Northland College
IN-24: Innovation A

The new food processing and community composting facility is the result of nearly three years of dreaming and planning. This new facility is a physical manifestation of Northland’s values, providing the space and equipment needed to aggressively move towards our 80% local food goal, create a composting infrastructure that can serve not just the College but also community partners, and provide enhanced educational facilities for students and faculty. The food processing facility of the Food Center allows the College to receive large shipments of local fruits and vegetables; freeze, dry, and can these products; and store them for off-season use. The Food Center represents a milestone in local food infrastructure as the region’s largest food processing facility. The Food Center is structured to function not just as a kitchen, but as a laboratory for student education, research and discovery and as a catalyst for local economic development. Until now there has been no readily available and convenient service in our area for off-campus residents and businesses to compost their organic waste. With the opening of its new composting facility, Northland has excess waste processing capacity. Through partnerships with community businesses and institutions, Northland is providing a fee-for-service compost collection operation that makes composting available to off campus entities that were previously landfilling their food waste. WHAT IS THE FOOD PROCESSING FACILITY? • Commercially licensed food processing and storage facility • Food processing infrastructure able to store up to 6 tons of food per year • Equipment available on a fee-per-use basis for regional producers, allowing them to expand their businesses • Classroom and working laboratory space for academic courses, workshops, and other co-curricular programs WHAT IS THE COMMUNITY COMPOSTING FACILITY? • Community scale organic waste collection and processing service • Composting infrastructure able to process up to 1 ton of material per day • Closed-loop processing in which finished compost can be sold as a soil amendment • Community outreach and education programming in waste management