Nicholas Fox – Why He’s Fighting Food Waste in Paradise

[00:00:10] Dominique: Hello. Welcome to Green Champions.

[00:00:12] Adam: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people, making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Dominique, our sustainability expert.

[00:00:19] Dominique: And I'm so glad to be here alongside Adam, our social enterprise extraordinaire. We bring you guests who sell the potential for impact in their job or community and did something about it. 

[00:00:28] Adam: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists to activists, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas.

[00:00:34] Dominique: Today, Adam and I are joined by Nicholas Fox. Nicholas is a permaculture designer and the founder of Soul and Soil Composting, which is based in The Bahamas, which is actually where he is calling in to talk to us from today. His passion for turning waste into value started with a childhood curiosity and has evolved into a national composting effort across the Caribbean. So today we're talking about composting and community specific initiatives. Thanks for joining us today, Nicholas.

[00:01:03] Nicholas: Thank you for having me, Dominique. Thank you for having me, Adam. I'm really excited to be here. 

[00:01:07] Dominique: Yeah, let's get into it. We're gonna dive first into kind of your background. I think we both wanna know about the beginning of your journey. You started in journalism and creative writing and that led you to permaculture and generative agriculture. Can you tell us a bit about how all those things are under your umbrella?

[00:01:25] Nicholas: As a young kid, I had a lot of Legos and I always enjoyed building things. So just having a tool where my mind could run free and you can just use this medium to express yourself was really cool.

And as I grew older, video games like Minecraft also started to form that curiosity with like interacting with the environment. There's so many different points where I'm not sure if now, because I have all of this experience and knowledge, looking back, I can connect the dots or they were shaping me as I grew up.

So even shows like Avatar and earth bending, all of these weird influences, kind of just like add up to saying, "Hey, there's something that you wanna do outside, but you don't really know what it is quite yet." As I grew up, I started out in Boy Scouts with a lot of my close friends, so we would hike, at like 10 years old through The Bahamas, have campfires, so on and so forth. That curiosity about what nature holds because there's so many little beautiful things as you go outside, maybe you see a new bird or you see the way the trees move. I just want it to be outside all the time.

There's another group in high school called the GGYA, the Governor General Youth Awards, which is essentially hiking community service. And you just, just for fun, really, I got to apply those skills from scouts where knot tying, fire making, just being on your feet all day with a rock on your back. I kind of found myself in a leadership role because a lot of people had never been outside before. They didn't know how to make sure their bag was secure.

So, there was a lot of confidence in the GGYA program that I had gained as well as, that's all I would really fantasize about we're high school. It's hot. We had to wear uniforms and listening to my teachers talk, they always thought that I would follow on my father and my sister's footsteps as becoming a doctor. But there was always something that just didn't seem right about being inside, treating people for illnesses that mostly came from poor imported foods and poor quality diets. I'd rather like be an agent for change.

And that's when my commerce teacher said, "If you wanna make money, go into agriculture." And that was like probably one of two things that stuck with me in that class. So, thinking about agriculture, thinking about hiking.

My mom came up to me one day and said, "I wanna start a garden in our backyard." I know my mom's family to be farmers. Her father was a farmer, a very successful farmer in Dominica. He had a farm, but I never knew him.

So I would learn about these family history teachings from my cousin. And she had said the word composting, and that sent me down a rabbit hole on YouTube. How do you live in the forest? How do you live off grid? You have to have a compost. You have to have all of these other things like solar. And I said, what, what is this compost thing?

So my mom and my dad started a garden, but the soil was so thin and so poor that nothing would grow. Guess what came up? And that's, that's really the beginning of composting. There was maybe three years into university. I had started off as a pre-med major. I didn't really enjoy it and I switched to journalism where my good friend John saw that I would go to the cafeteria and just post what's on the menu for lunch so people wouldn't come in, waste a swipe, try something they didn't like and waste the food.

So that was one of the first ways I thought about cutting down on food waste. Whereas the next evolution of that was trying to get university-wide food waste collection. 

[00:04:51] Adam: I love this. So you had basically in your garden, started working with composting at your house, just in order to prove that soil quality. And then that stuck with you when you were in university and you started bringing that in and trying to just make something happen.

[00:05:05] Nicholas: Yeah, I did. I don't know why it stuck with me. Thinking back between the ages of 14 and 18, it was just something I did. I mean, it was cool.

