Facts About Compost

What Is Compost?

Gardeners and farmers add compost to soil to improve its physical properties. They may even use compost instead of soil to grow plants. Mature compost is a stable material with a content called humus that is dark brown or black and has a soil-like, earthy smell.

Compost is created by:

• Combining organic wastes, such as wasted food, yard trimmings, and manures, in the right ratios into piles, rows, or vessels.
• Adding bulking agents such as wood chips, as necessary to accelerate the breakdown of organic materials; and
• Allowing the finished material to fully stabilize and mature through a curing process.

Mature compost is created using high temperatures to destroy pathogens and weed seeds that natural decomposition does not destroy.

Benefits of Composting

There are a number of benefits to compost that not everyone is aware of. Some examples are listed below:

• Organic waste in landfills generates, methane, a potent greenhouse gas. By composting wasted food and other organics, methane emissions are significantly reduced.
• Compost reduces and in some cases eliminates the need for chemical fertilizers.
• Compost promotes higher yields of agricultural crops.
• Compost can help aid reforestation, wetlands restoration, and habitat revitalization efforts by improving contaminated, compacted, and marginal soils.
• Compost can be used to remediate soils contaminated by hazardous waste in a cost effective manner.
• Compost can provide cost savings over conventional soil, water and air pollution remediation technologies, where applicable.
• Compost enhances water retention in soils.
• Compost provides carbon sequestration.