Soil Cycle strives to simplify sustainable living and encourage citizens and businesses to reduce wasted food. By diverting food from the local landfill using bicycles and human-power, we hope to create a more sustainable community. Teaching people the importance of a simple behavior change, such as composting food scraps, has a lot of power as well. Once our food scraps have been processed, cured compost is returned to members. This provides them a tool to grow their own food, connect with the land, and ultimately complete the food cycle in their own backyards.
Soil Cycle serves both as an example and a community resource. With Climate Ride funds, we propose to upgrade our demonstration permaculture garden and compost site, offer additional online resources, and teach more workshops to share our expert knowledge of gardening and composting. The EPA’s Food Waste Hierarchy prioritizes feeding hungry people and animals over composting, a value we embrace but have not yet been able to substantially integrate into our mission. We intend to build a community produce stand offering free produce donated from local gardeners and farmers; this is a reuse for unsellable food that would otherwise be composted. What is not eaten will be used as animal feed before it goes back to the soil to grow more food. We also propose to build a free sustainability library to share the informational documents we create, as well as books about gardening, soil, sustainability and agriculture.