Join our Food Scrap Exchange solution

For people living near our farm, in Montague Village, Massachusetts, we have triple-win proposition: help a small local farm, the climate, and yourself!

How the food scrap exchange works for you:
+ We give you a 5-gallon food waste bucket.
+ You drop your food waste in it (including meat and dairy scraps)
+ Every week, you leave your filled (or half-filled) bucket out, we pick it up, and leave you a new one.  That’s it! So easy!  One less waste stream you need to worry about!

Will you join?
Text us at 781-428-1670 OR
Email [email protected] OR
Fill out the contact form below:

Why compost your food scraps?  It's easy, good for the planet, reduces waste.

For dinner, you make your family a nice vegetable stir-fry with onion, carrots, garlic, red peppers, and broccoli florets. You are going to toss the leftovers in the garbage, but might be wondering whether you couldn’t someday get around to starting a compost pile instead. In the United States, most kitchen scraps become “food waste,” and are dumped into landfills, where they decompose and produce methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. According to the EPA, every year in the United States, 133 billion pounds of the overall food supply is wasted, which impacts food security, resource contribution and contributes to 18% of total U.S. methane emissions. Pretty grim, right?

​​What if we told you that you could be part of the solution without having to deal with the work of a compost pile in your backyard?

Let’s face it—in our chaotic, busy modern world, composting isn’t exactly the easiest, most convenient thing, nor is it the top priority on your to-do list. Maybe you live in an apartment and composting isn’t feasible for you. Maybe you have a nitpicky Homeowner Association that doesn’t allow compost. Or maybe, you’re just trying to make ends meet—working multiple jobs, long hours, supporting a family—and you simply don’t have the time to compost. We get it. 
 
With Big Foot Food Forest’s new Food Scrap Exchange, we make it simple and easy to compost. All you need to do is sign up using the form on this page or emailing or texting us.   We'll get you started by dropping off a bucket at your house; you put all your food waste in it; and once a week we'll come by to exchange it for a new, empty bucket.

What happens with the food scraps?  They become part of our “new old fashioned system,” which was innovated by the Vermont Compost Company and researched by Black Dirt Farm (with grants from SARE and the USDA). Food scraps are fed to chickens, who not only gobble up the delicious morsels, but also delight in scratching at the scrap piles.  Leaves are added, which are rich in carbon. The compost is better than regular garden compost because the scraps go through chickens’ digestive tracts, which produces nitrogen-rich manure. And the scratching effectively breaks apart the scraps into little pieces, perfect for compost: chickens are basically the best composting machines out there! Not to mention, feeding the chickens nutritious food scraps also helps them to produce hearty eggs. Talk about a win-win!

We worked with this system for three years at a household scale with four chickens and seven neighbors who loved the convenience and having reduced less smelly garbage.   

In March, 2024, we expanded our food scrap collection route to feed our commercial flock of 100 chickens.  This has been a success for everyone involved and we would love to get more neighbors to join us!