Liz Turner, aka The Compost Chick, picks up food scraps from La Grande's Liberty Theatre Cafe on Monday, Aug. 28, 2023.

NORTH POWDER — A new local compost business turns local food waste into nutrient-rich soil, all while being documented on Instagram and Facebook.

The Compost Chick, a North Powder-based business, currently exchanges outgoing food scraps with freshly made soil from Union County businesses and households in La Grande, Cove, Union and North Powder. Liz Turner — aka The Compost Chick — recently expanded her growing subscription-based business to Baker City, and she also offers education on the benefits of compost.

Growing up, Turner’s dad was adamant that the family collect discarded food scraps in a container to compost. However, the pile never turned to usable soil to supplement new food being grown.

“It was just kind of like this weird sludge in our yard in a barrel, but we never put it on the garden,” Turner said.

Although Turner commends her father for his climate-conscious intentions, she now realizes that composting is an arduous process not many people are educated on.

Turner, a Heppner native, a full-time physical therapy assistant at Grande Ronde Hospital in La Grande, has always had an affinity for nature and a green thumb. In the summer of 2022, she decided to slowly ease into the compost-making business by asking her coworkers to collect food scraps in Folger coffee cans. After admittedly “nerding out” watching YouTube videos on how to make compost and successfully doing it, Turner said to herself: “I could really make a business out of this.”

In October 2022, she created an Instagram account for the budding business — @thecompostchick — to garner new customers and to educate and create excitement around composting.

“The difference between composting food scraps and sending your food scraps to the landfill is if you send a banana peel to the landfill, it’s in a plastic bag. It’s not stirred with oxygen. It’s not even exposed to oxygen and it will create methane gas,” Turner said. “Whereas if it’s in a composting system, it’s exposed to oxygen so it actually brings the CO2 back into the ground, decreasing (atmospheric) CO2.”

Turner said composting has never been more important, mentioning that it is illegal to throw away food scraps in five states — California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont. But, composting isn’t as simple as just collecting food scraps and waiting for them to become soil.

Turner said the four main ingredients to a healthy compost pile are carbon, nitrogen, water and oxygen. However, the process takes time and is very particular.

“There’s definitely a fine science, which I think is why a lot of people are very intimidated by doing their own compost,” she said.

This is when The Compost Chick enters the equation.

“My company basically takes all the hard work out of it,” she said. “You just give me your food scraps, and you get the benefit of the finished compost at the end.”

Turner formed The Compost Chick LLC in February 2023 after realizing the community could use someone to turn their waste into compost.

Turner posts regularly on social media to inform her current and prospective customers about what can and can’t be composted. She said the most exciting part about picking up buckets from her customers is when she sees new things in the compost that she recently posted about on Instagram.

The process

Turner collects her hot pink Compost Chick buckets from subscribers, including the contents of a 32-gallon trash can from La Grande’s Liberty Theatre Cafe. Once the containers are picked up and taken back to North Powder, she separates the food waste into piles outside.

“Basically one-fourth of my yard is this operation so far,” Turner said.

Turner and her family also raise chickens, which help the process immensely.

“Chickens eat things that don’t always compost like meat and cheeses,” she said. “So if you have a chicken composting system, you aren’t limited (to) only put fruits and vegetables. There’s less factoring in what you could put in the compost when there’s chickens involved.”

Turner covers the compost piles in wood chips to deter wild animals from snacking on the food scraps and to help trap heat. She uses a pitchfork to turn and stir the piles once or twice a week, which takes about 45 minutes.

She repeats the process for 20 weeks, allowing the food waste enriched by chicken and goat bedding to turn into soil and be rid of any harmful pathogens.

“We do vermicomposting, too, which is composting with worms,” Turner said. “So there’s a lot of things like avocados the worms love. The worms will eat the heck out of avocados, and fruit and stuff like that.”

Turner said the whole process of making the compost is very “labor intensive” — not to mention the time tacked on for pickup of scraps and delivery of compost. The Compost Chick also sells buckets of compost to non-subscribers.

“It’s basically like having another full-time job,” she said.

But, Turner also said the business is rewarding because it helps local growers and promotes a healthy environment.

“If you think about it, not everyone can put a solar panel on their house, and not everyone can afford an electric car,” she said. “But everyone has food scraps. Everyone can put their food scraps in a composting system, and that’s the easiest way to decrease your effect on the climate.”

Turner hopes to continue to expand The Compost Chick and help the community understand the economic and environmental rewards of composting.

“This food that was waste is now what’s fertilizing and supplementing, making sure that the best soil has gone into the next generation of food,” she said. “It’s a closed-loop food system. You eat the food locally, it composts locally,” and the cycle repeats.

Website: www.thecompostchick.com

Instagram: @thecompostchick

Facebook: The Compost Chick