People, Food and Land Foundation works at the intersection of community, ecology, and policy to restore and regenerate California’s soil systems and rural communities and economies.

Intro

Rooted in decades of grassroots innovation, we acknowledge the fundamental connection at the nexus of people, soil, and food. Our work centers care for people and care for nature by supporting compost and healthy soils, empowering land stewards, bridging gaps in capacity, and advancing opportunities for policy and science that serve both ecological health and community needs. Through place-based bioresource and funding solutions, we help return nutrients, resources, and opportunity to the communities that generate them.

Economic Development, From Waste to Resource

The State of California is unique in its vast access to high-quality organic materials. At the same time, all of the compost made in California each year sells out. If policies and planning were aligned to recycle bioresources with a focus on soil amendment creation, we could increase the organic matter in soil, increase water holding capacity, and dramatically decrease the use of synthetic fertilizers in agriculture.

To estimate the total potential amount of compost that could be produced in the State of California PFL has conducted a high level analysis of available compost feedstock, or organic materials.

Compostable Organic Materials Inventory

82.3 Million Tons of Available Feedstock Material
Municipal Organic Materials: 10.4 million tons per year
(mixed materials: includes non-recoverable food waste, non-recyclable paper, and yard waste materials)
Confined Cattle Manure: 52.5 million tons per year
(manure from dairy and non-dairy cattle CAFOs)
Agricultural Biomass: 5 million tons per year
(woody biomass from orchard & vine and field & seed operations)
Forestry Biomass: 14.3 million tons per year
(technically available woody biomass from excess logging and sawmill residues and shrub and forestry thinnings)

Current Compost Development Capacity: The amount of available compost feedstock vastly outweighs the amount of materials being made into compost. Of the 82.3 million tons of organic materials throughout the state, only 9.65 million tons of feedstock are being processed into compost every year. To create more compost, we must increase compost capacity by expanding existing composting sites or creating new ones. 9.8 million tons of feedstock developed into compost annually in California from the following processing sites:

Commercial Composting: 70 sites processing approx 5.3 million tons of feedstock.
Agricultural and Green Composting: 142 composting sites collectively process around 1.4 million tons per year of mostly agricultural and green material feedstock.
Dairy Composting: 80 dairies processing approx. 3 million Tons of Manure into Compost
Community Composting: 223 community composting sites processing approx 2,897 tons of feedstock.

Building New Regional Compost Supply through Policy & Planning

PFL supports the creation of compost at all levels. We focus on strategies that support distributed smaller scale production of this material in communities, on remediation sites, and on farms.

Decentralized, small- and medium-sized composting sites are economical to build and maintain, provide higher quality, more affordable products, and reduce trucking costs and emissions associated with moving feedstocks to composting sites and moving compost to markets.

Policy

Three main obstacles were discovered during the analysis of the current regulatory landscape;

Permitting structures between regulatory agencies differ in rules and requirements
Regulatory rules are often based on feedstock material type, creating an inflexibility when it comes to combining diverse feedstock material, particularly if that material is brought in from off-site,
Emphasis on point-source impacts of composting operations lead to a lack of consideration of the systemic benefits of compost creation and application.

Planning

Address low hanging fruit first with simple yet effective planning strategies.
Center soil health building when planning for new composting projects.
Consider multiple uses for compost, beyond agricultural uses.
Support diversified and distributed composting sites, prioritizing projects that directly benefit community members.
Create economic incentives that catalyze local compost markets.

For more information about holistic compost planning or to view PFL’s research, please follow the download links below:

A Review in California Compost Planning & Corresponding data sheet
Compost Planning Paper
Compost Planning Checklist
To estimate the total potential amount of compost that could be produced in the State of California PFL has conducted a high level analysis of available compost feedstock, or organic materials.
Compost Feedstock Inventory & Capacity Template (USDN)

The Marigold Fund for Unincorporated California

The Marigold Fund for Unincorporated California was formed over 10 years of strategic organizing by agroecology practitioners and farmworker community service providers who seek to repair the harms of agriculture in the Central Valley.

This participatory grantmaking fund prioritizes agroecological land stewardship by farmworkers, small farmers, and Tribes who live on and work the land, and whose legacies have built California agriculture, and who are best positioned to implement nature-based solutions to meet California’s climate goals.

The Marigold Fund supports unrepresented agricultural workers and land stewards living on the margins. These deeply rural, unincorporated, and often impoverished communities have been structurally excluded from access to capital and political representation that would otherwise support their participation in core natural resources governance. These efforts for political and environmental regeneration are focused in the Central Valley of California due to the region’s combined environmental and social challenges – and simultaneous potential for growing new green economies

In the race towards carbon neutrality and protection of remaining precious groundwater resources, California must write human communities into its climate future. The Marigold Fund poses an alternatives to financing legacy factory farms and fuel and energy production and instead supports community-led management strategies that keep natural and financial resources in place. Such strategies include community farming and market gardening, community composting and local biomass repurposing, nature-based climate solutions for groundwater longevity, and the building of local cooperatives that strengthen rural economies.

We believe that, like any healthy biological network, the fund will be most successful in re-growing human and soil communities, economies and ecosystems if we start small and decentralized. Importantly, the projects we support are proposed and implemented by residents of California’s agricultural communities.

People, Food and Land Foundation’s projects are rooted in environmental equity as a way to reach bold climate solutions.