@fruitnut brought up a really interesting point earlier which is what do we do with food waste we sometimes get? In the past when my health was better I had all the answers I kept pheasants. chickens, pigs, or beef to dispose of the waste. Composted anything they wouldn’t eat. Do you feel like if one apple hits the ground it’s waste or do you consider it compost for next year or food for wildlife. Who is feeding food scraps to fish? This is why tilapia are such a huge hit now but unfortunately they cannot live in the winter outdoors here. Tilapia eat most fruits and vegetables.
The only waste we have is from things we grow, and things that we don’t like. Every now and then we try something new and don’t like it. Like once I bought figs in syrup, it was so obvious that they were picked raw. I felt sick to my stomach and they went to waste, clearly it’s one of those things that either you like it or you don’t.
As long as nutrients go back in to the soil there is no total waste, yet I do also think that we can do our part feeding less fortunate people as well.
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Food waste literally here is real thing when a combine leaves a field there is so much corn left behind you could feed an army for a year. Sure it’s getting more efficient all the time but grow a 15’ x 15’ area of wheat sometime or mustard and you will know what I mean. It ripens at slightly different times. So some wheat is falling by the time other wheat is ripe. Wasting a loaf of bread would not be good but we wasted much more before you ever received the bread when we were growing the wheat.
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All our scraps and food “waste” goes to our chickens, except we don’t feed them chicken. They eat everything, in return the litter in the coop becomes fertilizer for our garden and orchard. Sure there isn’t 100% capture on nutrients, but it’s a lot better than going into a landfill. Plus we get healthy birds, which in turn lay nutrient dense eggs for us to eat, and the cycle starts over again.
I used to use a tumble style compost bin, but I gave that to my dad, he lives in town and can’t keep chickens. He throws most of his table scrapes into the compost bin and uses it to fertilize his garden.
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Chickens and composting are our methods, as well.
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I’m not sure if OP question has any other meaning.
To us, everything is very easy. We do not raise animals and we go almost complete organic. The “waste” from garden and orchard is all vegetation or wood. All of those go to wooded area. I do not even bother to build a compost pile for them. My compost pile is mostly kitchen waste and weeds and grass clippings.
Actually I started to scrub my forest floor to harvest the humus. I get more than 1 AC totally wooded area that is deer alley. Full of invasives. I know a lot people are against “disturbing” forest floor. But this is a good opportunity to remove invasives and harvest some rich humus at the same time. We own the land anyhow. We feed the forest with garden waste.
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We don’t have enough space to have waste. My dad had a 2 acre land in the mountains but he wrote us out of the will so no one got that. Right now living under mom and grandma’s roof and they live in the city and cities do not have much land. Going to try to move out next summer to a house by my work. My work is in a mountain town so I should have plenty of land there. Hopefully once that goes into play I get enough food to worry about food waste. Right now only waste we have is dead annuals.
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We don’t have a lot of food waste- trimmings, peelings, etc. and daily coffee grounds go in a composter. Eventually that gets mixed with even more landfill mulch or compost. Bottom of my raised beds.
Actual garden or orchard wastes- burnt if infected or suspected. Bottom of my raised beds, or taken to the landfill for composting.
We buy very little prepared foods, mostly ingredients and we have a freezer. So no weird waste, much more glass to recycle.
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i give my vegie/ fruit scraps or leftovers to the chickens. dogs get any left over meats. we have near 0 waste here. paper/ coffee grounds get tore up and placed around the plants that need some help. scratch back the mulch. scatter grounds, cover with paper/ cardboard then cover back with mulch.
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You all must think this thread was terribly wasteful A windfall of windfalls! as truly Kansas is the land of plenty. We get incredibly heavy yields. When I purchased this place from a friend many years ago I asked him why he was selling it. He looked right in my eyes and said I wouldn’t sell one foot of it if I was not sick with cancer it’s good land. It was true but it’s 10x better now than it was. Always think of you all like friends and neighbors who have the same problems and solutions but there is a big difference in locations. My goal was to first figure out how to grow a pear orchard in Kansas then figure out what to do with them. @39thparallel has a winery interested in the extra pears next year so we will work together to have less waste on my farm next year. Mike grows enormous amounts of fruit like I do and more. He has the same pests as well and that means more as well. The first couple years I had big harvests I thought it was partially luck now I just think pears grow fairly well in Kansas. So why don’t we have more pear orchards as we have none at all? The callery roots yield us a crop even on the years when my neighbors get no crop from their pears. The fact callery works so well for me I think is partially unique to this location.
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I was puzzled by the topics. The only people who have trouble with garden waste are the people who do not have much land. Then those people do not get much garden or orchard. Then they have to resort to street dumping like how we dump Christmas tree. Same with fall leaves. To most of the people, this is never a problem.
