The Village of Pinecrest is partnering with the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians and others on an initiative that would bolster their existing composting program, and aims to benefit underserved communities and divert food waste from South Florida’s landfills as they continue to fill up.
The initiative dubbed the “Everglades Earth Cycle” is being funded by a recently-awarded $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to the Village.
The Village expects to receive the funding in June, but this comes amid ongoing court battles over the Trump Administration moving to freeze federal grants and loans.
The composting program began with just one food scrap collection bin at the Pinecrest Farmers’ Market. Since its creation in October 2023, and the addition of an extra bin placed at the adjacent Pinecrest Library, the program has collected over 900,000 pounds of food scrap, according to Village spokesperson Michelle Hammontree.
Now — with the USDA funding, as well as money from the Village of Pinecrest, the Office of Commissioner Raquel Regalado, and Fertile Earth Worm Farm, a commercial and residential composting company — Hammontree said the program will add seven new collection sites.
READ MORE: Bright Lit Place: The people who fight for — and depend on — Everglades restoration
Four sites will be placed within Pinecrest, and three more will be scattered across low income neighborhoods inside Miami Dade County’s District 7, the area represented by Commissioner Regalado.
“We’d be educating the community on sustainable ways of getting rid of their food scraps,” Hammontree said.
Fertile Earth Worm Farm, an operation in Homestead, is handling the processing of food scraps into compost for the program.
“ Everything in nature is a cycle,” said Fertile Earth Worm Farm founder Lanette Sobel. “There's no linear take-make-waste system like we have with landfills and incinerators; what's waste in one cycle is a resource in another.”
Sobel said she wouldn’t be surprised to see about a million pounds of food waste diverted from local landfills in two years of the program running after expanding. The “Everglades Earth Cycle” initiative plans to take the compost made from Pinecrest’s collected food waste and donate some to the Miccosukee Tribe.
“ We're really concerned about water quality and soil quality out here,” said the Rev. Houston Cypress, who sits on the Board of Directors for one of the project’s partners, the Love the Everglades Movement. Cypress is also a two-spirit poet, activist and member of the Miccosukee Tribe.
“We learned a lot from the Miccosukee Tribe's efforts. They set one of the original standards for water quality out here, but now they're leading the way forward in terms of composting and best practices for gardening,” he said.
The first donations will be used at the Swampy Meadows Community Garden, which sits on the edge of the Miccosukee Indian School, an early learning center, preschool and K-12 facility. The garden grows vegetables like tomato, lettuce, bok choy, radish as well as heirloom sugarcane. The vegetables are harvested and distributed to school kids, their families and across the community.
“ It's really about indigenous solidarity,” Cypress said. “One of the greatest things about this project is that it’s really about reciprocity and giving back.”
One offer on the table is for the “Everglades Earth Cycle” program is to give compost to the tribe to use in rebuilding their sinking tree islands.
“This is something that is up to the Miccosukee tribe and their team of scientists to determine whether or not this is a path they want to follow,” Sobel said.
The Fertile Earth Worm Farm founder said that if the tribe decides that’s something they’d like to pursue, Sobel’s team of scientists at the earth worm farm could formulate the nutrient-rich composted soil to the tribe scientific team’s specifications for soil properties they’re looking for.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
