So you want to compost, Tampa Bay?
A Q and A on composting with Kali Rabaut, a founder of Suncoast Compost.
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Published 5 hours ago
This week, we spoke to Kali Rabaut, a founder of Suncoast Compost. Her business takes local residentsâ scraps for a fee each month, composting at a local farm. She talked about how people can get started on getting their food waste out of landfills â totally on their own or paying for a service like hers.
The cities of Tampa and St. Petersburg have also offered backyard bins for their residents to compost.
The goal, Rabaut said, is to make everyday food waste more useful and to help the environment in the process. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
If Orange County commissioners pass a backyard-chicken program June 8, the county will join a roost of local governments allowing residents to keep chickens for their eggs. The list includes Orlando, Longwood, Maitland, Winter Park and Winter Garden and neighboring counties of Lake, Osceola and Seminole.
Promising advancements in biocontrol treatment that slows citrus greening
Florida citrus growers may have a new tool to help them slow the presence of citrus greening in already diseased trees. While there is no cure for Huanglongbing (HLB), researchers at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences found that injecting a benign Xylella fastidiosa EB92-1 bacteria biocontrol into infected citrus trees over a period of six years reduced the incidence of trees with severe HLB symptoms. The potential result is providing growers with a strategy to keep trees alive and productive longer even when infected with the citrus greening bacterium.
Raise your hand if you ve ever had an avocado that was too hard and under ripe one day and become too squishy seemingly overnight. Or maybe you wanted a sandwich for lunch, but the lettuce that seemed fine at the supermarket was suddenly soggy and old.
Post-harvest researcher Tie Liu, an assistant professor with the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, knows the struggle. And he wants to help.
Liu is studying the possibility of creating a handheld or wearable device to test food freshness beyond what human senses are capable of finding. I ve seen this many times in my refrigerator. Sometimes you just bought a vegetable and then forget it, and just a few days later, it s all yellow, he said. Personally, I feel very wasteful. We need to have a better idea of how to manage it and reduce vegetable waste.
As a natural resource economist for the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS), a big part of my job is to help growers reach their economic and conservation goals in efficient ways.
Agriculture plays an important role in sustaining and improving Florida’s natural resources. We can increase this role by measuring the economic value of the ecological services that growers provide and by using that information to help implement policies that reward agricultural stewardship.
Farm economic sustainability is closely tied to environmental sustainability. Practices and technologies that reduce chemical inputs help to reduce costs and the amount of chemicals lost to the environment. Practices and technologies that help improve soil health which may reduce chemical leaching or soil erosion may also improve crop yields.