Story by E. M. Morrison
Photos by Rolf Hagberg

Cold Spring, Minn. — For one Stearns County startup, chicken waste is tops — just the stuff to make rich fertilizer and garden products.

Last fall, Mathias Miller and Brad Matuska, founders of Mississippi Topsoils, opened a $500,000 high-tech compost facility next to the Gold’n Plump Poultry plant in Cold Spring. They meet the plant’s disposal need with an environmentally sound waste service while manufacturing premium horticultural products.

The venture shows how compost technology is creating value-added processing opportunities, says Michael Sparby, manager of AURI’s Morris field office. AURI is involved in many areas of the rapidly advancing compost industry, such as demonstrating large animal composting, developing low-cost compost systems for farms, and testing methane digesters.

Better than spread

Gold’n Plump Poultry is one of the largest integrated chicken producers in the Midwest. The St. Cloud-based company, a recipient of the Central States Industrial Achievement Award for excellence in environmental protection, “has a history of sound environmental practices,” Matuska says.

Gold’n Plump welcomed an alternative to land-spreading wastewater solids, says the company’s environmental services manager Clay Watson. Spreading waste on cropland “brings with it a number of potential issues — runoff, odor, high transportation costs, crop limitations, specific farmer needs and road restrictions.”

Composting biosolids is about 10 percent cheaper than land spreading, Watson says. More important, “We think biosolids composting is the environmentally right thing to do.”

Gold’n Plump sends Mississippi Topsoils about 100,000 pounds of biosolids a week. The company composts it with residential yard waste, sawdust, pallets and clean scrap wood, most of which used to end up in landfills or incinerators.

Although bulk compost sells for about $20 a yard, waste tipping fees are needed to support commercial composting, says Matuska, a certified compost facility operator. But the industry predicts that demand for soil amendment products will grow to more than a billion tons a year, he says. This demand, coupled with advanced composting technology, is driving commercial composters to shift focus from disposal services to value-added manufacturing of compost products.

In a stew, really

“Compost” comes from an Old French word for stew — and that’s essentially what composting is.

At Mississippi Topsoils, waste is “stewed” in huge covered containers. Dried poultry processing solids — mainly from blood — are combined with wood chips, leaves and grass, then sealed in 20-ton bins. The mixture cooks for about four weeks as heat and beneficial bacteria transform the waste into clean, odorless humus.

The same thing occurs in a backyard compost pile. But at Mississippi Topsoils, composting is high-tech. Computers control the entire process, mixing waste materials, maintaining optimum temperatures within the sealed bins, recycling leachate or “compost tea” and channeling exhaust through biological odor scrubbers.

What comes out of the bins looks like good black dirt. The heat of decomposition has destroyed pathogens and weed seeds, creating a medium rich in plant nutrients and organic matter. The compost cures on the ground in steaming heaps for a few more weeks. When mushrooms begin to sprout, it’s ready to support plant life.

Mississippi Topsoils processes mature compost into a half- dozen products, including tree mulch, garden fertilizer and lawn top dressing. The company also makes blended compost products such as potting soil. They designed their product line and marketing strategy with help from AURI and the Small Business Development Center in Brainerd. “We’re listening to customers,” Matuska says, “designing our products for specific uses and offering customer service,” including delivery.

Selling it is easy

This year, mississippi Topsoils will manufacture about 5,000 cubic yards of premium compost, which it markets to central Minnesota fruit and vegetable growers, nurseries, greenhouses and landscapers. This group already understands the horticultural value of compost, Matuska says. Klein Landscaping and Nursery of St. Cloud is one example.

Klein grows its own nursery stock, each season potting about 20,000 shrubs, 800 shade trees and 6,000 perennials. “In the past, we used a potting mix of regular strip topsoil and peat,” says Jeff Boike, a landscape designer for Klein. “So we planted a lot of weeds, too. I was spending too many dollars on labor, pulling weeds.

This spring, Boike decided to try a compost-based potting medium from Mississippi Topsoils. “Compost is weed-seed free and has more nutrient value.” says Boike, who has been in the nursery business for 15 year. “I didn’t need to be sold on compost.”

How to beat a bad name

Not everybody in Stearns County is sold on compost, though.

Ten years ago, a poorly managed garbage composting operation near St. Cloud turned into a reeking nuisance, prompting a public outcry that shut down the facility. “There is no doubt that composting has a negative reputation in the Tri-County service area,” Matuska acknowledges. He and Miller spent nearly two years overcoming the legacy of that earlier failure.

Beginning in 1997, they held dozens of community meetings to explain improvements in compost technology and the odor-control benefits of closed-vessel systems. At the first meetings, “people would really jump down our throats,” Miller recalls. But slowly, the two entrepreneurs built a base of trust. “We let the community know we wanted to help solve a problem, not create one,” Matuska says.