Earth Care Farm

By TOM MEADE
Providence Journal Staff Writer
March 2008

CHARLESTOWN — Mike Merner said he felt like a hypocrite.

He had grown up on a golf course in New Jersey where his father was superintendent, an expert in growing turf grass.

After a year in farm school at Delaware Valley College in Pennsylvania, the younger Merner moved to the University of Rhode
Island, where he studied agronomy and agriculture in the late 1960s.

When he graduated, he launched an almost instantly successful
landscaping business focused on installing and maintaining lawns. In
the late 1970s, he cared for as many as 100 acres of lawn, using
chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

In 1977, he and his wife, Betty, bought an abandoned 30-acre farm on the edge of Charlestown. They built a new house and planted an
organic vegetable garden to raise “healthy” food for their family.

“I felt like a hypocrite,” he said, “because I was growing an organic
garden, and I had a chemical-intensive landscaping business. The more chemicals we used, the more we needed to use, and the more we disturbed the natural checks and balances of parasites and
predators.”

In the early 1980s, loam was becoming scarce, and loam is the
foundation for planting turf grass, Merner said, adding that
excavators were mixing rocky material with ground organic matter and calling it loam. “It had no tilth, no texture, no porosity,” Merner
recalled. “It didn’t have the life force of soil. It didn’t have the
microbial activity of soil and it packed like concrete. You could put
a lawn in and initially you could make it look good, but because it
didn’t have the foundation of good soil, it wasn’t a sustainable
lawn.

“I had been making compost for our own garden and farm, and I decided to start using that instead of the so-called loam.”

Merner’s business was soon using all the compost he could produce. It was a combination of leaves, manure, grass clippings and other
organic matter. Turning it frequently would allow beneficial microbes
to convert the waste into dark, nutritious soil that would hold water
and nourish plants.

By the mid-1980s, Merner’s landscaping company had stopped using
chemical pesticides and fertilizers and was abiding by organic
standards. “The Providence Journal ran a story about ‘the organic
landscaping company,’ ” he recalled, “and the phone just rang off the
hook, because there were so many people interested in it for
different reasons. Some people were concerned about the whole
environment. Others were just concerned about their wells or their
kids playing on the lawn. Business flourished.”

“It was the compost that paid the bills,” he said. Today, like an organic alchemist, Merner blends leaves, fish, seaweed, manure and other ingredients to produce compost that some gardeners call “black gold” for its richness.

Although his business is thriving, Merner said he and other compost
producers in Rhode Island have been hurt by a law that allows cities
and towns to dump leaves free of charge at the central landfill in
Johnston. The measure was meant to encourage saving glass, plastic and other materials for recycling, but it also allows municipalities
to dump leaves, wood chips and other organic matter.

Many have opted to bring their leaves there, rather than pay a fee
that compost operations, such as Merner’s Earth Care Farm, charge.
“The dump used to charge municipalities $17.50 a ton to take in
leaves or wood chips or grass,” he said. “Little compost sites like
me were heroes because we charged $5 a ton. We saved them hauling time, but our standards were higher because we didn’t want plastic bags, soda cans or other litter.”

Now, municipalities prefer to haul yard waste to Johnston rather than bring it to a composter, Merner said, and the material is adding to
the volume to the dump, rather than being returned to the earth. “The highest and best use of this stuff is not for landfill cover,” he
said. “They’re filling the landfill with all this good organic matter; they’re not putting it back into the cycle of life.”

With the beginning of spring, a stream of trucks, large and small,
starts to flow into Earth Care Farm. They belong to gardeners,
farmers and landscapers such as Merner’s daughter, Jayne Merner
Senecal, formerly a vegetable grower.

She had run a “community-supported agriculture” operation, or CSA, at Earth Care Farm for five years, he said. In a CSA, subscribing
members pay an annual fee to share in the risk and the harvest of a
farm. If things go well, each member receives a weekly basket of farm produce during the harvest season.

This summer, two other farmers, Anne Averill and Peter Rundlett, will
take over the CSA at Earth Care Farm, and Senecal will run her
organic landscaping business based on the family farm. Landscaping is less risky than vegetable farming, Merner said, and
tending to customers’ yards is much less risky than producing
compost. “You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on
equipment,” he said, “and have one neighbor complain, and you can get a cease-and-desist order."