As many benefits as compost has, it’s near the bottom of the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Food Recovery Hierarchy” – the agency’s guideline for prioritizing food waste prevention efforts. In the middle of the hierarchy, after “preventing waste” and “feeding people,” is feeding animals. Several partnerships in Austin are demonstrating that when food can’t be consumed by people, but before it’s far-gone enough to be composted, it can be fed to animals.
The Capital Area Food Bank of Texas gives donated meat that’s no longer fit for human consumption to two local zoos. The meat – which might be freezer-burned or have a torn package – is frozen and then picked up by the Austin Zoo and the Capital of Texas Zoo. The arrangement saves the food bank money on disposal costs and the zoos money they would otherwise spend on food.
Some local farms collect products that can’t be sold for human use and feed them to their animals. Eden’s Cove Farm raises hogs and picks up flawed and unsalable produce from Johnson’s Backyard Garden. Munkebo Farm raises pigs, cattle, and poultry, and collects blemished produce and nearly expired dairy products (for the pigs) from Greenling organic delivery service.
Both farms also visit local microbreweries to collect spent grain – the barley, wheat, or rye that has been put through a mashing process to remove the starch. The resulting high-protein mixture can be fed to hogs or cattle. They also pick up eggs from Vital Farms that are close to their expiration date or have cracks or imperfections – once pasteurized, these can be fed to swine as a protein supplement.
The time (three hours a day) and gas (for 50 to 80 miles of driving a day) it takes to collect these things is substantial, Eden’s Cove co-owner JoAnn Smotherman says. But she says the food is of higher quality than other options, and it’s being returned to “the system.”
“What my pigs don’t eat gets put into the ground and tilled in, so the organic matter is put back into the earth,” she says. “It completes a cycle, whereas if we take organic matter and put it in the landfill it can’t decompose, and all that energy is wasted.”
Chickens, too, eat vegetable scraps, whether in a backyard or on a much larger farm. Organics “By Gosh” has experimented with feeding produce culls to chickens, and plans to expand that project in partnership with local farmers. In the pilot program, owner Phil Gosh said 300 chickens ate about 4,500 pounds of material a week.
This article appears in April 24 • 2015.