Support Star City Compost and Our Origin Story

         The Harvest Collective is ready to bring food waste recycling to the Roanoke Valley.  Since 2019, there has been an imminent prospect that we would develop a business plan to establish Roanoke’s first food waste collection program and composting facility. Over the course of these years, we have gone through multiple iterations of what this business could be. Meanwhile, our organization has also explored avenues of community gardening and perennial food forestry, all within the context that this community gardening movement could reach a larger audience by integrating food waste recycling as an option for Roanokers.

        Now, at the end of 2022, we are almost ready to launch Star City Compost – as Roanoke’s first compost facility and food waste recycling option in the Spring of 2023. We’ve established a good operations and site plan for a compost facility, we’ve signed a 5 year lease to the property, we’ve saved $20K to support the project, we’ve got a good core team to support the project, and our conversations with regulatory agencies all look promising for us to achieve our proper permitting.

        We have done a lot of hard work preparing to get this project off the ground. We are making strong headway to starting Star City Composting. I thank your for reading this blog and wanting to support our efforts.

               The ways you can help are by:

-        Donating to our company.

-        Pledging to join our food waste diversionprogram once we open up in Spring of 2023.

-        Helping us to find good spaces for food waste drop-off locations in the community. A post about this will be published soon. 

-        Finding large businesses, schools, apartmentcomplexes, or restaurants who might want to be our customers.

-        Investing in the establishment of our company.

    Along the way to Star City Compost’s emergence, we also established The Harvest Collective. We are a group of ecologically minded community activists that seek to build more community ownership in businesses that function to nurture and steward our local ecological resources. We believe in a dispersed model of ownership - establishing businesses that are inter-related, but independent to encourage the resiliency of the entire ecological food system we are seeking to nurture. By April of 2023, we hope to claim that Star City Compost is the first successful business outcrop from our activities.  

For a long time, it has been apparent to me that the separation of people from nature and our subsequent subjugation into paradigms that encourage materialism and racial division, over deep spiritual reverence is the inherent injustice underpinning every aspect of our society. As a culture we have allowed profit motives and private property accumulation to dictate our relationship with ecology and each other. While it can be credited with many benefits, it also has fundamentally separated us from having meaningful relationships with the natural world and in many cases our local community.

The call to action of The Harvest Collective is that collective ownership in ecologically oriented businesses represents a tangible avenue to maneuver towards creating a healthier relationship between Americans and nature. Trust me, this is not an easy path to trail blaze. There are many obstacles and places to stumble on the path since there is no clear path to follow. However, because this action is rooted in the health, vibrancy, and inter-relatedness of all life, it is a struggle I find worth pursuing and redefining over and over again.

            This philosophical pretext is important to understanding how, as a person without a lot of financial resources or background knowledge in running a “solid waste facility” as the state of Virginia defines it, is starting Roanoke’s first compost facility. I believe that as someone who previously started a non-profit organization dedicated to educating about zero-waste and co-led the nation’s only coast-to-coast roadside litter pick-up (Learn more about Pick Up America here), I have the heart and passion necessary to succeed. As someone who has a bachelor’s degree in environmental restoration and management and has spent much of my adult life immersed in studying the nuances of ecology, I have the mind to focus and achieve.

By building community with like-minded folks within The Harvest Collective, I am surrounding myself with the support I need to achieve. I believe the path towards starting this facility found me and that it is dually time to fully embrace it as my life’s calling. 

In 2019, I entered a business plan competition called the Gauntlet at the encouragement of other community leaders to draft a business plan for Roanoke’s first composting facility and food waste pick-up. I made the plan, placed 11^th in the competition and then approached the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality about how to achieve a permit to run such a facility. The obstacles presented to become properly permitted solid waste facility posed a serious challenge to me. One that I knew I couldn’t do alone and needed help with. 

After learning there was a local composting consultant who is an expert in the industry I reached out to Craig Coker to ask for his help. Over a cup of coffee in the fall of 2019, I offered him ownership in a business that could be born from our collaboration.  Wanting to see a food waste composting option in the area he lives in, as well as seeing the eagerness in my eyes, he agreed to support the project pro-bono.

Since 2019, he has gone through the process of brainstorming our plan, coaching me in business, providing compost facility training course to the harvest collective, and generally being the ally this project needed to come to fruition. We are only able to be where we are today, with an operations plan, facility site design, good communication with regulatory agencies, and a solid business plan because of his coaching and patience.

Craig has oftentimes reminded me that compost facilities can take 3-4 years to get off the ground and another 3 years before they become profitable. But once your composting systems are established and municipalities begin supporting food waste recovery, it can be a very worthwhile business venture economically and ecologically. Having already dedicated my life to pursuing ecological restoration and improving our collective relationship with nature I am in this project for the long haul.  

               My wife has commonly brought me back to earth, to say that this compost facility provides the best economic option for me to succeed in my passion for ecological restoration. As a man of 37 years who has spent the majority of my adult life dedicated to preaching and actively working to preserve our natural resources, the composting facility at Heritage Point Farm has become my hope and inspiration to persevere through the many struggles of life to make a better world for my family and community.

         Megan, Finley, and I recently went to the facility to pray under the full moon. Megan shared with me the name she wishes to give our baby boy who is due on November 16. She explained to me that there is no better name for our child than Terran.  Terra means earth in Latin and Spanish. She helped me make the connection that starting a business to build soil or good healthy earth and raising my baby boy named after the earth on the same timeline is of no coincidence and is our destiny as a family. I am so grateful for her support and love. 

        Thank you and have a wonderful day!!