Turning degraded land back into fertile land is actually very feasible and not as hopeless as it may seem. A lot of the damage people have done to landscapes in recent centuries is still reversible. There are a lot of examples all over the world of people turning dried out and heavily eroded land back into fertile land with great bio diversity.
Sometimes at small scale, and sometimes at very large scale. Often even just leaving it alone, and putting a stop to the practices that destroyed the land, (e.g. keeping the grazers out) sometimes is all that is needed. For example, a simple fence can allow vegetation to re-establish itself without getting destroyed by hungry deer, sheep, or whatever.
Once you have plants with deep roots, the land gets better at retaining water and soil stops eroding away. Once the land can retain water, a lot of life can make use of that. Nature tends to be resilient and adaptable. There are no one size fits all solutions for every landscape. But there are a lot of things that have been tried that have yielded good results.
In any case, stuff like this is not as surprising as it seems. Organic matter rots. That usually involves a lot of bacteria and insects. The result is basically compost. A giant heap of compost and a lot of wild seeds from neighboring grounds with a bit of water is one hell of a good way to kickstart nature. Probably the best decision was to leave it alone.
In that case, it also took a boatload of investor money, keeping on the previous farm staff, and endless volunteer labour by way of WWOOF [1]. Not that any of that's a bad thing, but the whole time I was watching it I was thinking did they really just start off by saying:
> We sensed it was coming. The landlord called. Todd had to go. Moving to another apartment wouldn’t stop Todd’s barking. And then it hit us. Molly’s dream could be the answer to everything. We had a great idea with no way to pay for it. [...] it eventually connected us to some investors who actually saw this old way of farming as the future.
How did two city-slicker non-farmers manage to get investment for a large, fully-staffed farm? I imagine the fact that they'd been spending the last 20 years making documentaries had something to do with it, and surely they weren't going to end up with a film saying "we thought we could make our natural organic farm work, boy were we wrong!"
Often you don't even need seeds from neighboring land. The soil that remains often still has seeds sitting dormant waiting for conditions to return to healthy.
Reading this feels like a great metaphor to life that I am unable to explain but I will still try, in the sense that, within a degraded land with just the right conditions, it is just waiting to grow :D
nahīñ hai nā-umīd 'iqbāl' apnī kisht-e-vīrāñ se
zarā nam ho to ye miTTī bahut zarḳhez hai saaqi
Do not despair over barren fields.
The soil is so fertile; a little rain is enough.
(The entire Urdu poem which probably is comparable to Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers" is pretty good).
This is good, I found another one to express what I was feeling.
We are here, We are waiting.
- Optimus prime.
My interpretation is that everyone no matter how bad things look from outside has hope/seeds of hope which are just waiting for the right conditions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJszUl1EI4A (I also feel like, the ending of this movie/transformers was one of the best movies and the ending still gives me goosebumps in hope for future)
Not even degraded land but just land where the natural soil is poor, for example when you're sitting on clay soil. On a smallish scale like your own property you can get in touch with arborists and get them to dump plant mulch in your driveway (often for free since they avoid the dumping fees), then spread it across the ground with some urea to help the bacteria break down the wood fibres. Within a year or two, you don't need to wait 16 years, you've got incredibly rich soil on the property, with the clay underneath acting as a long-term storage sponge for moisture.
> Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park".
No good deed goes unpunished--wild that the competitor company successfully sued them.
There's actually no guarantee that if the "experiment" were allowed to continue that the results would have been as great. If the biomass accumulated faster than it could be broken down, we might not have seen the same result.
The article says they returned after that long having forgotten about the experiment. I think they would have recognized there were positive results long before that if someone happened to be checking in at say Year 2, 5 or 10. It not like the land was still barren piles of orange peel at Year 14 and then suddenly Yahtzee!
That's not the point, the point is nobody could know for certain at the time of decision making, so it is revisionism to frame dumping as a legitimate experiment. The outcomes do not justify the action made at the time given a reasonable analysis of ecological risks. The time order in which a rational decision is justifiable matters, unlike whatever the prior commenter was trying to suggest.
Did they forget? Or did they know this would happen before dumping the first peel and it simply wasn't worth the money it would take to prove it in the public record?
Because what I bet happened is that off the public record who knew their stuff said "this will happen" and then the government rep said "you need to pay some sort of 3rd party with a government license to weigh in on such matters an obscene amount of money to produce a report that says that on the public record" and it was a nonstarter so the project just died and now 16yr later here we are.
From TFA it sounds like they had no idea, given how often they repeat how surprised they were at the outcome. So it sounds like an uncontrolled experiment, let's dump thousands of tons of food waste here and hope for the best.
