While in Conch's Lounge located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, fellow "soilbrothers" Rob Young & Bob Beaty were lamenting their composting efforts in Berkeley, California during the previous months of 1984. Being inspired by cold beers & Bruce Springsteen on the juke box, the soilbrothers had an idea.  Their next compost venture would be named American Soil.  "Born in the USA", yes, indeed. While the heartland of America was being depleted of topsoil due to erosion, poor urban planning, and short-sighted agricultural till practices; recycling the vast quantites of organic wastes would replenish the organic matter void of the 20th Century.

American Soil® is a municipal scale composting process designed to produce soil amendments for a sustainable urban environment. The ingredients are derived from materials that otherwise would have been destined for landfills, such as wood pallets, green waste, organic wastes, clean fill, etc. The product, American Soil®, is sold throughout the Delaware Valley for use in urban parks, golf courses, office and industrial parks and along highways, as well as for individual residential properties. The product may also be used as intermediate and final cover for surrounding municipal landfills.

Today, American Soil® has the potential to change long abandoned industrial urban landscapes from Brownfields into Greenfields while diverting a significant volume of solid waste from surrounding landfills. Long rows of frequently turned compost take up a significant portion of the site but there is much more to this facility than just composting.

For more information on American Soil® products, please contact us via email at info@americansoil.net.

To learn more about our architectural salvage products, visit our store, Provenance, at 912 Canal Street in Philadelphia. We are currently open Wednesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm, Sunday 10am to 5pm and always by appointment.

Provenance
912 Canal Street
Philadelphia, PA 19123
Phone (215) 925-2002
www.PhillyProvenance.com

This Compost
by Walt Whitman

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

Behold this compost! behold it well!