ROBERT REED CRAWLED UP on a large pile of meals scraps and yard trimmings and sat down. He buried his palms and rooted round a bit, grinning at his colleague, Kirk Steed. However as a substitute of responding with a grimace of distaste, Steed merely smiled.

“Good,” he mentioned.

And it was good. That’s as a result of the pile wasn’t an oozing, reeking mass of disintegrating banana peels and moldy pasta from the again of the fridge. It was a darkish, barely moist pile of odorless granular materials. Sure, it had as soon as been literal rubbish — however now it was reworked into totally completely different stuff: compost.

And since it had been reworked, it not solely was sensorially inoffensive — it had actual worth as a nutrient-rich soil modification.

Due largely to geopolitics, curiosity in compost is spiking within the farming neighborhood. Fashionable nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers are principally created from pure fuel, so among the best locations to make it’s the Center East, the place fuel is plentiful and low-cost. The nations across the Persian Gulf produce about one-third of the world’s synthetic fertilizers, and that essential provide is now bottled up because of the struggle with Iran.