Also, it's a sample size of one. There could be 20 other non-published stories where something similar was tried and it turned the place into a toxic wasteland. It's a great success story but I can see why people would be nervous with a food company dumping its waste next to a national park.
I suspect the people with a million orange peels to dump are also the people who are experts in exactly how the various parts of an orange degrade with time and that when the plan was concocted they did so knowing it would likely work but they didn't write it down and have since left. Basically the same as legacy code. You see this all the time in the physical world. "why did those morons choose X for Y". Well, 20yr ago the product served Z and at the time that industry cleaned their factories with some other chemical than what they use now and therefor X was the right choice.
People who know their industrial project will F-off and create a dump are the ones who go through the process, pay for the bullshit surveys and studies, get the permits and whatnot and document the whole thing fastidiously. Because those are the things you do to ensure that you are not the bag holder at the end of it all.
I came here to say this, because this whole anecdote mildly infuriates me.
I don't necessarily blame TicoFruit for their actions. They might have some legitimate concerns about fairness, since their competitor is now able to dispose of peels much more economically.
But for the courts to stupidly go along with the injunction is what disappoints me. A much better result for everyone in Costa Rica would be if both manufacturers were allowed to dump at no cost.
It's recently occurred to me how "valuable" today's trash is likely to be considered in the future. I'll focus on organics here but I think the plastics will be equally valuable, too.
I have no idea what % of American households compost or live in places which offer municipal compost pickup but I imagine it's in the single digits. As evidenced by this article, compost is/can be an incredibly powerful agent of change: food production, habitat restoration, etc. However, most of us are putting organics into refuse streams where they're likely to be burned or buried in a way that's actually harmful because they release methane when they decompose under those conditions. It can be a bit gross and tedious to compost at home but there is a certain satisfaction which comes along with it.
I worked for a time designing and building landfills. Nothing really rots in them typically as it’s really dry and don’t have good access to oxygen.
Modern landfills are like giant plastic bags. This is to protect ground water.
Decomposition as noted releases methane. Some landfills gather it in pipes and “flare” it )burn. They have to vent the gas as a full landfill is covered by a plastic cap to prevent water infiltration.
We dug up trash from the 70s to extend the landfill out. It was in remarkably good shape.
The thought occurred to me some 25+ years ago that today's landfills will be tomorrow's mines. I hope it isn't true but taking the very long view I'm afraid it will be.
St. Lucie County wanted to use a plasma torch that would have converted plastic and other carboniferous waste to energy. Like many other plans to do the same, it fell through
These machines are currently too expensive for widespread adoption, but I love the electric composter I bought that I keep in my garage.
There's no grossness or work involved. You just dump stuff in it and it cooks it down to something dirt-like(nearly but not quite compost ready) in less than a day.
I have municipal compost, but it's only picked up every 2 weeks, so that meant I needed to keep food scraps around for two weeks before pick up, so they either would get super gross and smelly, or I had to use my chest freezer to store them and make that gross and smelly and dedicated to just compost.
For those who can't or find dealing with compost a challenge, there are also other options to recycle biowaste. It's a bit of pricey subscription, but we have a Mill which processes most food waste into chicken feed (you do have to mail the processed food to them for further processing).
They could not find the site and searched for it for years. A stark reminder that civilian use of GPS is relatively recent thing. The site was created in 1990s and GPS was opened for civilian use only in 1995 and gained equal accuracy by legislation in 2000.
> As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.
We now understand that fungus plays a vital role in the soil ecosystem. And given how easily fruit and vegetables rot and get moldy, the orange peel mass sounds like the perfect layer for the fungus to thrive in. The dead earth received a live giving blanket yielding healthy soil vegetation can thrive in.
One risk here is that a giant pile of biomass could allow nefarious critters to grow disproportionately. For example, in Alaska, they had giant brush piles that ended up fueling beetle infestations across the state.
The whole compost thing can be a lot of hassle for people. For a simpler option, if you are lucky enough to have a decent garden area, find somewhere away from your house and just throw biomass there regularly. Coffee grinds, spent tea, leftover veg, etc. and watch what happens! Sometimes simple is best.
Does orange peel not produce any CO2 / methane when left like this? I'm assuming there is some negative carbon footprint before this becomes a positive?
The ecological win definitely looks nice on paper, but whenever people talk about compost the carbon footprint / gas emissions is always at the front of people's minds, and I don't really see that discussed in the article.
