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Comment by ljf | Hacker News Reader

I grew up on a (very) small farm - I still go to throw apple cores out of the window, as when I was younger the was always /something/ that would be happy for the treat. All dinner scraps were saved (or rather taken straight out), and all the windfall and rotten apples were happily eaten by the sheep, cow, geese and chickens.

I really hate throwing food away now, really pains me!

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One of the things that we've been thinking about is when we're at scale (I would say scale is 50,000+ Coops in the field) I would love to build a circular food waste system where we use food expiring / thrown out from grocery stores to feed our Coop member's chickens. Then we'll do partnerships where our members can sell excess backyard-to-table eggs back to the grocery stores.

Most people don't get that eggs usually are 30-60 days old when you buy them at the grocery store and they have to travel up to 1000 miles to get there in cold storage.

Want to know how old your eggs are? On every egg carton there's a 3 digit number from 1 to 365. That is the day of the year the producer of eggs handed them off to the distributor. Producers have up to 30 days to hand it off to distributor and the distributor has an additional 30 days to hand off to retailer. Kinda wild!

The crazy part that I learned when we started keeping chickens is that the eggs last so long unrefrigerated. In the US we have to wash commercial eggs, but we don't wash ours until use. We can keep eggs in our countertop spiral holder for weeks, easily, and they are perfect. Once I learned how old eggs in stores were, I bought more chickens.

Throwing away the core is throwing away both food and the most beneficial part of the apple for your gut. Of the ~100 million bacteria in an apple, the core and seeds contain around 60%, while the pulp only contains around 20%, the skin 10%, the stem 10%. Numbers are from the top of my head, they could be off

Are you saying you eat Apple Cores?

It's actually not that hard if you change how you eat an apple. Don't eat around the core, and there won't be any core left at the end.

Yes, if you eat it bottom up instead of around, there is practically no core. Also much cleaner, and you just throw the stem away plus the benefit of ingesting all the good bacteria

Yeah, the amount of food waste that can easily be "reprocessed" on even a small farm is tremendous.

Not only do you have reduced waste, you have reduced packaging (no need to put the eggs in cartons if you're just carrying them to the kitchen).

People usually thing you need pigs to eat waste, but most farm animals will take some or all (the biggest risk is accidentally giving an animal something it shouldn't have).

I grew up on a small poultry farm. Most farmers I know are very very good at recycling and reprocessing. There's very little "rubbish" if you are clever about it. If it can't be fed to an animal, and it doesn't rot (compost), it's probably something you can build with, either a machine or a structure. Meanwhile you use animal waste to improve the garden, producing more food, the scraps of which go back to the animals.

The biggest exception was in the case of disease, which we managed with fire. Burning diseased bird coops along with the corpses of dead birds was very cost effective on our small scale.

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