Where Does it All Go?: Food Waste at Fat Bear Farm

"Trash" is a very complicated concept in this house.  We usually produce very little actual trash.  Most of our waste is food waste, and we feed a lot of mouths with it, both directly and indirectly.

Chicken treats, top to bottom: tomato, cucumber, lettuce, beets, carrots, blueberries.

There are several tiers of food waste here.  Let me break it down for you.  In descending order of quality:

Dog supplements, a.k.a. treats

For example: baked sweet potato skins, pizza crusts ("pizza bones"), "juice" from the tuna can.  We only toss Miles and Thurgood the food scraps that are good enough for us to eat ourselves.  The only animal we eat is fish, so unfortunately for Miles and Thurgood, we don't have a bunch of meat passing through the kitchen.

The ever-so-rotten Miles Giles.

Chicken Snacks

Our little princesses are quite particular about what will and will not do for their treats.  They are pleased when I give them the blueberry seconds, stale bread and cereal, wineberries, tomato scraps, and grapes.  Watermelon is their favorite non-bread item.  One watermelon is always too much for the two of us humans and the dogs to finish, so the girls help out a lot.  They like most fruits and veggies, but if it doesn't look good enough for me to eat myself, then they don't want to have anything to do with it.

Chicken treats, top to bottom: peas, lasagna noodles, strawberries.

Rahmona, Roberta, and Preciouses, enjoying happy hour.

Worms

Things we feed the worms: coffee grounds, brewer's spent grain, vegetable peels.  We keep their diet simple and free of processed foods and fruit.  The fruit attracts flies, and we don't add anything but whole foods because it makes the bin funky.

One of our bins last spring.

Compost

All the onion, raw potato, and garlic peels go here.  Rotten food, egg shells, and anything the dogs, chickens or worms don't eat, goes into the compost bucket.  This is usually the very end of the road for all the food refuse.  Food rarely makes it into the garbage can, which is very important out here.  

Garbage Bin

We live in an area with no trash service, so we have to load our garbage into the van once a week.  The less food we have in those trash bags, the better.  Another reason to keep food out of the trash is that we have a lot of wildlife around the farm that would be attracted to it.  Bears, wild pigs, feral dogs and cats, are among that group.

Unfortunately, our dump doesn't recycle glass.  So, if I have a funky fuzzy jar of something, I toss it.  Almost everything else go to one of the above groups.

This system took us about a year to fine-tune.  It all happened very organically.  In feeding our chickens the veggie scraps, we're giving them more nutrients to provide us with eggs.  In feeding our worms and compost piles, we're helping them to make fertilizer for future crops.  In giving our boys healthy treats, we're securing extra kisses from them.  It's a win-win.