Going mobile

If you were driving down the highway and saw a greenhouse in the back of a big box truck, you’d probably try to take a picture of it, right? Or at least be intrigued enough to find out more about what you just saw on the road.

That’s exactly the effect Justin Cutter, co-founder of Compass Green, is going for. Founded by Cutter and his partner, Nick Runkle, Compass Green is a fully functional greenhouse built in the back of a box truck named Angie that grows vegetables and herbs and is powered by waste vegetable oil. The Compass Green team teaches practical farming tools and raises awareness on sustainability through presentations, workshops and greenhouse tours at schools, camps, organizations and communities. The curriculum is focused on bio-intensive methods of sustainable farming — producing the maximum yields with the minimum amount of resources.

“With our project, a picture is worth a thousand words,” Cutter says. “When I’m calling schools to try and schedule our events, it’s difficult to explain what they are, so I instantly attach a photo of it and people are like, ‘Whoa, cool.’”

That interest is what sparks Cutter’s lessons about sustainable farming, and with an ever-increasing population and an alarming decrease in farmable soil, it is becoming more and more important to share practical solutions to turn the situation of agricultural scarcity into one of abundance.

“Not many people know that agriculture is one of the most devastating influences on the entire planet,” Cutter says. “There’s a lot of issues that people need to be aware of, but even more importantly, they need to have a solution.”

That’s the mission Compass Green hopes to accomplish through its unique channel of bio-intensive teachings.

The beginning
Cutter has always pursued work for the betterment of humankind and the environment. Most recently he was teaching and presenting bio-intensive farming workshops across the nation.

“I was supposed to move down to Colombia and start a sustainability center, but before I went I was traveling around the U.S. a little bit teaching workshops on biointensive,” he says. “As part of that, I would also give a presentation on the state of the world food situation because very few people know how serious it is and what’s going on.”

Every time you eat a pound of food, up to 24 pounds of soil are lost. The result of that continuing over time means we have about 35 to 50 years of farmable soil left on the planet.

Top: Compass Green grows vegetables and herbs in its mobile greenhouse. The truck is also powered by waste vegetable oil.  Bottom: Compass Green’s truck, Angie, had been used as a mobile art gallery before founders Justin Cutter and Nick Runkle acquired it.

“If you grow food biointensively or using other sustainable practices, every time you grow a pound of food you can grow 18 pounds of soil,” he says. “Although we are getting into a very dire situation in terms of our ability to create food off the planet, there is absolutely help and time to turn it around ­— we just have to act now.”

Acting now was exactly what Cutter and Runkle had in mind when they agreed upon a mobile greenhouse idea.

“I got a call from one of my old friends, Nick Runkle, and he had a mutual friend who had a big box truck that he turned into a mobile art gallery,” Cutter says. “The truck was just sitting and rotting away in Long Island. He made some inquiries to see if he would be interested in selling it. Then he called me up and said, ‘Hey, Cutter, this might sound crazy, but what do you think about turning a truck into a greenhouse?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got something planned.’ At that point I was having no luck starting sustainability centers in Colombia, so I said, ‘Give me a few days to think about it.’ I hung up the phone and amused the ridiculous idea of turning a truck into a greenhouse in my mind for about a half hour and then called Nick back and said, ‘Alright, buddy, let’s do it.’”

The idea appealed to Cutter and Runkle’s sense of fun and gave them an attention-grabbing avenue to teach people about sustainable farming practices.

“Having a mobile greenhouse is something that is strange enough and beautiful enough to attract everybody’s attention,” Cutter says. “We drive down the street, and the looks we get and the pictures people take with their iPhones drives them to our website. Things like that really capture people’s imagination. It doesn’t matter if you already have a greenhouse or if you give a hoot about sustainability, you’re interested and you want to learn more. Because of that we’re able to reach people who wouldn’t normally be exposed to this kind of education, and that’s exactly the group that we really need to educate if we’re going to have some impact on the way things are done in agriculture.”

Education
With a focus on school environments and communities, Compass Green and its truck teach people how to produce food in a more efficient and sustainable fashion.

“We focus on schools and colleges because people are receptive there,” Cutter says. “They’re already in a learning environment, so it is perfect for education. We do different things like farmer’s markets to music festivals. All of that is great and you can reach a very wide audience that way.”

Compass Green creates awareness around what is going on with our conventional agriculture system and teaches people bio-intensive methods.

“Bio-intensive is a technique that has been developed and researched for the last 40 years,” he says. “It is used in 38 countries worldwide in virtually every type of climate. It’s really applicable and really easily usable and doesn’t require any kind of machinery, and the yields, on average, are four to six times the U.S. average yield.”

In bio-intensive farming, there are eight elements, and the last one is called whole-system farming, in which you recognize and take into account that farming is a complete system.

Compass Green  teaches practical farming tools and raises awareness on sustainability through presentations, workshops and greenhouse tours at schools, camps, organizations and communities.

“Your garden is not something where you’re trying to isolate corn or soy and inject them with nitrogen and potassium and make them grow, but rather you’re trying to treat your entire farm as a mini ecosystem, and you want to create the right structure and situation for that ecosystem to thrive and flourish so that predators are taking care of the kind of pests that eat your plants,” Cutter says. “We can apply that principle of bio-intensive to not just farming, but to everything that we’re doing and look at the whole system. With our project, we are always looking at the whole system and finding ways in which we can be more sustainable from the kind of fuel we are using to the miles that we have to travel to our approach and other aspects.”

The truck and its cargo also offer a lot of educational value.

“We try to grow our truck according to a bio-intensive model, which does grow a lot of grains because grains grow and create a biomass that makes ideal compost and that’s what really puts the sustain in sustainability — being able to replenish your soil’s nutrients through proper composting,” he says.

Seed saving is also a big part of what Compass Green teaches since it’s the only way that you can ensure food security and genetic purity for your crops.

“I explain to people how plants adjust to their surroundings,” he says. “You start to grow something that starts to become more perfect for your environment, so the descendents of the plants that I’m growing right now are going to be better acclimated for life on the road.”

Cutter plans to continue traveling the country, but wants to expand Compass Green’s reach by adding more mobile greenhouses to the fleet.

“The response we’ve been getting has just been so positive, and we really feel this can be an effective model for change, not just to bring sustainability education to schools that wouldn’t normally have access to it, but also to start to change the way agriculture is done by creating a more educated and conscientious consumer and creating a more independent consumer,” he says. “In order to do that in the future … we would get another truck and build up every year to have a fleet that can be regional … to broaden our reach and have a greater impact.”