[00:05:13] Adam: How did you learn about it? 

[00:05:14] Nicholas: Just YouTube. There's a YouTube channel called Kirsten Dirksen, and she interviews these people with interesting homes. Everybody goes up to their compost pile and they touch it and they tap it and they said, "This is my compost pile and we put all of the things from the garden in here." And I'm like, how?

So it really just started that way from mimicking what I saw. But it wasn't until my junior year in university that I start researching it. There's a lot of free resources online from the UN and the FAO, so on, and I would download those, read them during the day, study them at night, and found it way more interesting than my university classes.

[00:05:51] Adam: That's super cool. When was your first kind of real hands-on permaculture project?

[00:05:55] Nicholas: My first permaculture project came in the form of like my friend's landscape. They live on a very steep hill, they live near a lake. Part of that lake floods and they wanted to use that water to help with their garden. So we only got to the design phase, unfortunately. But the experience just from dealing with someone and listening to the needs and wants that they want for their land, it was like a huge teaching moment for me because you have to ask certain questions. But getting all of that information out and putting it into a design for them, it was a little scary at first because I had never done anything like this before. 

[00:06:31] Dominique: I like that you mentioned how much you were like new to a lot of this at one point in time, which I think that's been a big part of your success, which we'll get into a bit of that a green champion story of like how good you are at storytelling and explaining a lot of these concepts.

[00:06:46] Nicholas: But where did you turn for resources? So at first there was YouTube videos. I do remember creating the first few piles. And it was all just trial and error. You just throw in a bunch and you cover it, and that was it for a long time, for maybe five years. So half of my half of my composting life was just it in a pile and bury it and forget about it. There was no concept of greens and browns. But after a while, listening and reading the documents, so, the Food and Agriculture Organization, which I guess is a branch of the UN, has some details about composting, how to compost. There's also, I think a 400 page book about farm composting that I ended up finding online which was also a free resource. And I remember like reading through the book and screenshotting things, going into a notebook and taking notes. Then there's maybe some obscure references about, the first time I saw mortality composting, which is like pigs being fully composted in a pile.

I was like, "Oh my goodness. What? What is this magical thing? You're turning a whole, it was 107 pigs that they dumped into a giant wind room. Right?"

[00:07:54] Adam: Wow. 

[00:07:55] Dominique: 107 is a lot more than I thought you were gonna say.

[00:07:57] Nicholas: So something like that really catches your interest. And there was this connection where I wondered, "If people are hungry, can compost cure world hunger?" Very simple thought that I had going through it and I said, if I learn everything about composting, maybe we can make enough to start curing hunger. So that's, that's what really drove me to learn about it in such a way. There was a time when I did not know that compost was a lucrative business. I thought it was just a hobby that people did. 

[00:08:25] Adam: So there's something really interesting here 'cause you started to touch on how, you know this compost really kind of captivates you in a way that's more than just a practice, right? But there's like this philosophy and this, this higher purpose underneath. Can you share a little bit more like what drives you in that?

[00:08:39] Nicholas: I was a very fortunate kid growing up. I had no needs for anything. And one of the ways that manifested itself was my mother would cook lunch for me every day no matter what. So I never went to school hungry. But I did have friends who did go to school hungry. 

[00:08:53] Dominique: I still remember it to this day in her car, half asleep on the drive home. Everybody should be able to eat like all the time, and everybody should have quality food. that was also around the time where there were these, they were almost like fever dream posters of people posting about GMOs and Monsanto. And I'm like,cool. So I just started following the rabbit hole and for a time, when you import food into The Bahamas or most other countries, they have like the export only label on them.

[00:09:24] Nicholas: And that made me wonder, "Okay, is this a lower quality version of what may be sold in the US and is that healthy for us?" You listen to the news and you hear that Bahamians have some of the highest rates of diabetes and obesity and heart failure. Even hearing my dad come home and talk about "Oh, I had a patient who lost their foot today because they're not taking their diabetes medication." A lot of these illnesses are caused by poor diets. 

So it's some of the same things that are going on around the world with just like poor food choices where I would listen to my cousins and my mom and my dad talk about their childhood and they always had like fresh food, fresh bread, fresh crops. Most recently my cousin told me that my grandfather had a farm and he had about 80 employees on it. And I had never known this about him before, but it's like, without even knowing him without any farming influence, I'm starting to follow in that footstep. 

