COLUMBUS, Ohio — Beef and pork farmer Tom Price of Delaware County wants trash: any kind of trash, whether it’s half-eaten sandwiches, tree trimmings or unwanted books.

  

Price, owner of Price Farms Organics, an agri-byproduct composting company located 25 miles north of Columbus, collects just about every kind of  food byproduct, manure, landscape trimmings and other waste. He turns all this into compost and sells it all back to local retailers, wholesalers, gardeners and landscapers.

 

“We don’t call anything waste. ‘Waste’is a bad word to me,” he said. “I take food and fiber from the surrounding communities and make a new product.”

Price also accepts biodegradable materials such as tree limbs, grass, leaves and soil from residents of Delaware and surrounding counties for recycling at no charge. Incoming materials must be cut to lengths of less than 4 feet and diameters less than 12 inches. Sizes greater than this will be considered oversized and charged a rate of $42 per ton.

Paper products are accepted at the farm for recycling as livestock bedding. The finished new product makes mounds and mounds of ripening compost; five acres of it. And his is a Class-II compost site that is highly regulated by the federal EPA and county policymakers.

Even the Price family donates to its own operation. The sixth-generation farmers raise feeder pigs and develop Holstein heifers over the summer on 285 acres.

The manure from the farm gets recycled back into the composting system.

The company accepts roughly 1,000 pounds of paper per day. The paper is placed into hog barns, where his pigs do a little more recycling on the paper. “You put a ton of phone books in there and in a couple of days, there are not two pages together,” Price pointed out.

While many citizens of Delaware and adjacent counties deliver their recyclable items to Price, his largest contributor is The Ohio State University. During football season an average home game attracts roughly 100,000 fans, who leave their garbage behind.

After game day, a crew from the farm collects up to 4,000 pounds of half-eaten hot dogs, sandwiches and popcorn, as well as leftover food from the stadium’s kitchens and box suites. Under the policy of zero waste, the stadium diverts about 95 percent of its garbage from landfills.

The farm hires inmates at the Southeastern Correctional Complex in nearby Lancaster to sort through the material, because it contains as much as 10 percent plastic. The material is then screened and the final composted product is sold in bags under the “Stadium Scarlet” banner.

Price traveled to the United Kingdom to see how agri-byproducts can be composted, as no one in the United States was doing that type of recycling at the time. 

 

Now, working with the EPA, the farm became a closed-loop operation.

His compost is allowed to work for up to two years to give it a rich black color, though potential pathogens are killed within only three months. Finished products that are bagged and sold include Barnyard Café and Zoo Brew – the latter is made from manure collected from the Columbus Zoo.

Two other items, Farmer’s Choice and Turf Blend, are just as popular. Farmer’s Choice is 90 percent compost and 10 percent limestone fines from a local quarry that wants to get rid of small slivers of rock. Turf Blend is two-thirds soil, one-third compost.

Food waste is accepted from local grocers. Coffee grounds enter his facility from a nearby Nestlé plant, and Mars, which produces candy and pet food, sends its byproducts as well. Even Anheuser-Busch sends its unwanted byproducts to this site.

Price is a Buckeye at heart. He is an alumni of OSU’s College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. He’s also a member of the college’s advisory council. He’s most proud, however, of his compost.

“People are understanding that compost is the most economical way to raise the organic matter level in their soil,” he said.

Established in 1997, Price Farms Organics now sells mulch, topsoil and compost, as well as sand, gravel, straw and hay. Operating for 20 years, Price sees the value in creating goodwill among his neighbors.

“Neighbors can put you out of business faster than the health authorities,” he said. “We’re not lily-white. This place smells, occasionally.”

Price Farms Organics is open Mondays through Saturdays from 8 a.m.-5 p.m. It is located at 4838 Warrensburg Road in Delaware. Call 740-369-1000 for more information.