Part of this year’s Gila River Festival. Register now; space is limited.

Bioreactor Tour with Mike and Carol Fugagli
Participant limit: 30 Fee: FREE
Difficulty: Easy

Meeting location will be at the New Earth Project site along San Vicente Creek. From Gough Park in Silver City take Hudson St. ( Highway 90) south to Ridge Road. Turn left on Ridge Road and then left on Mobile Drive. Signs at the end of the pavement will direct you to parking at the New Earth Project site. See map.

Silver City, like many small mountain communities in the American southwest, is directly in the crosshairs of climate change. To have a livable future, not only do we need to reduce current carbon emissions, but carbon drawdown from the atmosphere is a necessary component in all climate models. To respond to this emergency, the Upper Gila Watershed Alliance launched the New Earth Project, focusing on carbon sequestration, food security, fertilizer and pesticide replacement, soil health, food waste reduction, and landfill methane reduction. The centerpiece of this project is an innovative technology: Johnson-Su composting. Johnson-Su composting is a static, aerobic composting system that specializes in the production of a microbially diverse, fungal rich compost that can greatly increase the soil’s potential to sequester carbon, increase water retention, fix nitrogen, and increase plant growth and food production while greatly reducing the need and high costs associated with nitrogen/phosphorus fertilizers and pesticides. The New Earth Project’s Johnson-Su bioreactors are highly replicable using food waste from school cafeterias, and shredded woody biomass acquired from urban silviculture and local forest thinning projects. This program is implemented in tandem with a grade school curriculum and youth employment plan. On this field trip, we will demonstrate how a Johnson-Su bioreactor is filled and describe how it works, discuss how we make biochar using the Ring of Fire, and visit a greenhouse heated with a biochar energy system.