Grassroots groups and state funding have propelled the change
By Mike Lynch
On a late Friday afternoon in March about a half-dozen North Country School students are broken into groups in a rustic building with a 20-foot long by four-foot-wide rotating drum composter near the back wall.
Some students hustle to chop up food scraps, scooping them up into buckets and then depositing them into the unit. A few feet away another student is gathering thumbnail-sized wood pellets. They are making a mixture to toss into the machine.
After the organic material has cycled through the machine, it empties onto the floor in a wheelbarrow-sized mound. From there, it is moved to a nearby bay, where it will sit for a few months before being sprinkled atop gardens where the students grow their own food.
Located in Lake Placid, a big focus of the North Country School boarding school is hands-on and placed education.
Composting has been part of the program for decades as part of the holistic approach to farming.
A study by the school in 2023 shows it generated more than 100 pounds of food scraps per day, including a high of 422 pounds on Aug. 4 that year.
Read the full story in the Adirondack Explorer.