I'm a small-scale farmer (maybe a large-scale gardener?), and one thing I've found about composting is that you just need a lot of material. Even at my small scale, it's almost an overwhelming amount of work to bring in the necessary inputs, or even just to move it around.
One reason people turn to synthetic fertilizer, I think, is because of how incredibly nutrient-dense it is. A 30 pound bag of 20-20-20 fertilizer has a similar amount of nitrogen as an entire pickup truck bed of horse manure. If you've loaded/unloaded a pickup full of manure several times, you start to see synthetic fertilizers very differently :)
A lovely aspect of hugelkultur is how little labor it requires over time, and how it uses logs as its main input. Logs are easy to find, easy to move, and decompose over many years if used this way.
First of all, after recycling and composting, I have very little trash waste - maybe a 10 gallon trash bag every couple weeks. Even junk mail and most packaging goes in the compost. Every so often driving by Starbucks I'll grab some of their giant "Grounds for Your Garden" bags and add that in too, and so the overall volume of compost is pretty high.
After digging into the rock-clay a foot or two, I add soil+compost+logs and line each bed with logs that hold its shape but also compost into the ground over time. As you say I've put in very little effort after the initial, but the improvement over a few years in the entire yard has been dramatic - it's basically been brought back to life.
The loop from garbage -> compost -> plant food -> my food is great, honestly makes me feel better about garbage. Highly recommended pandemic project.
I've done a mix of techniques, but at the end of the day I've just found that the more organic material you can bring in, the better. I'm still looking for that silver bullet, though-- Something that can be deployed inexpensively at scale. I'm particularly excited to experiment with fracking daikon this winter (https://www.restorationseeds.com/products/fracking-forage-ra...).
Anyway, it's validating to know that someone else has independently arrived at the same conclusions as me :)
In this gardener's opinion, however, Charles Dowdings' teachings on compost are absolutely fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf6CGj7xpFE
If you have long-standing piles of organic matter in a sunny location, make a garden bed there and you'll be blown away by how fertile the soil is.
That's called a midden and it's a great way to get rats.
Cold compost process takes a couple years, hot compost takes months.
Hot compost is great for kitchen gardens, cold compost is great for food forests.
Hot Compost is bacteria dominant.
Cold compost is fungal dominant.
Bad to remove the bacteria. Good to not spread invasive species like worms and such.
There's lots of things that live in soil. We don't have to help them spread.
https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/qian/resources/...
First I'm doing an anaerobic phase and then taking the output of that, pH balancing it if necessary, then feeding it to composting worms I've been breeding. Then I take the worm castings from them and bag that up.
The initial source is really the problem. I'm taking local yard waste so it should be fine to redistribute locally, but sending it out further to other areas of the country could pose a problem.
Ideally the anaerobic phase of the composting process should kill any invasive species in the compost, but maybe it won't. I know typically people go for an aerobic composting process and bank on the heat killing any pathogens in the compost.
That said, my county is planning on building a commercial compost facility as part of a strategy to stop spending money building landfills. 50% of our current non-recycling waste stream is allegedly compostable. I hope it pans out.
I have to give Amazon a lot credit towards this effort. They never use glossy cardboard (yay!), and their tape actually breaks down in my compost heap (although the labels don't). I recently got one of their new bubble envelopes, too, which appear to be made out of thick paper and cellulose. Super cool.
But why is it that sauces and oils don't soak into this "compostable" cardboard? Let's dig a bit on the net... hmm. The cardboard is coated with perfluoroalkanoates, chemicals similar to the old Scotchguard that won't break down even in a compost pile. Oh dear.
One of the traditional ways to make black garlic is to tie it in a jar and bury it in compost which cooks it low and slow over weeks.
It should be a standard thing that's everywhere, like parks. and whoever's stopping by can vaulunteer to do the turning, once in a while or there can be a sign up sheet.
Gardeners like myself would kill to get a good compost for our gardens.