This Florida composting program will help restore the Everglades

[ResidentialBusiness]

Soon, when residents of a village in Florida’s Miami-Dade County drop off their egg shells, banana peels, and other kitchen scraps for composting, they’ll be helping restore the Everglades—and benefit a community garden run by the local Miccosukee Tribe.

The Everglades are a massive wetland ecosystem crucial for the environment: It’s the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States, is home to multiple threatened and endangered species, and is a significant carbon sink. The Everglades directly benefit people, too; the watershed provides drinking water for more than eight million Floridians, and Indigenous tribes live in that region. But that vital ecosystem is being threatened by soil loss, agricultural runoff, and encroaching development.

[Photo: courtesy Fertile Earth Worm Farm]

Pinecrest, which has a population of around 18,000 people, has had a free residential composting program for about two years—the first in Miami-Dade County—through a partnership with the Fertile Earth Worm Farm. Now, the village and the farm are working with the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida and the Love The Everglades Movement to use that compost to rejuvenate the wetlands. Through the first phase of the program, compost will go to the Miccosukee’s Swampy Meadows Community Garden, which grows vegetables right in the Everglades. 

[Photo: courtesy Fertile Earth Worm Farm]

The project is made possible thanks to a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded at the end of December, before the Trump administration was in place and started attacking funding and programs that use climate change terms. (There’s also additional funding from Pinecrest village and others.)

Though the Everglades are crucial to Florida, locals can feel a sort of distance, physical or mental, from its ecosystem, which “helps to make people feel separate from it,” says Reverend Houston Cypress, a Miccosukee Tribe member, artist, and cofounder of the Love the Everglades Movement. “We’re trying to encourage people [to remember] we’re a part of it. Let’s take a little bit more responsibility for our impacts on the place and use better practices, and walk softer and more in harmony with these lands and waters.”

[Photo: courtesy Fertile Earth Worm Farm]

Adding more healthy soil to the Everglades could counter some of those threats, particularly agricultural pollution. Fertilizers from nearby farms run off into the Everglades, saturating the land with nitrogen and phosphorus that impedes the flow of water, chokes out native vegetation, and causes harmful algae blooms that end up killing fish. 

[Photo: courtesy Fertile Earth Worm Farm]

But compost makes the soil healthier, which helps it hold onto nutrients so they don’t wash into the water. “If you have something toxic, you don’t give it to the water. You give it to the soil, because the soil cleans,” says Lanette Sobel, founder of Fertile Earth Worm Farm. “It makes perfect sense that we’re giving this back to the Everglades, and giving this back to the Miccosukee, the stewards of the Everglades.”

The USDA grant will add compost drop-off bins throughout the village, and go towards community outreach, to educate and inform residents about this option. The hope is also to divert food waste from landfills, where it becomes a significant source of planet-warming methane, and from incinerators, which release harmful pollutants.

[Photo: courtesy Fertile Earth Worm Farm]

“Why would you consider incinerating food?” Sobel asks. Miami-Dade County’s incinerator burned down in 2023, but the county is considering building a new one—though no one really wants it. Sobel hopes this program can show residents about some alternatives for our waste: Instead of using intense amounts of energy to burn food, which also releases pollution, that food can be a resource for the soil. 

The program could also save locals, including businesses, money on other waste hauling options. (Compost drop-off is free for individuals, and local businesses can get a discount on hauling rates.) The organizations estimate that the USDA grant will have an economic impact of more than $8 million to the Everglades community as a whole, when considering impacts like the savings on waste hauling, the worth of the compost, how much it would cost to remove those nutrients from the watershed, and more. 

[Photo: courtesy Fertile Earth Worm Farm]

Already, Pinecrest’s compost program has diverted more than 90,000 pounds of food waste from landfills and incinerators in about a year and a half—an amount equivalent to the weight of 12 Land Rovers. With the expanded drop-off centers and outreach, this project could divert around 390,000 pounds of food scraps per year—and help the Everglades in the process.

Cypress hopes the projects also brings the community together. “Hearing from and supporting the Miccosukee efforts on protecting the Everglades, we’re always learning about teamwork, about coalition building, about partnerships and friendships,” he says. “And so I think that that’s one of the cool things about this project, that we’re being good neighbors. Sometimes you want to invite your neighbor over for a potluck, and then sometimes you want to bring some soil for the next potluck.” 

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