Soil Cyclers

Above: Soil cyclers Camila Guzman and Bruce Jugan

Every little bit helps solve the climate crisis.

by KIT STOLZ - Ojai Magazine, Summer 2021

Global warming — or “the climate emergency” as Scientific American urges it be called — has hit Ojai hard. For the second time this century, Ventura County has fallen into “extreme drought,” according to the measurements of the U.S. Drought Monitor after the second driest winter in 127 years in California. Less than five inches of rain fell this year in downtown Ojai. Land managers warn that historically parched vegetation in the state threatens a year of wildfire as widespread and devastating as 2020. Meanwhile, temperatures in Ventura County on average have warmed more than five degrees since the 19th century, which is the fastest rise among all counties in the lower 48 states, according to a 2019 data analysis by the Washington Post. And that’s not even mentioning the cataclysmic 2017 Thomas Fire. But on a pleasantly cool Sunday morning in May, Camila Guzman rides into the Ojai Community Demonstration Garden near City Hall on an electric cargo bike, effortlessly pulling behind her three tubs of fresh kitchen scraps. As part of an e ort supported by the Center for Regenerative Agriculture, a small nonprofit led by environmental educator David White, Guzman organizes a handful of volunteers to collect fresh kitchen scraps from as many as 50 residents of the City of Ojai on Sunday mornings, which are brought back to the Community Demonstration Garden and composted. Guzman smiles as she explains the process to a film crew from the City of Ventura, another town where she works as a “soil cycler,” collecting scraps at farmers’ markets and offering composting services to small businesses. Her “career in food scraps,” as she jokingly calls it, began in professor Sean Anderson’s senior conservation biology class at California State University Channel Islands when she debuted her idea for a small business organized around the usefulness of organic waste to food growers. As part of her project, she dubbed herself “the queen of compost.” “I knew I had something when the class laughed at that, and even professor Anderson smiled,” she said, thinking back on the decisive turn in her life. As White oversees, Guzman demonstrates a simple eye test by which a soil sample can be checked for its level of organic matter, then empties her compost bins into the long dark pile at the demonstration garden, which will become fodder for decomposition, and in time excellent soil that’s rich in humus and biological activity. When the time is right, it will be added to a garden. The e ort is called the Ojai Cycling Compost Collective, a grassroots e ort launched in the spring of 2019 that’s supported by small grants, such as a recent $1,500 donation from the Ojai Rotary Club. Composting breaks down food scraps and other organic matter harmlessly with aerobic bacteria, but when crushed without air under thousands of tons of debris in landfills — such as at Toland Road near Santa Paula — organic waste consumed by anaerobic bacteria produces methane in large quantities. Some landfills in California — including Toland Road, not far from Santa Paula, which handles Ojai waste — have produced so much climate-heating methane that its plumes are visible from far above to NASA-designed methane-detecting instruments.

Satellite spectrometer image of Toland Road landfill taken on October 16, 2017, by the California Methane Source Finder. Methane plumes are shown in red.

Eugene Tseng, an engineer and professor with California State University Northridge, helped organize the “California Methane Source Finder” for NASA and California four years ago. For two years, the survey repeatedly fl ew over the state with a plane carrying an advanced spectrometer able to detect methane plumes from above. After surveying 272,000 facilities — including oil and gas installations, dairies, and landfi lls — the survey found that the Toland Road facility at that time released more methane than all but one landfi ll in Southern California, the massive Sunshine Canyon facility serving Los Angeles.

Tseng points out that nations such as Japan and many European countries have already excluded organic waste — food in particular — from landfi lls. In California in 2016, Senate Bill 1383 put in place a goal of reducing organic waste by 75% from all landfi lls in the state by 2025, specifi cally to reduce the generation of “short-lived climate pollutants” such as methane in landfi lls, which are estimated to be one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases in the state. That means 23 million tons of solid waste a year must be diverted from landfills to composting facilities across the state, according to Bill Camarillo, the CEO of Agromin, a composting company headquartered in Oxnard. About half of landfill waste is organic waste, according to a CalRecycle spokesperson, meaning that if buried, it will in time produce methane.

Staff at the City of Ojai said that it took nearly 30 years, substantial investments, and legislative penalties for container recycling to be instituted through California. Now with SB 1383, the state has given cities and counties less than 10 years total to keep millions of tons of organic waste out of landfills.

“By diverting organic waste from landfills, whether it’s green waste or food waste, the e ort is to get that green waste to composting facilities, and food waste to edible food recovery e orts,” Grant said, noting that the county will lead the edible food recovery e ort, although each city remains responsible for reducing its share of organic waste that ends up in landfills. Ventura County’s public health division said that a consultant’s plan for food

recovery will be presented to the board of supervisors this fall, and that e orts to revive a wood recycling center akin to the Ojai Valley Organics mulching operation on Baldwin Road that closed last year are in the works. Nan Drake, an executive with waste hauler EJ Harrison & Sons, said that beginning in July, Harrison will pick up all three curbside barrels in Ojai on a weekly basis. “This should give residents a lot more barrel space for both their recyclables and for their green waste,” she said. County “disposal rate” statistics collected by the state’s CalRecycle agency show that many cities in Ventura County, including Ojai, are generating more waste than in the past. In Ojai, the state estimates residents are generating 8.4 pounds of waste a day, the most in the county, up by one-third since 2012. Grant said that a substantial percentage of Ojai’s waste is generated by tourism. He compares Ojai to Malibu, another small town that generates a high level of solid waste.

Above: Camila Guzman and David White turn the compost pile at Ojai’s Demonstration Garden.

“Both Malibu and Ojai have small populations with a high level of tourism,” he said. “It’s a small base of people, but includes a lot of hotels and restaurants, so the numbers for that population look heavy.” For David Goldstein, an administrator and environmental writer with the county’s Recycling Market Development Zone, which uses incentives and loans to develop business opportunities in recycling, the bicycling composting program is a worthy educational program for local residents, but much too small to solve Ojai’s massive solid waste problem, which added up to a total of 11,861 tons in 2019, according to CalRecycle. For David White, the point is that the composting of organic waste e ort led by Camila Guzman and himself is a “nature-based climate solution,” in which plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and release it safely into the soil, feeding soil biology, and cycling nutrients for plant health in a natural way, without requiring toxic chemicals or releasing greenhouse gasses.

“This composting program is an example of community action, without the use of large, industrialized compost programs,” White said in a conversational debate with Goldstein. “We are at the tip of the spear, and that’s the most important part.” “You are at the tip of the spear, and that is important,” Goldstein said, in partial agreement. “But the rest of the spear — that’s also very important and a much bigger part.” The city of Ojai supports the Center for Regenerative Agriculture’s bicycle composting program, which operates under a memorandum of understanding, and agrees with Goldstein that much more needs to be done to reduce the amount of organic waste going to landfills. “The compost collecting is a great program, highly visible, and it’s something that people can see and appreciate and it helps people understand how composting works,” he said. “All that is great, but as far as the impact on the total amount of solid waste, it’s not huge. Its impact is in terms of visibility and education and outreach.”

Inset: Camila Guzman tests compost samples for organic content.

Summer Ojai Magazine writer, Kit Stolz @kitstolz