The article does say
> Especially since, in addition to the double-win of dealing with waste and revitalising barren landscapes, richer woodlands also sequester greater amounts of carbon from the atmosphere – meaning little plots of regenerated land like this could ultimately help save the planet.
How long will it take for it to cross the CO2-neutral mark? Maybe a silly question, definitely not my area of expertese.
Avid backyard gardener here. When we moved to our new house in Fort Wayne our yard was a real problem child. It was a new build in an old neighborhood. All the other houses where about 40ish years old. Ours had also had a 40 year old house, but at some point that house was abandoned, eventually condemned and then knocked down. Eventually a builder snapped up the lot and built our current house. But that means the ground had been stripped of topsoil and compacted all to hell not once, but 3 times in the past 40 years. What was left was dead heavily compacted clay subsoil. It had drainage issues in wet weather, it developed crazy deep & wide cracks in dry weather, and just generally didn't want to grow anything.
We solved it by dumping around 400 cubic yards of arborist woodchips spread 12-18 inches thick over most of the yard, then top dressed that with composted manure and worm castings. Finally, we planted a bunch of wine cap mushroom spawn (to break down the wood) and clover (to fix nitrogen and feed the fungi) over the whole thing. 3 years later we have rich loamy soil that drains well, is full of earth worms and grows anything we plant it it.
TL;DR: Add tons of carbon and nitrogen into degraded soil and the local fungi, bacteria and worms will turn that into good soil if given sufficient time.
> As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.
Another data point to the thesis that it's not the earth that needs saving, it's human systems. If disruption becomes the order of the day, who's impacted the worst?
I'm surprised they would just throw orange peels away. There are beneficial compounds in orange peels that can be extracted: limonene, hesperidin, naringin, pectin, insoluble and soluble fiber. Or, could be added to animal feed.
Presumably the reason this article delays showing you the before/after photos is to get you to scroll and see more ads, since you'll probably just close the tab after. Which sucks, but, fine.
What really gets me is that: I scroll passed all the ads without even registering them (I haven't figured out how to block ads on my phone). Surely almost everybody else also does. Surely anyone who clicks or seems to react to them in the data is a mistake. So why is there still money, however little, in showing them? Why do they even bother? Who is defrauding who here?
Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park".
This is why we can't have nice things. Juice company makes compost? Sued! Ford wants to pay his workers a living wage? Sued! Nail lawyers to trees.
> Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park".
... why does TicoFruit even care? Did they just see their competitor do something that might be good for people and sue them out of spite?
Monty Don has said before that really the best and only thing you need for a great garden soil is regular addition of lots of compost. This is it on a very large scale. :)
123 comments
Sometimes at small scale, and sometimes at very large scale. Often even just leaving it alone, and putting a stop to the practices that destroyed the land, (e.g. keeping the grazers out) sometimes is all that is needed. For example, a simple fence can allow vegetation to re-establish itself without getting destroyed by hungry deer, sheep, or whatever.
Once you have plants with deep roots, the land gets better at retaining water and soil stops eroding away. Once the land can retain water, a lot of life can make use of that. Nature tends to be resilient and adaptable. There are no one size fits all solutions for every landscape. But there are a lot of things that have been tried that have yielded good results.
In any case, stuff like this is not as surprising as it seems. Organic matter rots. That usually involves a lot of bacteria and insects. The result is basically compost. A giant heap of compost and a lot of wild seeds from neighboring grounds with a bit of water is one hell of a good way to kickstart nature. Probably the best decision was to leave it alone.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8969332/
> We sensed it was coming. The landlord called. Todd had to go. Moving to another apartment wouldn’t stop Todd’s barking. And then it hit us. Molly’s dream could be the answer to everything. We had a great idea with no way to pay for it. [...] it eventually connected us to some investors who actually saw this old way of farming as the future.
How did two city-slicker non-farmers manage to get investment for a large, fully-staffed farm? I imagine the fact that they'd been spending the last 20 years making documentaries had something to do with it, and surely they weren't going to end up with a film saying "we thought we could make our natural organic farm work, boy were we wrong!"
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20140315055010/http://www.aprico...
>
Reading this feels like a great metaphorOne of the more famous Urdu poem ends:
(The entire Urdu poem which probably is comparable to Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers" is pretty good).https://www.rekhta.org/couplets/nahiin-hai-naa-umiid-iqbaal-...
We are here, We are waiting.
- Optimus prime.
My interpretation is that everyone no matter how bad things look from outside has hope/seeds of hope which are just waiting for the right conditions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJszUl1EI4A (I also feel like, the ending of this movie/transformers was one of the best movies and the ending still gives me goosebumps in hope for future)
> Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park".
