2023 visitors enjoy a tractor ride at Prancers Farm.
by David Goldstein, PWA, IWMD
Students for Eco-Education and Agriculture, SEEAG, a nonprofit organization primarily serving schools in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, are partnering with agriculturally related businesses for the upcoming Ventura County Farm Day on November 2, from 10 AM to 3 PM. The public is invited to register for tours at more than 15 sites. Not all events will take place on farms, and not all the focus will be on crops. In fact, some long-deserved attention will be focused on the compost and mulch that have long been an important input for productive farming in Ventura County.
In fact, one of the optional tour sites is the Agromin compost facility on Arnold Road. Owned by USA Petroleum, this site was a mushroom farm until 2002, when two recently graduated UC Santa Barbara Environmental Studies majors, one son of a USA Petroleum executive, decided to turn it into a compost facility called Shoreline Organics. By 2004, the two had begun compost operations, but they struggled with permitting, regulatory, and financial challenges.
Agromin bought the business, took over the lease, and turned the site into Ventura County’s major composting facility. Although the facility has been successful for two decades, it likely has only a short future as a compost making operation. Competing land uses, including bird preservation related to the nearby Ormond Beach Wetland, have limited options and posed challenges for compost operations. Anticipated as an alternative, Agromin is currently expanding a compost facility on the Limoneira Farm, near Santa Paula. Agromin also operates a mulch-making and food-waste transferring facility at the Simi Valley Landfill and Recycling Center and expects an early 2025 opening for an in-vessel composting and food-waste-to-animal-feed facility on Mountain View Street in Oxnard.
One of the two entrepreneurs who started Shoreline Organics at Agromin’s Ormond Beach site is now in a different role with another company that is also on the Farm Day tour list. Greg Lewis is now Vice President of Duda Farms Fresh Foods. The farm, near the ocean on the outskirts of Ventura, is a major national producer of celery. Unsurprisingly, the farm uses a lot of compost, as Lewis is familiar with the benefits of the product.
The McGrath Farm is another site where SEEAG’s agricultural education program will intersect with compost education. “I’m going to tell people there shouldn’t be anything called ‘waste,’” said Phil McGrath, an owner of the farm. “We feed what we can to people; anything left, we feed to animals; and after that, anything left we turn into compost.”
McGrath recalled that his late father and grandfather, William and Joseph McGrath, relied heavily on compost, not just as a good agricultural practice for crop production, but also as an environmentally smart method of waste management. Until 1948, the McGrath Dairy on the site and at two other locations was the third largest milk producer in California. Dairy manure was an important input for composting.
Changing regulatory conditions and other factors led to the demise of the dairy, but Phil McGrath dreams of bringing it back with clever measures, including advanced composting, that could make it work again in Ventura County. In the meantime, the McGrath farm hosts the Rodale Institute California Organics Center, which helps farmers solve challenges, conducts research, and provides educational programs related to compost.
Petty Ranch, a fifth-generation farm in Saticoy, is an additional Farm Day site with significant compost connections. Serving as the Farm Day hub, this is the site where SEEAG hosts thousands of children each year for its Farm Lab program. It has an eight-foot-long worm box, where red worms eat food scraps, producing high quality soil amendment.
Sign up for free Farm Day tours at www.venturacountyfarmday.com, and use the farm day trail map to plan your day. “You can build your own farm and food adventure and also learn about compost,” said Catilin Paulus-Case, Executive Director of SEEAG.
David Goldstein, an Environmental Resource Analyst with the Ventura County Public Works Agency, may be reached at [email protected] or (805) 658-4312
