Sometimes at small scale, and sometimes at very large scale. Often even just leaving it alone, and putting a stop to the practices that destroyed the land, (e.g. keeping the grazers out) sometimes is all that is needed. For example, a simple fence can allow vegetation to re-establish itself without getting destroyed by hungry deer, sheep, or whatever.
Once you have plants with deep roots, the land gets better at retaining water and soil stops eroding away. Once the land can retain water, a lot of life can make use of that. Nature tends to be resilient and adaptable. There are no one size fits all solutions for every landscape. But there are a lot of things that have been tried that have yielded good results.
In any case, stuff like this is not as surprising as it seems. Organic matter rots. That usually involves a lot of bacteria and insects. The result is basically compost. A giant heap of compost and a lot of wild seeds from neighboring grounds with a bit of water is one hell of a good way to kickstart nature. Probably the best decision was to leave it alone.
> We sensed it was coming. The landlord called. Todd had to go. Moving to another apartment wouldn’t stop Todd’s barking. And then it hit us. Molly’s dream could be the answer to everything. We had a great idea with no way to pay for it. [...] it eventually connected us to some investors who actually saw this old way of farming as the future.
How did two city-slicker non-farmers manage to get investment for a large, fully-staffed farm? I imagine the fact that they'd been spending the last 20 years making documentaries had something to do with it, and surely they weren't going to end up with a film saying "we thought we could make our natural organic farm work, boy were we wrong!"
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20140315055010/http://www.aprico...
One of the more famous Urdu poem ends:
nahīñ hai nā-umīd 'iqbāl' apnī kisht-e-vīrāñ se
zarā nam ho to ye miTTī bahut zarḳhez hai saaqi
Do not despair over barren fields.
The soil is so fertile; a little rain is enough.
https://www.rekhta.org/couplets/nahiin-hai-naa-umiid-iqbaal-...
No good deed goes unpunished--wild that the competitor company successfully sued them.
Because what I bet happened is that off the public record who knew their stuff said "this will happen" and then the government rep said "you need to pay some sort of 3rd party with a government license to weigh in on such matters an obscene amount of money to produce a report that says that on the public record" and it was a nonstarter so the project just died and now 16yr later here we are.
I don't necessarily blame TicoFruit for their actions. They might have some legitimate concerns about fairness, since their competitor is now able to dispose of peels much more economically.
But for the courts to stupidly go along with the injunction is what disappoints me. A much better result for everyone in Costa Rica would be if both manufacturers were allowed to dump at no cost.
I have no idea what % of American households compost or live in places which offer municipal compost pickup but I imagine it's in the single digits. As evidenced by this article, compost is/can be an incredibly powerful agent of change: food production, habitat restoration, etc. However, most of us are putting organics into refuse streams where they're likely to be burned or buried in a way that's actually harmful because they release methane when they decompose under those conditions. It can be a bit gross and tedious to compost at home but there is a certain satisfaction which comes along with it.
Decomposition as noted releases methane. Some landfills gather it in pipes and “flare” it )burn. They have to vent the gas as a full landfill is covered by a plastic cap to prevent water infiltration.
We dug up trash from the 70s to extend the landfill out. It was in remarkably good shape.
Practical Engineering put out an excellent video on landfills a couple years back, well worth the watch for the visualizations alone.
Can useful energy be recovered from this?
No one was interested in further research.
edit: I see some research is now happening.
In the longer run, when there's been more compaction, settling, and densification (and changes in what things are valuable), and more need to reclaim land that was previously landfilled, we will do this more.
St. Lucie County wanted to use a plasma torch that would have converted plastic and other carboniferous waste to energy. Like many other plans to do the same, it fell through
In a more civilized civilization we'd be investing in making these processes work. Likely there was more money to be made by stakeholders to scuttle these endeavors.
If you are throwing in nothing but rubber tires a thing like that will yield a lot of energy, if it is nothing but concrete rubble from buildings it will consume a lot of energy. To keep it happy it really wants every bite you feed it to have the perfect mix of ingredients and it's not easy to get that out of municipal waste.
There's no grossness or work involved. You just dump stuff in it and it cooks it down to something dirt-like(nearly but not quite compost ready) in less than a day.
I have municipal compost, but it's only picked up every 2 weeks, so that meant I needed to keep food scraps around for two weeks before pick up, so they either would get super gross and smelly, or I had to use my chest freezer to store them and make that gross and smelly and dedicated to just compost.
I've seen compost vending machines in my visits to NYC and a few other places, but i've yet anyone using them
Also a scam.
