Provisions for Poultry

t's never my intention to embarrass my wife when we go out to dinner. Don't get me wrong.

I don't spill food on myself or the floor. I save that for when I'm at home. But she sometimes cringes when I approach the waiter for a to-go box and say: "If I don't eat it, our chickens will." The staff is always happy to hear that the food isn't going to waste, but my wife pretends she doesn't know me.

Too few restaurants and homeowners compost or give their food waste to farmers. And that

What's This?

Our new FREEcycle column will provide on your farm to provide substantial savings, such as making chicken feed from scratch, recycling metal, creating free liquid fertilizer and more. In this column, we'll show you how to recycle some of your natural materials and food scraps into a perfect soil amendment.

contributes to the fact that the average citizen generates 20 pounds of food waste every month, according to the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. That adds up to about half a ton annually for a family of four.

Citywide, that means food waste from homes, restaurants and institutions composes about 13% of municipal trash that goes to the landfill. That probably costs most cities about $40 a ton or more carried by garbage trucks that get as little as 3 miles per gallon (not a typo). So, every time your customers or a restaurant throws away food, they're creating upward pressure on their own tax bill.

There are also environmental advantages to letting hens eat these food scraps. If these scraps go to a landfill, they slowly decompose in a way that turns them into methane gas.

The methane will escape into the atmosphere where it is 25 times worse for promoting climate disruption than is an equivalent amount of CO₂ coming from your car exhaust or those garbage trucks.

And if you're on a city sewer line and dispose of food scraps down the drain, with or without a garbage disposal, things aren't much better.