starts to break down as well into smaller components (the plants’ nutrients), which are now at risk of being easily washed out by the rain. The consequence is the loss of both humus and soil nutrients.

What can we do to minimize the impacts?

Under heavy rains, drought and tempeature increase, the soil’s future doesn’t look bright at all. As a consequence, the same goes for plants’s future and our own too. However, at field scale, something can be done to prevent (or at least limit) the heating up of the soil.

1. Agroforestry practices can create a cooler microclimate in the field as well as protect the soil from havy rains.
2. Mulching can help both reducing the runoff of water across the field and keeping moisture close to the crops’ roots in hot summer days.

Unfortunately, we can’t breed better soils, as we do with plants. But even if we would have plants capable of withstanding climate change scenarios, where these crops will be grown, if soil health would decrease?

Soiless agriculture can become the new agriculture, but we can’t grow forests and prairies in hydroponic systems.

We Should Worry About Climate Change’s Impact On Soil Fertility was originally published in The Environmental Reporter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you follow updates on environmental news, chances are you are familiar with the term monocropping in agriculture and the related debatable consequences it causes both at the field and the landscape level.

Or…was maybe monoculture the term you heard? Now, you may be wondering if there is even a difference between the two? Are they both equally impacting and, if so, what are the possible alternatives that could be implemented in our fields?

Monoculture or monocropping?!

To answer these questions, let’s make first a bit of order with the terminology here:

1. Monoculture is the agriculture practice of growing a single crop in a field or farming system at a specific time (meaning that the next year I can grow something totally different). As a side note, monoculture is a technique used in both conventional and organic farming due to its unquestionable handyness during the farming operations of planting, weeding and harvesting: same type of crop to deal with, same type of machinery which is needed on the field.
2. Monocropping is instead a continuous monoculture, meaning that the farmer keeps growing the same crop overtime on the same field.

Monoculture and monocropping are not the same thing and they do not have the same impact on the environment: monoculture’s negative effects can be counterbalanced by simply growing a different crop the following year (crop rotation), which does not happen in monocropping.

Monocropping is responsible for the well-known terrific effects at the environmental level, from soil fertility reduction, agro-biodiversity loss, ground-water contamination, soil erosion and loss of soil organic matter to ultimately the overtime decline in the crop yield, which is also the major concern of our irresponsible producers and likely the only thing that might make them think twice about what they are doing. The reason why monocropping has such detrimental effects lies not only in the fact that this agricultural technique is associated with an intensive use of agrochemicals but also because it depends on the use of agrochemicals to be a viable option.

Why monocropping sucks…

One of the reasons why monocropping is biologically unsustainable is the same why nothing, not even weeds, grows under a walnut tree: allelopathy.

Every plant produces biochemical compounds, named allelochemicals, which have a direct effect on the physiology, growth or behaviour of other organisms. Many types of allelochemicals are produced by plants to fight off pests or to inhibit the growth of other surrounding plants, in order to limit the competition in the quest for water, nutrients and light. Although not all allelochemicals are produced to harm or limit the growth of other organisms, most of these secondary plant metabolites can be considered as a sofisticated chemical weapon in the biological warfare going on in your field.

But what does it have to do with monocropping? If the same type of crop is grown repeatedly with no breaks (like in crop rotations) on the same field, the allelochemicals it produces will start building up in the soil, leading in some species (like wheat) to a self-inhibition: the plant will be stunting and less yielding. What does a stunting and less yielding plant need? Extra fertilization, especially of nitrogen, which is among the main macronutrients of plants. What happens when too much nitrogen is applied to the soil? We have nitrogen leaching into the groundwater or into the surrounding water bodies, causing eutrophication problems.

The problems do not end there though. A study reported that high rates of nitrogen fertilization leads to the formation in the soil of nitrosamines which

exerted strong phytotoxic, mutagenic, teratogenic and carcinogenic effects on micro- and macroorganisms (plants, animals and humans). They are strong inhibitors of DNA and RNA synthesis and block the transmission of genetic information connected with amino acid synthesis. — Byrnes et alt.

Under this scenario, it is easy to see how monocropping systems will lead within a short time a strong downfall of the agrobiodiversity of the field and to a destruction of the soil ecology. To cope with this, more agrochemicals inputs (pesticides to control insects no more limited by natural antagonists and fertilizers to make up for the loss in soil fertility) will be needed, creating a vicious cycle which will end when the soil won’t be able to bear the production anymore.

…and why intercropping rocks!

Now, we have seen what monocropping is and what are its effects. What can we do about it? The main alternative to monocropping are crop rotations. But here I would like to talk about a not so common practice in industrialized countries, but highly used in developing countries which can be an alternative to monocropping (and also used jointly with crop rotations): intercropping.

Intercropping consists in having multiple crop types grown simultaneously on the same field. There are three main types of intercropping:

• Row intercropping: several crops are grown on the field arranged in different rows based on crop type.
• Strip intercropping: an advanced version of row intercropping used in industrial agriculture, where a higher portion of the land (still subdivided in rows) is devoted to only one type of crop, next to another large row of a different type of plant.
• Mixed intercropping: this is a “vegetable garden version” of intercropping, where different crops are grown together in a mix on the field, without respecting any particular geometry.

What are the advantages of intercropping in comparison with monocropping? Many!

1. Resource use efficiency. Over-yielding in intercropping systems have been attributed to a higher resource use efficiency, mostly related to a better exploitation of the water and nutrients allocated in the soil. Deep rooting crops can be associated with shallow rooting ones, leading to a complete absorption of the inputs across the whole soil profile.
2. Different microclimate. Taller plants can provide shelter from wind or rain and shade to shorter plants, protecting them from solar radiation.
3. Light interception. Intercrops composed on non-synchronous patterns of canopy development can exploit incoming sunlight in a much more efficient way than monocrops.
4. Humidity. Relative humidity can be maintained at higher levels depending on the type of intercrop, reducing crops’ disseccation problems.
5. Pest control. Pest management is also associated with higher yields in intercropping systems. Different plants can both offer shelter to pest antagonists. At the same time certain crops’ allelochemicals can be used as a beneficial weeding measure, if the plants are correctly intercropped taking care of their specific times of development.

Of course intercropping must be carried out carefully, as we have to keep in mind potential competition problems for water, light and nutrients (meaning that we cannot randomly put any crop together and expect to have a positive effect).

Think about it as a relationship or, better, as a symbiosis: each plant needs to be associated with its best partner in order to benefit it and benefit from it at the same time!

Intercropping Should Replace Monocropping Once And For All was originally published in The Environmental Reporter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.