[00:10:17] Dominique: the fact that the food system captivates you in such a way. It feels very connected to your ancestry, to your family, to the things that you've grown up around. And you've found your own way into building better systems in our food system, And I, I wanna talk a bit about the fact that you're doing this in The Bahamas, how has your own connection to that land and the culture of The Bahamas, influenced your work? And I know for me, I'm asking you about the culture side.

Like my family's from Trinidad and Tobago. I understand that my cousins and my family operate so much differently than like my American friends. 

So I'm really curious like what about The Bahamas in specific stands out to you when you think about making this culture shift around composting?

[00:11:01] Nicholas: Woo. That's a really good one. So let me take it back a little bit. Few hundred years ago we were colonized. Basically, our islands were pillaged. So you had a lot of forestry, a lot of aragonite mining, you had a lot of mineral mining. But due to colonization, we had so much forestry logging and so on and so forth. And what really exacerbates that intensive farming is the hurricanes. So living in a tropical country, we have thin sandy loam soil. There's not a lot of clay. It's not held together properly. Especially when you start removing vasts acreage of forests that either took centuries to be built up or was carefully planted by the natives who had been here before colonization because they had proper agroforestry methods, like the milpa farming technique that you see evidence of in South America. That was also done here, but our history has mislabeled it as slash and burn, so it's only telling part of the story.

So now in our social studies textbooks, the Bahamas has poor soil. It is not suited for farming, da, dah, dah, dah, dah. As well as when you read the reports of past colonialists, they wanna grow crops that may not be suited for this climate. So then they also write The Bahamas off as a poor soil destination. My favorite place to visit the national park is the Primeval forest where it's a seven acre forest that has not been touched. You can see the old growth trees. These are some of the biggest native pine trees I've ever seen in my life. Diverse fungi, diverse life, and a lot of bohemians are tree blind. So when they see dense forests, they see bush. And all bush is good for is development. All you gotta do is clear it all and develop it. I don't mean to generalize all Bahamians, of course there's people that care about it, but for the average Bahamian, "Man, that's just bush." But some of these plants are medicinal, some of them are used in boat building, fruit trees, so on and so forth. And getting people to understand that this is a living ecosystem that we have to live with and not hold hostage and bend it to our will is the real challenge here before we can even get to composting. You can't destroy a forest and then plant two trees on it, build a house and say, well, you know, I'm doing my part.

[00:13:20] Dominique: I'm just like thinking about the nature around us as like part of our livelihood as opposed to like, in the way of our livelihood. That is interesting though in terms of like a clear cultural shift that's needed. 

[00:13:33] Nicholas: There's also a lack of garbage bins, in my opinion. I feel as though you should have garbage bins like every 10 feet. Maybe that's a little too close, but the way that you'll see people eating fast food and they just throw the cup out the window, You have people who throw their beer bottles in the road, or if you go and clear a property, I mean, you got 30% beer bottles everywhere. So there's also this culture of littering and not really believing or understanding the impacts of climate change.

[00:14:04] Adam: It sounds a bit like there's this whole set of practices about living and thinking about how you exist with the world that goes beyond just, "Hey, here's permaculture, here's composting, here's all this great stuff." It sounds like there's this other kind of rudimentary set of like, Hey, here's how we just behave with our land in order to live with it and understand it more.

[00:14:22] Nicholas: Definitely. Another reason that I think I got into this is my mom's a very clean lady and. 

[00:14:29] Dominique: I love the through line of your mom's influence on you.

[00:14:32] Nicholas: She's always been supporting from the background.She's silent with her support but she's just letting me do my thing and it just kind of just naturally gravitated towards it.

 Looking back, I can say, I don't wanna call her a clean freak, but her clean freak tendencies have really just shaped like, "Oh, I want the environment to be clean." Like when you go to the beach, you don't wanna risk stepping on rusty nails or broken glass. The Bahamas is so beautiful that you kind of just feel bad when you see trash everywhere. It's so pristine. I mean, the beaches and the clear water, everything that they put on the advertisements is true. But there's also this other side where it's just like, guys, come on. Let's get it together. We live in Paradise. Let's clean up the beach and let's really just enjoy this place.

Tourism is also our number one industry. Last year we had nine plus million tourists visit The Bahamas. And first impressions are lasting impressions. So you wanna have a clean city when people come to visit. I mean, that's 9 million people who set eyes on the country and they're like, "It's not really like the ads. I mean the water's pretty, but there's dirt here and there's grime here."