We now understand that fungus plays a vital role in the soil ecosystem. And given how easily fruit and vegetables rot and get moldy, the orange peel mass sounds like the perfect layer for the fungus to thrive in. The dead earth received a live giving blanket yielding healthy soil vegetation can thrive in.
I just put food waste and some other compostable stuff outside -- in a pile, on the ground. Currently, that pile is in a place where autumn leaves tend to gather naturally.
And in that pile, it all composts. It turns last week's bean soup into next year's hot pepper harvest.
It's not zero-effort but it's very close. I'll have spent more time writing this comment than I have on any aspect of composting over the last several months.
Later on, to use it in the garden, I just... use it in the garden. I scoop aside the top layer with a shovel and take whatever is beneath it. The plants don't seem to care that the composting method is slow and lazy, or that a portion of it might be somewhat unfinished.
(Now, to be sure: Home-scale composting can have a great deal of optimization applied. Bins, aeration, deliberate introduction of red worms, careful management of moisture, temperature monitoring, whatever -- the sky's the limit. But I have enough hobbies, and I'm not trying to market it as a product or win a race here. This method keeps up with my household's output just fine and doesn't take up much room at all in my tiny-ass yard.)
Also try to mix in some brown/carbon (leaves, shredded paper, cardboard etc) with your green/nitrogen (food scraps, grass cuttings etc), otherwise it can become a stinky swamp (anerobic).
The ecological win definitely looks nice on paper, but whenever people talk about compost the carbon footprint / gas emissions is always at the front of people's minds, and I don't really see that discussed in the article.
The article does say
> Especially since, in addition to the double-win of dealing with waste and revitalising barren landscapes, richer woodlands also sequester greater amounts of carbon from the atmosphere – meaning little plots of regenerated land like this could ultimately help save the planet.
How long will it take for it to cross the CO2-neutral mark? Maybe a silly question, definitely not my area of expertese.
As for methane, that's a good question. Orange peels are better than most things because the limonene inhibits methane producing bacteria. But you'd still get quite a bit in the deeper piles (that produce the anaerobic conditions needed for methane production).
Spreading them out more would help, but might interfere with the beneficial effects.
While forests are great they are not the best focus iirc compared to the oceans.
I assume that China will be the first to do these sorts of things, since the west will be too hogtied in regulations, lawsuits, and bureaucracy.
[1] https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2026/02/17/ocean-iron-fertilizat...
Remember the orange trees took the CO2 out of the atmosphere to make the peels. Some of it, probably most of it, is going back into the atmosphere but some of it is going to become soil carbon which could be retained for decades
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_carbon
Soil carbon is like dark matter in that there is a lot of it and it is poorly understood.
(1) Landfill burial
(1a) Without methane capture and use: Produces methane, relatively high short term warming potential.
(1b) With methane capture and use: Ends up as CO2 after burning the methane.
(2a) Mostly aerobic: Produces CO2
(2b) Mostly anaerobic: Produces methane
And perhaps more to the point: There isn't really a purely "no co2" way of disposing of organic matter other than perhaps burying it at the bottom of a deep mineshaft (but the co2 or methane will be produced anyway). Landfilling it is strictly worse - you still get the decomposition products, _or worse_ because you'll mostly get methane, but without producing useful soil byproducts.
Overall this project is a huge win on a carbon perspective and a waste reduction perspective.
But seriously GP could have had a mental model that landfilled orange peels might sit there for a long time -- which depending on conditions and food could be true on human scales (like 10-40 years) but not on the scale of 100 years. Especially if the conditions were dry -- a dry orange peel is pretty robust. That's not likely to be the case in Costa Rica, but I'll forgive some naivety here absent demonstrated malice.
We solved it by dumping around 400 cubic yards of arborist woodchips spread 12-18 inches thick over most of the yard, then top dressed that with composted manure and worm castings. Finally, we planted a bunch of wine cap mushroom spawn (to break down the wood) and clover (to fix nitrogen and feed the fungi) over the whole thing. 3 years later we have rich loamy soil that drains well, is full of earth worms and grows anything we plant it it.
TL;DR: Add tons of carbon and nitrogen into degraded soil and the local fungi, bacteria and worms will turn that into good soil if given sufficient time.
I'm currently improving my soil via a series of cover crops chosen to fix nitrogen and aerate soil, but it's yet to be seen how well it turns out.
Keep in mind pure organic matter does not a soil make. It's the mix of that organic matter + the inorganic substrate. So I added a bunch of organic matter to turn the dead compacted inorganic substrate (degraded pewamo urban complex series clay subsoil in my case) into good soil. The organic matter + fungi help that heavy clay to stable macro aggregates which let the soil drain. The humus the organic matter turns into help regulate soil moisture in dry conditions and provides the right environment for all the soil microfauna need to do their thing. Essentially I restored the O & A horizons, and over time the B horizon will improve.
