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We are very pleased with our recent acquisition of our new cardboard shredder. We started shredding cardboard with it about 6 weeks ago and are very happy with the results.
At this time, we are shredding about 1,050 lbs. of cardboard a week. One thousand pounds are going to our compost operation. The shredded cardboard is proving to be a great carbon source for our piles. The cardboard absorbs the moisture of the fruit in the piles and becomes soft. The softened material makes it easy for our compost turner to break it up even further and allows the cardboard to mix well with our other ingredients, horse bedding and wood chips.
Since we need a steady source of carbon to balance the sugars and nitrogen in our piles year round, the input flow of cardboard and wood chips is well aligned for our compost system. We have less wood chips available to add to the piles in the summer because we aren’t pruning. Summer time is when we have the highest volume of cardboard coming onto the farm. The cardboard holds all the materials that supply our kitchen and other farm operations. We are working year round at Frog Hollow, but summer is decidedly the very busiest time of year. In the winter we are busy pruning our 30,000 trees and have ample wood chips to act as a carbon source.
All in all, we are producing about 2,400 tons of compost a year or about 2 tons of compost per month. It’s too soon to know if the compost we are making this summer with cardboard acting as the primary carbon source is fungal or bacterial dominate – (we want fungal). We suspect it will turn out fungal dominate and will let you know when we know!
The rest of the cardboard we are shredding is acting as packing material for our mail order business. My personal favorite mail order boxes are the ones being packed with our decommissioned CSA boxes. It makes for a nice visual touch!
As always, we are continually looking for ways to close the loop on our “waste stream” by turning waste into something valuable to feed our operations.
