Farmer Pirates Compost
Scaling up quickly to meet growing demand
Creating a compost economy for grocery stores
Buffalo’s Farmer Pirates Compost began working with one of its largest clients—Tops Friendly Markets—after New York State created a law requiring large commercial businesses to recycle their food waste.
Two months before the new law went into effect in January 2022, Tops launched a composting program at 15 of its stores in the Buffalo area. The law requires businesses and other institutions that generate an average of two tons of food waste a week to donate excess food and, if they are within 25 miles of a composting facility, recycle their food scraps.
However, before Farmer Pirates Compost could start picking up the stores’ expired, inedible produce, the company needed to supply Tops with 100 wheeled totes in which to collect the food scraps. To unload the heavy food waste into its truck, the company also needed to buy a dump insert that would grab the 32-gallon totes and dump the organic waste into the vehicle.
In order to offset the cost of the $43,000 project, Farmer Pirates Compost applied for a grant from the Food Waste Reduction and Diversion Reimbursement Program, which is managed by the New York State Pollution Prevention Institute (NYSP2I) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 2021. The funding also covered part of the cost of purchasing a second truck to serve the company’s growing customer base and an upgrade of the surface of its three-acre composting site.
“This gave us the opportunity to work with Tops,” said Ignacio Villa, one of five owners of the company, which received a grant of $19,000 through the NYSP2I program. “It’s a big deal in terms of our ability to turn that stream of organics into a soil builder in the city.”
Supplying compost to city farmers
Farmer Pirates Compost was founded in 2012 by a group of urban farmers in Buffalo who wanted to generate high-quality compost to use on their crops. The company started its composting business by collecting food scraps from 20 people who joined a subscription-based service. Today, it has nearly 450 residential customers.
To increase the amount of compost it was producing, Farmer Pirates Compost began working with commercial and institutional clients, including Buffalo State College, the Milk-Bone® manufacturing facility, and the Himalayan Institute. Collecting food scraps from a range of clients has enabled the company to generate more compost to sell to urban farmers and gardeners looking to enrich the quality of their soil.
“Cities are places where food can be grown and where the effects of climate change can be mitigated by green stuff,” Villa explained. “We would like to see the city become a ‘food forest.’ There is a huge potential, even in urban areas where soils are contaminated, that compost can become a component of mitigating those contaminants.”
Since it began collecting surplus food from Tops last November, Farmer Pirates Compost has diverted nearly eight tons of food scraps a week from landfills, which has since amounted to more than 300 tons of food scraps.
The new equipment and site improvements funded through the NYSP2I program has allowed the company to not only increase its commercial business but also to add another collection route to its residential pickup service. “It’s been a great help to get our business going,” Villa observed. “And in terms of our potential to grow, it’s opened a bunch of doors.”
