The Yellow Barn’s closed-loop compost business aims to demonstrate a small, farm-based compost membership in the Boulder County can be successful and replicable program to create nutrient-rich soil for farms, help build community and offers an effective solution towards climate change. Yellow Barn Farm can support BOCC’s Zero Waste Resolution by increasing waste reduction access points and farm-based micro-facilities for additional composting. 

      We started our own service in July 2021, and currently serve 20 households with weekly food scrap pickup and product delivery service, with 3 recurring microgreen memberships, and 5 dozen free-range chicken egg subscriptions. We have done no marketing, yet have already seen that there is major support for this program in the local community. We are seeking to both scale our current operation to 150 local households within a 15 minute radius, and be a demonstration project leading the way for other small farmers. 

This pilot program can demonstrate the economic viability and income opportunities for farms and farm workers, create a distribution network for farm-to-door delivery, help keep food waste out of landfills, and supply farms with the materials needed to create their own healthy compost for gardening/food production.

     As a 100-acre property, we aim to be a food hub network for other small, local farms that often struggle to cultivate products, operate a business, market themselves, and manage distribution. With the Yellow Barn as a central drop-off point, we would be able to store/refrigerate produce, meats, flowers etc from smaller farms and handle the distribution directly to local households. Larger farms that are outside of our service area could be encouraged to replicate the compost/distribution model with other smaller farms in their vicinity, creating a mycelial network of farm-to-household “nodes”.

     The collected food scraps are currently fed to our pigs that are in rotation in our market gardens and silvopastures. They increase soil health by “processing” the food waste, turning it into fertilizer as they forage in the farm plots and give us rich, healthy soil to plant our crops in, while off-setting the cost of feed for our animals.

     Our future goal will be to seek funding for an anaerobic digester that would take food waste and turn it into a fertilization liquid to be mixed with compost and soil mixes, as well as create CO2 and Methane that can be stored and used for off-grid energy production to heat and power greenhouses, homes, and the entire farm's power needs.

     We are seeking support from our community to show in our grant application that this is a desired service and to help us secure the funding required to fully scale the program. We are seeking $75k to fund the purchase of a Sprinter van, 150 buckets, a washing station, refrigeration/freezer for produce, a freeze-drier for processing, and sustainable/compostable packaging for produce delivery.