Woodside Arran Case Study
Sector: Community composting
Equipment:A500 Rocket Composter
The backstory
Founded by husband-and-wife team Andy and Jenny Macdonald, Woodside Arran is a small permaculture farm located off the west coast of Scotland. As outlined on its website, the farm’s vision is to “establish a model of sustainable, resilient, and self-sufficient community-led regenerative agriculture that protects biodiversity and generates local livelihoods.”
The challenge
As well as its menagerie of free-range chickens and rare-breed pigs, the farm has an organic ‘market garden’ – home to lots of varieties of fresh produce – and it sells the produce to the local community. There are many people who volunteer at the farm too, which means there is a healthy portion of plate scrapings generated there each week.
Due to the farm’s remote location, it was previously relying on outsourcing the compost for its growing areas – 200-400 litres per bed – and this had to be delivered by ferry. Therefore, Woodside Arran wanted a way to generate high-quality, nutrient-dense compost on site, reduce its reliance on third-party providers – which use plastic packaging – prevent its food waste going to landfill, and save money on transportation costs.
The solution
The farm therefore invested in an A500 Rocket Composter to close the food waste loop, which sees the Woodside Arran team feed the site’s food waste into the machine – alongside woodchip, farm, and garden waste – to create a resource for its cultivation plots.
It no longer relies on ferries bringing bags of soil to the site, meaning this has not only saved the farm significant amount of money in outsourcing and importing fees, but it’s also helped to improve their carbon footprint – by reducing the shipping movements taking place.