Cover cropping is great btw, but you might want to get a soil sample analyzed. We had less than half a percent of organic matter when we moved in. Really you want that up in the 5-8% territory. More towards the higher end if your soil is clay dominant like ours. Cover cropping alone wouldn't have gotten us to that number in my lifetime.
This year, since I just moved in, I'm just doing a small 10x10ft testbed. I mixed in a few inches of compost manure, shallowly because the soil is so rocky. My plan is to do a biomass/nitrogen crop mix this spring, which is currently seeded, and then in fall do another similar mix along with deep rooted radish for decompaction. Then hopefully next spring I can plant real things. If I find that after a year of cover cropping the soil is still unusable, then I'll bring out the power tiller and pickaxe for the rest of the yard and get the amendments mixed in deeply. I've read a lot of permaculture books in the last year, and I'd like to garden in that way, but I'm certainly not against buying bulk amendments to get started.
12-18 isn't deep enough for me, since I am going to have large shrubs (need 3ft) and perhaps trees (need 5ft).
It would be extremely interesting to hear about the legal merits of the rival company's lawsuit, and the politics of the Supreme Court.
My curiosity is about how the legal system got it wrong - simplistic or outdated laws, or clueless or corrupt judges, or some combination, or something else?
Where do I sign up?
The main idea is introducing biomass in layers and heavy pruning, start planting a lot of short-life plants (like grass) while also planting some medium-life plants (like bushes or small trees). Prune the grass on every seasonal cycle keeping the cut leafs on the ground. Repeat the cycle while also introducing long-life plants (like bigger trees, preferably fruit-bearing trees). Another idea is having plants that seek for water deep underground, those eventually bring streams and creaks back to life.
When you understand it, the plan sounds simple, you are just speeding up the natural cycles of the location, using grass to fix carbon and generate biomass while other trees grow in the vegetation. It is pretty impressive
Edit: added a better link explaining Synthropic Farming
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_G%C3%B6tsch
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
Another data point to the thesis that it's not the earth that needs saving, it's human systems. If disruption becomes the order of the day, who's impacted the worst?
What really gets me is that: I scroll passed all the ads without even registering them (I haven't figured out how to block ads on my phone). Surely almost everybody else also does. Surely anyone who clicks or seems to react to them in the data is a mistake. So why is there still money, however little, in showing them? Why do they even bother? Who is defrauding who here?
Firefox + ublock origin + consent-o-matic saves the day for me.
This is why we can't have nice things. Juice company makes compost? Sued! Ford wants to pay his workers a living wage? Sued! Nail lawyers to trees.
... why does TicoFruit even care? Did they just see their competitor do something that might be good for people and sue them out of spite?
> TicoFrut, which is 98% Costa Rican-owned, charges that the environmental services contract is little more than a permit for improper disposal of its foreign-owned competitor's waste. TicoFrut President Carlos Odio says Del Oro should be compelled to build a proper waste-disposal plant just as his company was forced to do in the mid-1990s amid allegations that orange waste from its juicing plant was polluting a nearby river. So TicoFrut teamed up with a high-profile environmentalist and radio host, Alexander Bonilla, and enlisted the support of two prominent congressmen and a few citrus growers in denouncing the Del Oro project. However, none of Costa Rica's conservation groups joined in the attack on Del Oro.
[...]
> One of the ministers they cited was the acting environment minister at the time, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, who signed the contract on behalf of the government. Rodriguez, an attorney, denied having sat on Del Oro's board but acknowledged representing the company while working in a law firm contracted by the CDC, Del Oro's British owners. The other official, Agriculture Minister Esteban Brenes, acknowledged having sat on Del Oro's board but denied any involvement with the contract.
> TicoFrut also claimed foreign employees of the CDC and, by extension, Del Oro, had received diplomatic immunity as a sweetener to invest, and could thus act with impunity.
> The Costa Rican Ombudsman's Office conducted its own review and declared the contract illegal. In its non-binding ruling, the ombudsman's office said no official studies had been done on the viability of the orange-waste experiment, and that due process had not been followed before the contract's signing
This is the work of a petty man child. This is how it reads to me: "I got caught being a lazy irresponsible cheap-skate who was illegally dumping and had to pay. Meanwhile, these intelligent forward-thinking jerks find an environmentally beneficial way to dispose of their waste for free! I'll show them and take those goody two shoes down a peg!"
Honestly orange peels are incredible, the smell, the robustness. It reminds me of the joke of the plastic cup at Whole Foods filled with orange slices. If only there was a natural packaging alternative...