And I mean, that's true for a lot of places, but we Bahamians, I know Bahamians love to be in the limelight. We have a strong like national pride And I just also wanna push that Bahamian pride forward and cleaning up the city and being an example for good climate practices.

[00:15:53] Adam: It sounds like you've become kind of a, a national icon for composting. I heard that you were selected as a composting specialist on a national project. Can you tell us a little bit about what that was and what that meant to you?

[00:16:03] Nicholas: Yeah. So I was working on a project for the international or the Inter-American Institute for the Cooperation of Agriculture. And it's this huge project that has several entities involved where we're trying to create sustainable land management practices where we have all of this funding to go and create sustainable agriculture, not only systems, but courses where my duty would've been to design composting facilities on islands that have some form of agriculture.

Maybe there's a gap and most times, that gap is some resource reallocation, such as composting and design courses for farmers and students to then start collecting waste and taking it to a composting facility.

So a little bit of context behind that, in The Bahamas, we import over a billion dollars worth of food every year for 400,000 people, plus the tourists, and 400 million of that goes to landfill. We have one and a half proper landfills in the country where we have 26 different inhabited islands plus keys. Some of the islands that I visited had open landfills or open dumps. You take a tractor, a D9 Cat, and you drive six acres into the forest and you just clear maybe 10 to 30 acres and people take their trash there and they either burn it or a fire happens naturally with all of this junk and you just leave it. 

While I was surveying, we, we had decided to go to one landfill that was further away from another landfill. And we're on this like 18 foot boat and it's 11:00 AM and you see the tiniest like whistle or whisper of smoke in the air. And I think around 4:00 PM that same day, we're coming back and you just see like plumes of black smoke across this beautiful island. On the right side you see all of this dark smoke and on the left side you have dolphins just swimming in the water and it's like, "We gotta do better."

[00:17:56] Dominique: That's just deeply sad to think about. Also,you talked a lot about the fact that people are not on average connecting the impact of some of these activities with climate change or things they should be concerned about. What is the conversation around the fact that you only have so much land to deal with and if you max out this landfill that you are relying on really heavily and especially looking at a high tourist location, is there even conversation around the financial opportunity of being resource conscious there's not a lot of resources to pivot to. 

[00:18:31] Nicholas: Honestly, I don't think that conversation is happening, especially on a larger Maybe the government does wanna have that conversation, their connection points just haven't been made yet. Right now there's a big focus on pushing solar power energy and other forms of sustainable tourism, but the landfill has kind of been swept under the rug or put in the back of the people's minds in terms of what that's gonna look like once it's full or if another catastrophe happens.

[00:18:58] Dominique: I really hope there's not another one of those.

[00:18:59] Nicholas: It was a close one. There was a scrap yard on site at the landfill, and that's about three acres. And there was a fire one night. There was a huge fire. And I remember working at the landfill. I remember my boss telling me that they had designed a specific bay for fire equipment in case anything happens.

And new management came in and said, "we don't need all of this fire equipment. Just the truck out front and if a fire happens, we'll deal with it". And to me, that's just not being prepared. You know, as a Boy Scout motto is "be prepared." And I've seen fires happen while working at the landfill, minor fires. So things like batteries and heavy machinery just do not go well together. All that hydraulic energy, it's very quick to start fires at a landfill, especially when there isn't a lot of sorting.

[00:19:47] Adam: Now back to your work a little bit like something that you had mentioned when you were talking about your composting specialist work was that you were doing a lot of education, and it sounds like you started making videos and connecting people across the Caribbean. I'm just curious, like what, what's it like to grow that and to reach more people?

[00:20:03] Nicholas: It is really humbling, honestly, to just have an opportunity to share what I'm passionate about and have people listenreally listen. I mean, it's really nice to just be able to share that in a way. And with people in the Caribbean, there's a sense of solidarity and where I know prices could be higher or people aren't making that much minimum wage is pretty low. Seeing the community that has already been formed by the USCC and the ILSR in composting and what communities already exist between Caribbean countries, I already see the bridge that once more people start composting, there's gonna be this revival of community around taking care of our neighborhoods 

 family members will say, " Bring me seeds for this plant, and bring me seeds for that plant." So there's all of these different avenues or hopes I have for the future where we're just more connected to speak about permaculture, agriculture, composting, and sustainable action.

