Table to Farm Compost Turns Food Scraps into Compost with Its BACKHUS A38 Turner

You’ve probably dined at a ‘farm to table’ restaurant that offers fresh, locally produced ingredients, supports local economies, and emphasizes transparency in its menu, letting consumers know exactly where their food comes from.

In Durango, CO, Table to Farm Compost has the perfect name for its locally based, circular business model. It’s a creative play on the phrase we’re all familiar with but it also describes exactly what it does; turn food scraps into a living soil that sequesters carbon from the atmosphere and keeps the soil food web alive and healthy. 

“Durango is rural, small community,” says Managing Member Monique DiGiorgio, “But since the average person throws away 20 lbs. of food each month, about 40% of what goes to our landfills is food and other organic matter. This is such a waste – for our community, our soil, our farmers, and our climate.”

So, Monique and her business partner Taylor Hanson created Table to Farm Compost, LLC to help divert food waste from the landfill and recycle it into healthy soil amendments.

The business offers services to residents, who can choose between drop-off services, where they place their food scraps in one of several compost receptacles in the area, or pickup services, where Table to Farm picks up their filled compost bucket. Residents that subscribe to the weekly pickup service receive two ‘dividends’ of compost a year to use in their gardens, discounts on compost orders, and compost deliveries free-of-charge. The business also provides services to commercial facilities, including restaurants, schools, residential complexes, hotels, and light industrial facilities.

“In terms of numbers, 90-95% of our users are residential subscriber members,” says Monique, “But volume wise, it’s probably 50-50 between residential and commercial. Local brewery Ska Brewing Company provides us their spent beer grains, which is a large amount of material.”

Food waste composting also needs “browns” (carbon-rich materials) for a balanced compost pile to break down the food scraps.

“In addition to food scraps, we use leaves, wood chips, saw dust, and pine needles in our composting,” according to Monique. “We’re not open to the public so we rely on local green waste aggregators like landscapers, homeowners’ associations, and the City of Durango to provide those carbon sources.”

Once the right compost recipe has been created, windows are laid out at the farm. “We were using a front loader to turn the windrows, and that would take about a week,” Monique says. So, Table to Farm set out to find a compost turner to effectively turn their windrows while saving staff time.

“Honestly,” she recounts, “I can’t remember what other machines we looked at. Our main objective was time savings, and the reason we went with the BACKHUS A38 was its size and cost, and the time it could save us. Based on those two things, it produced the best, highest quality results. Now we can turn our windrows in about 20 minutes. The time savings has been a game changer for us and frees up a huge amount of time for our farm manager.”

From a week’s worth of work to 20 minutes; who wouldn’t appreciate those time savings?

“There really wasn’t much of a learning curve, that went quickly,” Monique says. “Our space management had to be adjusted because with a front loader, we could build windrows around 7 feet high, but the A38 maxes out at 6 feet high so we had to readjust our piles. But what we lost in height we gained in being able to put our rows closer together, so we’re happy with that.”

Today, their BACKHUS A38 is helping Table to Farm Compost create around 3000 cubic yards of compost annually. “A relatively small fraction of our compost is returned to members as dividends, and the largest percentage is sold to local farmers, landscapers, and wholesalers, who sell our product in Colorado and New Mexico.”

Most importantly, their BACKHUS compost turner is a key component in helping them achieve their mission: to recycle food waste into compost and save the earth.

To learn more about Table to Farm Compost, visit https://tabletofarmcompost.com/

BACKHUS self-propelled compost windrow turners homogenize and aerate windrows of any material type to build a pile structure that promotes hydration. This turning action creates the ideal environment for microbial growth through moisture distribution, which in turn reduces composting time and operating costs.

Ecoverse^® provides North America the best engineered and well-made environmental processing equipment that adds value to waste products by converting them into usable end products. Launched in 2001 with the introduction of Doppstadt^® shredders, grinders, and trommel screens, we now offer BACKHUS^® compost turners, Backers star screens, Tiger depackaging systems, EcoSift density separators, EcoStack conveyors, Ecoscreen trommels and scalping screens, Menart tow-behind compost turners, and Roco rock crushers and scalping screens. We also offer know-how, experience, and expertise to help guide you towards the right mobile and stationary machines for your needs, your operations, and your budget to help you do more, better.

Contact us to learn how we can take your compost production and processing to the next level of production and profitability.