This year, Airdrie residents have the option of discarding their Halloween pumpkins and feeding dozens of hungry pigs at the same time.
The City of Airdrie has partnered with Heart Rock Ranch in Carstairs for the annual Pumpkins For Pigs program. Heart Rock Ranch co-owners Starla and Matt Hoffe, who formerly lived in Airdrie, started the pumpkin-composting initiative four years ago.
“It’s fantastic that people are shifting their thoughts about produce that would otherwise be thrown away, and multi-purpose their pumpkins to feed farm animals,” Starla Hoffe said. “Whether it’s us or anyone local they want to support, that shift in mentality is fantastic across the board.”
According to Hoffe, the ranch has approximately 40 Berkshire and Tamworth heritage-breed hogs, who enthusiastically gobble up the pumpkin remains each year.
“They just love them – they go to town on them,” she said. “It’s so delicious and such a treat for them. And it’s so good for them too. There’s a lot of nutrition in there for them."
Airdrie resident Rebecca Reaville, a friend of Hoffe’s, helped get the program started. In the first two years, Reaville said she would drive her minivan around the city to collect dozens of pumpkins in the days following Halloween, and then take them to Heart Rock Ranch for Hoffe's hogs to feast upon.
“I just don’t see the purpose of buying things for decoration and then throwing them out,” Reaville said. “I was always looking for different ways of doing things and used to cook a ton of pumpkin. When [Hoffe] moved out to her farm and had her pigs, I asked her if the pigs eat pumpkins, because every year at Halloween people spend money on pumpkins and then pitch them in the bin, and they’re perfectly good food.”
Last year, Reaville said she recruited some friends and used a truck and trailer to haul the pumpkins. Thanks to increased media attention, they managed to collect five trailer loads and more than 1,500 pumpkins in total – including a 300-pound pumpkin that was donated anonymously by a regional farmer.
According to Susan Grimm, team lead for Waste and Recycling with the City of Airdrie, residents can deposit their pumpkins in a bin on the south side of the Airdrie Recycling Depot yard during operating hours Nov. 4 to 8. The pumpkins will then be transported to Heart Rock Ranch.
“At the City here, we’ve always collected pumpkins,” Grimm said. “The amount has significantly decreased since we implemented our green bin program because most people throw their pumpkins in there and then they go for processing to become compost. Our initiative has always been to keep pumpkins out of the landfill.”
Scott Strasser, AirdrieToday.com
Follow me on Twitter @scottstrasser19