[00:21:01] Dominique: And I think you just touched on it a little bit, but I wanted to ask you, what's something that you wish more people understood about the connection between soil health and climate change? 

Okay. I'll always start it like this. If there's a storm coming and you don't have any trees or any type of protection, that damage is gonna be way worse than if we had just spent the money and prepped for it or I think a, a news broadcaster had asked me why should I believe in climate change? And you just have to meet somebody where they're at.

[00:21:31] Nicholas: So something as simple as saying, do you have a child? Like how old is your child? Imagine when they reach your age that there's no more kunk left in the water, or like it's unfathomable to live in The Bahamas because there's been so much erosion that your homes will probably go into the sea.

And these are real realities, I'm not trying to fearmonger or I just want people to understand that these are actual possibilities that we can run out of food, like favorite foods. We can lose biodiversity to soil erosion and just poor planning that to live on this island would be basically unfathomable.

I mean, today, right now, it's about 90, 94 degrees with max humidity, probably 85 to 90%. And I'm outside often, this is a different type of sun than we are used to I mean, four or five years ago. I can already tell that the heat is different from being outside.

And there are so many people at risk for heat stroke, for like intense sunburns and so many climate related injuries that you have to do something to get them to understand. When I see somebody and they ask, what do you do? Why is that important? I will stay with that person until they can kind of see a part of that puzzle.

[00:22:42] Dominique: Yeah, that shift from like, we're entitled to the future or we're entitled to all these resources, we have to respect the boundaries of all of these things which I think also kind of leans back to, I think, an earlier comment you made around like, the natural world around us is supposed to like aid in our livelihood. We also have to respect that or it's just not gonna be there. I can attest in the Midwest we've definitely had weeks already that are sitting above 90. So the heat is, is no joke and we're all seeing it. I appreciate the way that you reframed that for us. So thank you. I think Adam has one more question for you.

[00:23:17] Adam: So looking back, what advice would you give your younger self when you first started this journey?

[00:23:22] Nicholas: Don't be so afraid to take a risk. It's okay to fail. It's just compost. Compost is a very slow process and it's a very forgiving one. That is a sentiment that is true throughout the entire business of composting. And a lot of people they're so interested in change. The beautiful thing about it is that Bahamians do want change, but because like I myself did not hear the word compost in the first 14 years of my life and one day it just hit my brain and it got stuck there.

So a lot of other people, they might have known that Grammy used to put food waste in a bucket and it would ferment and she would water the plants, but that knowledge, just that, that language, which is so important to share, is so good. you'd realize that just to get somebody from a different side of the world, to understand your point, you'd have to meet them where they're at. So a lot of times I was too afraid to put myself out there because I didn't think people would receive where I was. So that really slowed me up.

Well, thank you so much for chatting with us. I am really stoked for our next chat where we'll get to hear more about like specifically what you're doing. But it's been really cool to hear kind of starting from Legos and like being interested in building something to really how you are thinking big, big picture about your impact, but doing it in a community and a culture that is so close to home for you. So I just love the way that you're creating this impact. I appreciate you sharing it with us. And if listeners want to support you, how can they connect with you or keep up with youSo you can find me @dacompostking, on TikTok, Twitter or X, Instagram, Facebook. And you can also follow my business page, Soul and Soil on Facebook and Instagram. We have a website, soulandsoilcomposting.com. And if you want to get in touch with me on WhatsApp, you can text the Soul and Soil number at 1242-455-6858.

So if you want to chat with the king, just gimme a ring.

[00:25:25] Dominique: Wow, that that was the best plug we've ever had.

[00:25:28] Nicholas: On the spot.

[00:25:29] Dominique: That was good.

[00:25:30] Adam: That was really cool. Thanks so much for joining us.

[00:25:32] Nicholas: Thank you for having me. I am honored and this was a great chat.

[00:25:36] Adam: Well, I'm excited to dive into Soul and Soil in our next episode. As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We're here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career or interests, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change.

[00:25:49] Dominique: You can find our episodes at thegreenchampions.com. If you wanna stay in the loop, give us a review and follow us in your favorite podcast platform. If you've questions about climate change or sustainability or potentially interested in donating to our podcast, you can find us on our website, thegreenchampions.com.

Our music is by Zayn Dweik. Thanks listening to Green Champions. We'll be digging into the second half of Nicholas's success story in our next episode.