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Updated the title to include food wastes. Hopefully that makes more since. It’s really organic wastes in general like Christmas trees, dinner scraps , leaves , orchard fruits or vegetable cutting leftovers , herb stems you name it. In another topic fruitnut mentioned as we stock up we get wastes sometimes. My thought is yes it’s true and we do this stuff accidentally at times where we plant a row of cucumbers and instead of getting 10 that year we get 200. My pears produce very heavy sometimes. Production at times can be shocking both the little we get and the excess here in Kansas. One year I planted a dozen tomatoes and got 30+ 5 gallon buckets of tomatoes but the next year got 1 gallon from the same place. When I see a pile of cow manure it’s like looking at a pile of tomatoes they produce so much heavier with the addition of manure. Wheni use chicken manure and keep it back from the plants it can triple production. Fish scraps can 10x production of tomatoes.
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I dont have chickens yet… may do that when I retire.
I compost all that I can … and what is not suitable for garden compost (like old spent leaf blighted tomato plants or peaches with BR)… l take that way off down in the woods… and let it compost there.
Oak and hickory trees dont mind it at all.
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I would certainly say different problems for different people in terms of gardens. Like I mentioned more space means more food but more food means more potential for waste. Same with disease. Half of Kansas it is super wet which causes fungal problems. Good when you think you can now grow edible mushrooms like oysters or winecaps but bad for things like apple scab, cracking of cherries or fireblight. Meanwhile you have places like me which are super dry which means little to no fungus and super sweet fruit but higher potential for fires, space is much more costly here than in Kansas which means you have to prioritize what you grow. What I have learned is in my area we have a short season and colder winters compared to most such as yourself. A good example is a posted in here about growing Indian Free peaches. Many in the forum stated in zone 5 I simply would not have the season for it.
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Turned my compost pile over today…
Lots of eggshells and earthworms.
About this time of year each year… I turn my pile over… and stop adding to it… start a new pile for new scraps…
Let the older pile finish… when it starts to warm up some in the spring… I turn the older pile over 4 or 5 times… and it finishes nicely by April.
TNHunter
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Im not about to toss old tomato vines into the compost heap. They might as well be hazmat. I’m not going to bother walking out there to put a couple of eggshells on the heap either.
It’s too cold in my opinion to profitably grow poultry in this location. The effect they have on fertility is undeniable though. When we had chickens as a kid, we inadvertently turned a caliche outcropping into a permaculture jungle.
Every year I get about a yard and a half of wood chips from the transfer station, an hour’s shoveling, put about 10 pounds of Urea fertilizer half dissolved half dry on the otherwise wet pile and call it a day.
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I might give up composting. My bottomless compost bin was located up against my house. Rats have dug a tunnel along my foundation to, and into, the compost bin where they dug a tunnel to the top of the pile. I removed all of the compost but I just saw a rat go into the hole. Now I have to figure out how to get rid of them. I would love to poison them but do not want to poison predators that might feed on them.
profitably yes. growing the best meat and knowing whats in it makes it worth the while. cracked corn is cheap and fuels the chicken’s ability to handle - 0 + easily. a couple scoops every morning in winter maintains their weight. all my kitchen scraps go in a bucket under the sink and every couple of days gets fed to them. my birds have weathered -37f in a unheated coop with no damage. keep the wind off them and coop dry they are fine. its gotten to -23f so far and my youngest hens are still pumping out a egg a day with no supplemental light. 
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Unfortunately one “remedy” for the wheat waste is to douse the field in Roundup, it causes the mature wheat to dry up so it can be harvested more efficiently in one pass 
My wife collects kitchen scraps and throws them into a pile on the North facing slope near our house and shed. It’s probably mostly feeding mice and raccoons and stuff, but I’m always hoping that something cool will grow from seed or something.
I’m pretty bad about avoiding the landfill, especially if it involves any extra work. When we lived in the suburbs, we experimented with a spherical composter that you’re supposed rotate.
I found it a big pain in the butt. And we didn’t agree about what should go in it - so it seemed counterproductive to me.
It would be easier decisions if we kept chickens.
The orchard floor get reasonably well cleaned out by wildlife.
In my view, any waste of energy, effort, or money is equivalent to food waste. I don’t hold food in special regard in that way since those other resources could also feed people. Collectively we have the capacity to feed everyone.
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The Kansas land in my area can produce 40 bushels of soybeans per acre. Imagine how many people that can feed. Same land can produce over 600 pounds of fish or thousands of pounds of pears on a bad year or tons on a good year. My land is much better than I found it! Typically it produces 150+ large round hay bales in addition to my fruit , vegetables, and fish. That is a lot of cows used for beef or milk being fed with that brome! The organic material as you mention is the secret to higher production. The farmers who are stingy with the nutrients they apply to the farm will find the farm is stingy with them. When applied cow manure everyone said it’s unnecessary but what they grow and what I grow are different. Nutrient rich soil is good for orchards. Gmo grains you can grow anywhere which is what most farmers here grow.
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