11/18/2025
Hey folks! It’s been awhile since we introduced ourselves and we have many new followers, so, we decided it was high time to do it again. We’ll spotlight one of our worker owners over our next few route days! First up: Kate. (she/ki)
Kate loves digging in the dirt( er soil, but dirt sounds better here). She’s a farmer by trade, graduating from the organic farmer training program at Michigan state in 2010. She’s worked as a farm hand, farmstand manager, farm manager and has owned her own farm. She has deep reverence for the soil and has been an avid composter as a farmer—but when a sickness caused her to stop farming in 2018, and she no longer had a giant compost pile to throw her food scraps in she became a backyard composter for the first time. She soon learned some of the headaches of small scale composting—most notably the lag in the winter when her outside bins slowed down and were at capacity and she had to stop composting for a few months each year! During Covid she was feeling stir crazy and helpless (like most of us) and a little lost since farming defined her for the last decade and gave her a deep sense of purpose. She began thinking of a way she could still be involved in climate action without growing vegetables for sale and kept going back to the soil…she began researching composting operations all over the country and wanted to bring one to her community, which led her to reach out to her friend, nature educator and environmental activist, Jessie Crow Mermel to see if she’d like to build a curbside composting business in Rockford with her! And the rest is history (well kind of! The two began dreaming of a composting business in 2021 but didn’t formally launch until 2024!) FUNNY FACT: Kate was named MOST LIKELY TO…”find a way to recycle anything and everything” in her highschool superlatives (class of 2002). The accuracy of this prediction makes her giggle 20+ years later! When not composting Kate likes to craft, thrift, cook, garden and spend time with her family—Brett, her husband who’s a local muralist and painter of the worm wagon , their two kiddos, two dogs and two bunnies. 🫶🏼