This makes my month: the Austin Farmer’s Market is now accepting compost from individuals partly because of this humble blog.
Farmers selling at Texas’ largest growers-only market have long donated unsold edibles to soup kitchens and 
composted the remains. Since last Saturday, though, shoppers can bring their household food waste to the market.
This makes sense for the same reason as farmer’s markets themselves–providing ecologically sound food solutions for urban dwellers lacking land to grow and/or compost their food.
So how did this come about? Last week I spoke with the Addie Broyles, the food writer at the Austin American-Statesman writing a piece on food waste. After reading my post about how folks can export their household scraps to the Union Square Green Market, which has collected compost since 1990(!), Broyles passed that tidbit along to Susan Leibrock at the Sustainable Food Center, which runs the Austin Farmer’s Market.
Fast forward two weeks and the market had set up a collection bin. Leibrock was unsure if customers would take them up on the offer, which was passed along through the farmer’s market newsletter. Sure enough, two shoppers came up to Leibrock early in the morning wondering where they could dump their plastic containers of food waste.
By the end of Saturday, Austin Farmer’s Market shoppers had filled a 55-gallon trash can with compost. That’s 55 gallons of food that otherwise would have gone to the landfill.
6 Comments