Composting on a working farm: starting small, scaling slow
How we built a closed-loop composting system on campus and what we got wrong before we got it right.
We were never going to compost our way out of a waste problem, but we wanted to see how much of the campus output we could keep on site. Two years in, the answer is most of it — and the path there was less about technology than about routine.
Three things we got wrong
Composting on a working farm is a logistics project that happens to involve microorganisms.
Our first bins were too big. We could not turn them on the cadence the system needed, and the centre of the pile went anaerobic within a fortnight.
Our second mistake was treating moisture as a setting rather than a daily reading. A weekly check is not enough during monsoon — and not enough during a dry spell either.
What works for us now
- Smaller bay sizes with a five-day turn cycle.
- A moisture probe in every active bay, read on the morning round.
- A two-stream intake — kitchen versus paddock — so we can balance C:N without thinking about it.
About Kavya Nair
Kavya Nair runs sustainability operations across the LSeT campus, with a particular focus on closed-loop waste systems.