Cowgirl Compost

Cowgirl Compost

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
Listen to Boise Idaho resident Jennifer Cummins and see if you can figure out exactly what it is that she does and what she's trying to do.

It's been a long time in coming. I was born and raised on a dairy south of Twin Falls, Idaho. So I've been aware of compost for a long time. I went away to school, I got an education and I thought I'm never coming back to small town Idaho. But there was a pull to come home so I came back and I was just on the family dairy farm with my parents and I said Wow you guys got a lot of good compost and my dad said yes. And we’re selling it to farmers at a high rate. They like to use it. It's really a complete soil amendment and it's stuck in my brain and I started looking around at different lawn and garden stores and what I was seeing in the store versus what I was seeing on the dairy, there was a big difference in quality and I thought this is an idea. This might work and so I just started working on it and it started very small. I enlisted my husband to help me and we started in a dirt floor shed and we've just grown from there we've been very lucky. He was raised on a potato farm in between Burley and Twin Falls, Idaho a very small town. So he grew up farming. His grandfather and great grandfather moved to Idaho to be potato farmers and so it wasn't that far out of his wheelhouse.

He had worked for a time in his family's potato packing shed so he had some idea about what it takes to move a product from bulk to bagged and ready for retail for customers to buy.

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