No good deed goes unpunished--wild that the competitor company successfully sued them.
Because what I bet happened is that off the public record who knew their stuff said "this will happen" and then the government rep said "you need to pay some sort of 3rd party with a government license to weigh in on such matters an obscene amount of money to produce a report that says that on the public record" and it was a nonstarter so the project just died and now 16yr later here we are.
Also, it's a sample size of one. There could be 20 other non-published stories where something similar was tried and it turned the place into a toxic wasteland. It's a great success story but I can see why people would be nervous with a food company dumping its waste next to a national park.
People who know their industrial project will F-off and create a dump are the ones who go through the process, pay for the bullshit surveys and studies, get the permits and whatnot and document the whole thing fastidiously. Because those are the things you do to ensure that you are not the bag holder at the end of it all.
I don't necessarily blame TicoFruit for their actions. They might have some legitimate concerns about fairness, since their competitor is now able to dispose of peels much more economically.
But for the courts to stupidly go along with the injunction is what disappoints me. A much better result for everyone in Costa Rica would be if both manufacturers were allowed to dump at no cost.
I have no idea what % of American households compost or live in places which offer municipal compost pickup but I imagine it's in the single digits. As evidenced by this article, compost is/can be an incredibly powerful agent of change: food production, habitat restoration, etc. However, most of us are putting organics into refuse streams where they're likely to be burned or buried in a way that's actually harmful because they release methane when they decompose under those conditions. It can be a bit gross and tedious to compost at home but there is a certain satisfaction which comes along with it.
Decomposition as noted releases methane. Some landfills gather it in pipes and “flare” it )burn. They have to vent the gas as a full landfill is covered by a plastic cap to prevent water infiltration.
We dug up trash from the 70s to extend the landfill out. It was in remarkably good shape.
https://planetliner.com/landfill-cap/
St. Lucie County wanted to use a plasma torch that would have converted plastic and other carboniferous waste to energy. Like many other plans to do the same, it fell through
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
There's no grossness or work involved. You just dump stuff in it and it cooks it down to something dirt-like(nearly but not quite compost ready) in less than a day.
I have municipal compost, but it's only picked up every 2 weeks, so that meant I needed to keep food scraps around for two weeks before pick up, so they either would get super gross and smelly, or I had to use my chest freezer to store them and make that gross and smelly and dedicated to just compost.
https://calrecycle.ca.gov/Organics/SLCP/collection/
> As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.
We now understand that fungus plays a vital role in the soil ecosystem. And given how easily fruit and vegetables rot and get moldy, the orange peel mass sounds like the perfect layer for the fungus to thrive in. The dead earth received a live giving blanket yielding healthy soil vegetation can thrive in.
The ecological win definitely looks nice on paper, but whenever people talk about compost the carbon footprint / gas emissions is always at the front of people's minds, and I don't really see that discussed in the article.
The article does say
> Especially since, in addition to the double-win of dealing with waste and revitalising barren landscapes, richer woodlands also sequester greater amounts of carbon from the atmosphere – meaning little plots of regenerated land like this could ultimately help save the planet.
How long will it take for it to cross the CO2-neutral mark? Maybe a silly question, definitely not my area of expertese.
We solved it by dumping around 400 cubic yards of arborist woodchips spread 12-18 inches thick over most of the yard, then top dressed that with composted manure and worm castings. Finally, we planted a bunch of wine cap mushroom spawn (to break down the wood) and clover (to fix nitrogen and feed the fungi) over the whole thing. 3 years later we have rich loamy soil that drains well, is full of earth worms and grows anything we plant it it.
TL;DR: Add tons of carbon and nitrogen into degraded soil and the local fungi, bacteria and worms will turn that into good soil if given sufficient time.
It would be extremely interesting to hear about the legal merits of the rival company's lawsuit, and the politics of the Supreme Court.
Where do I sign up?
> As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.
Another data point to the thesis that it's not the earth that needs saving, it's human systems. If disruption becomes the order of the day, who's impacted the worst?
What really gets me is that: I scroll passed all the ads without even registering them (I haven't figured out how to block ads on my phone). Surely almost everybody else also does. Surely anyone who clicks or seems to react to them in the data is a mistake. So why is there still money, however little, in showing them? Why do they even bother? Who is defrauding who here?
>
Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park".This is why we can't have nice things. Juice company makes compost? Sued! Ford wants to pay his workers a living wage? Sued! Nail lawyers to trees.
> Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park".
... why does TicoFruit even care? Did they just see their competitor do something that might be good for people and sue them out of spite?