Celebrating My Biodynamic Compost Mentor, Jack McAndrew
Jack McAndrew, my Biodynamic Compost teacher, left his body last week.
Meeting and learning with Jack changed the trajectory of my career in agriculture and of my life.
Jack, you are in each and every compost pile i will ever make. You are in the “sea of greens” that i plant in my garden, in the gardens i plant with children, and in all gardens i plant everywhere. You are in the garden beds that i eat from that sustain me. You are with me on my journey and your influence is passed on to all who i teach and all who i impact.
“The most important part of the process is reverence for the smallest entity” - Jack McAndrew
Yehi zichra baruch ~Your memory is for a blessing.
***
After learning about my passion for growing food and compost making, a woman I met at a new year’s gathering during the 1st days of 2012 told me about Farmer Jack. She said she thought i’d really enjoy learning from him and gave me his phone #. I called him the next week. He told me he just had a mild stroke and was recovering.
I checked in with him regularly and we finally had our 1st meeting in the summer of 2012 at a farm in the Santa Monica mountains where he made compost at. Admiring the stunning quality of the vegetable production growing from the compost, I thought, “this is the only food i’ve ever seen that’s more vital - disease and pest resistant and vigorously growing - than the food growing in my backyard.”
I wanted to learn “his secret” and expressed great interest in learning to make Biodynamic compost.
**In 2009 when i set out to transform the backyard from a shaded field of weeds and 50 foot trees, to a sun soaked urban mini farm (that would become a one-of-a-kind gem of urban ag in LA) my 1st mentor, Michael, took me under his wing and propelled me eons ahead of where i would have otherwise been as a newbie farmer. He taught me that what we are actually doing as beyond organic farmers is we are growing soil, and that the best way to do this was to make our own compost to feed and nourish and grow soil. We strategized to source materials and he guided me through making 10,000 of compost before i even created the garden beds to grow food. Michael said, “people are going to think you’re nuts, but i see you - you’ve got it in you - you are going to grow the most amazing food they’ve ever seen!” My experience making compost and growing food over these 1st 3 years is what prepared me to meet and learn with Jack.
A week after meeting Jack, he brought a truckload of cow manure and a couple bales of alfalfa to my backyard, and we spent the day making compost. I loved everything about it - the exacting precision of the method and technique, the intentionality, the sacred ritual. In addition to the sacred act and laborious physical feat i had been dedicated to in my 1st to years of my farming pursuits, Jack opened my heart and mind to composting as a high art and a strategy to save humanity. I felt like i found the gold at the end of the rainbow.
At the end of the day I said, “people can’t get anything like this. I want to make this for people.” He replied, “you could make 30,000 pounds back here.” At that moment, I realize that what he was saying is that I could make huge compost windows in my backyard if I covered the majority of the 13, 15 foot long double-dug beds i poured immense amounts of my blood, sweat and tears creating over the past 3 years. At that moment, I knew that’s what I was going to do.
I spent more time with Jack over that next year than I did with all of my friends combined. I spent countless evenings with him in the living room of his mobile home on the bluffs of the Palisades overlooking the Pacific Ocean studying the agriculture course, talking about compost, and about life.
He told me stories from all the decades of his life, from his childhood family life, to his days working at the horse race track, to the years he spent making compost and farming and learning with his teachers and colleagues - Harris Porter, Peter Dukitch and Larry Hershman. He always asked me about my mom and the children i teach. And i shared all about my life, from the wild globe trotting adventures of my 20s, to my family, friends and girlfriends, and the challenges and successes of navigating life in my 30s.
Jack loved my garden. He loved that i was “doing the work” and that i had spectacular results to show for it. He taught me how he’d sow dozens of seeds in a small space, like a 1 gallon pot, to grow baby greens, explaining that it’s the fertility of the compost that’s able to support the growth of so many plants growing so close together so well. I applied this technique to my garden beds and soon after, i began selling baby greens to chefs and restaurants in LA.
