Monaghan Farm embarks on journey to zero waste

Monaghan’s ethos of self-sustainable living is exhibited through its organic farming practises. 90% of the 60 households grow their own vegetables with many feeding their soil by composting their kitchen waste.

Pieter Tolmay, Monaghan Farm manager and earthworm enthusiast, comes from an agricultural background and has always had a passion for the environment. Through his experience in landscaping he encountered the impact of harmful chemical inputs in gardening and agriculture first hand.

In 2014 Monaghan implemented Earth Probiotic’s bokashi food waste recycling method as a natural means to create compost from the residential and restaurant food waste. Bokashi treated food waste is processed through Monaghan’s compost and vermi-composting operations.

Waste quickly composted

Bokashi, wheat bran inoculated with beneficial bacteria, enables all food waste to be safely and quickly composted, while saving 235kg of C02e per ton composted. This includes waste streams which are usually not suitable for composting or worm farming such as cooked and uncooked meat, bones, fish, dairy and citrus.

Monaghan’s composting method provides a complete organic waste solution as it also incorporates horse and cow manure, garden and food waste produced by the estate, meaning no organic waste needs to be removed or landfilled.

The estate’s restaurant, The Other Side, collects the food waste in airtight drums, layering it with bokashi. Separating the food waste from other waste streams increases the dry recyclable volumes by more than 32% and also eliminates odours, flies and other pests from the waste area.

Once the waste has fermented for the required two weeks, the landscaping team collects the waste and adds it into their compost heaps. Thereafter the partially composted materials are fed to a worm farm where the highly valuable worm castings are produced.

Saving money

This, in conjunction with a dry recycling programme, has managed to reduce Monaghan’s waste to landfill by one skip every week with the goal of further reductions. “The great thing about these initiatives is that it’s not costing us money, but saving us money,” says Tolmay.

Cost savings are delivered by reducing waste collections and compost purchases.

By incorporating bokashi into the worm farming process, he has increased his worm processing and reproduction capabilities by around 70%. Once fully operational, this will enable them to produce approximately 40m² of vermi-compost every three months.

“It’s amazing to see what bokashi has done,” Tolmay explains as he lists other environmental impacts within the premises. This filters through from the improvement in soil quality, increased yields and disease resistance in plants especially in the winter months, water saving in irrigation, and the increase in owls and other desirable wildlife.

Thus far Monaghan farm have successfully diverted more than 1.5 tons of food waste from landfill, contributing to Earth Probiotic’s impact of over one million kg of food waste diverted from landfill since 2012.