09/05/2026
Healthy land starts from the ground up. 🌱
Compost is a mixture of ingredients used as plant fertilizer to improve soil's physical, chemical, and biological properties and is critical for carbon and regenerative farming and gardening. Peat has many properties that make it a favoured material for horticultural compost. However, unlike mineral soils, peat is almost pure carbon (together with some nutrients and minerals) that builds continuously, year in, year out, at a rate of 1-2 mm, over millennia and can only be produced by destroying ecologically valuable peatlands. This means that peat-derived compost has a very high carbon and nature footprint.
This past International Compost Awareness Week, we were thinking about what constitutes a 'healthy' compost. Ideally this doesn't come from peatland, but where bogs have been exploited for compost media they need to be restored, a process that is complete when the healthy bog vegetation restarts that process of peat-building. For farmers working with GRI, peatland restoration and paludiculture aren't just environmental actions — they are a way to maintain and rebuild the enormous organic capital of their land and open up new income streams through paludiculture and carbon credits.
However, replacing this is not plain sailing as a huge quantity of horticultural peat, up to 40 million m3 in fact, is produced in Europe each year and we need to find substitutes for this. On a small scale we can do our bit by making our own https://www.ipcc.ie/advice/composting-diy/ but if we are to save Europe's peatlands then we need to do this on a large scale and one good opportunity is with one of GRI's partners Bernardt Aumann, aka the Humus Guru https://humusguru.nl/over-micro-bio-turbation
International Compost Awareness Week may be ending, but composting continues year-round. Start a compost system, support local programs, attend events, and share your composting story. The Compost Research & Education Foundation has a brilliant range of resources available at compostfoundation.org/icaw-home to help you get started.
Together, we can build healthier soils and stronger communities. 🌍