Jack told me to bring him my first bag of compost when it was ready and that we would have a ceremony. When i arrived, he said, “set up your camera, and we will take a series of pictures.” We flipped over a trashcan for a table, put the bag of compost on it, and posed together for picture #1. For picture #2, he said for me to reach out my hand, that he was going to pay me for the bag, and to look at the camera, not at my hand. And for a picture #3 he said, now i’m going to pay you and look at your hand.” I looked down, and he had handed me $100 bill. He looked at me and said, “you don’t ever need to question the worth of this compost.”
Over the next two years, I would go on to make over 100,000 pounds of compost in my backyard out of dairy cow manure and alfalfa hay. All said and done, from bringing in the materials, to making it, turning it, harvesting, bagging and delivering it, I moved over 1,000,000 pounds with my hands from 2012 to 2014.
When my first pile was ready, I asked Jack, “who is going to buy this? I don’t have a network. I’m not ‘that guy’ to sell it” (… Later on I would learn I am totally “that guy!” I very much grew into that guy). He said that the word would get out - that people would find out. I had no idea how. But they did. Jack connected me with a couple of his old clients, I shared pictures of my garden in my compost on some new social media platform, I let folks know who I had built gardens for and sold vegetables to, and slowly but surely, the phone began to rain more and more and more with orders. Soon enough, I was delivering orders all over Los Angeles, solely by word-of-mouth. Pro garden folks - landscape and permaculture designers - would come over to visit the garden and exclaim things like, “what the heck are you doin’ back here, kid?!” “Don’t tell me it’s your compost!” I would say, “it’s my compost.” They became my best clients. Jack was right.
As my burgeoning compost career blossomed, The LA Times and the Los Angeles Jewish journal wrote articles about me and my work. I was so proud to tell them about Jack. They both included soundbites from him in their articles.
In the years to follow, I would share with Jack my trials and tribulations, extraordinary stressors and the great successes of my “entremanurial” compost pursuits, including securing locations in the Santa Monica Mountains and then in Sonoma County to scale my operations, making compost with large machinery (5 cu yd loader buckets, compost turners and water trucks), being relentlessly uncompromising in mimicking how I learned to make it by hand, becoming a Demeter Biodynamic certified compost producer, teaching for Demeter amongst a plethora of organizations, and putting thousands of bags of a caliber compost unheard of in the industry (organic dairy cow manure and organic **alfalfa hay!) on the market for the public.
When the Sonoma batches were ready, I gave Jack the 1st bag of compost with an official label, which read - “Wynbrandt Farms Biodynamic Compost is a recipe and tradition handed down through a lineage of the world’s most dedicated Biodynamic Compost masters that dates back directly to Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Biodynamic agriculture.”
Jack was so proud of and impressed with me. He remarked that I have taken my compost making pursuits further than he ever dreamed to take his. He called me “the rabbi of compost.” I remarked that this is the sign of a great teacher, and that his enthusiasm, support and belief in me meant the world to me. I took so much joy in sharing with him about my journey and I told him many times how much of an impact and influence he had on my life.
***
Jack and I share such a profound love of the high art of compost making - the idea, the alchemy, the magic, the action, the results, and how it heals and elevates the vitality of the living skin of the earth, and thus, of humanity. We are endlessly fascinated, enchanted and amazed. Making compost infuses our lives with the sacred, the timeless, The Divine, a purpose greater than ourselves, and relevance in the continuum of humanity as humble guests inhabiting the earth.
Our body dies but our spirit is eternal. In the decomposition of our flesh and bones - in our death - there is life. Our composting bodies nourish the living skin of the earth - who we are, where we are from, what we are made of, and where we return to.
Humus (and *humus compost - what Jack taught me to make) is the smallest, most broken down particles that organic matter become - fully decomposed. Jack talked about it as a state of aliveness.
Humus. Human. Humility.
When we return to the soil, we return to ourselves - we return to who we truly are. And when we return to who we truly are, we are humble.
Jack, you are in each and every compost pile i will ever make. You are in the “sea of greens” that i plant in my garden, in the gardens i plant with children, and in all gardens i plant everywhere. You are in the garden beds that i eat from that sustain me. You are with my on my journey and your influence is passed on to all who i teach and all who i impact.
“The most important part of the process is reverence for the smallest entity” - Jack McAndrew
Yehi zichra baruch ~Your memory is for a blessing.
