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Monday, July 7, 2025

Charlestown's Earth Care Farms expands with a great new project

Abandoned Connecticut Quarry to be Transformed Into Soil Farm

By Frank Carini / ecoRI News staff

Jayne Merner with her father, Mike, and Birdie at
Earth Care Farm’s Connecticut site.
(Sterling Tougas)
The first family of Rhode Island composting, in search of land to expand their 48-year operation, wound up across the border in the Constitution State.

Jayne Merner, daughter of Mike, the founder of Charlestown, R.I.-based Earth Care Farm, recently told ecoRI News the decision to move to Connecticut was based on land availability, lack of neighbor pressure, and costs. She also said the search was narrowed because they didn’t want to use “good land” and they didn’t want to cut down trees.

They found just the spot, on Newport Road in this small Windham County town. The former gravel pit in northeastern Connecticut was just what the second-generation compost farmer was searching for. 

The 241-acre site needs plenty of work, but the transformation from abandoned gravel yard that features cornfields lost to meadows of mugwort and a cemetery of rocks of all shapes and sizes will begin on 14 acres at the property’s entrance.

For nearly five decades, the Merner family, led by Mike, has played the role of an organic alchemist, making a living turning zoo and stable manure, wood chips, leaves, straw shavings, seaweed, fish guts, coffee grounds, and food scrap into soil.

This nutrient-rich compost helps meet the needs of New England farmers looking for soil enrichment. The Earth Care Farm operation currently generates about 5,000 cubic yards annually of compost certified by the Organic Materials Review Institute. Some 25,000 tons of yard debris, manures, and food scrap is processed to make that compost.

The benefits of organic compost include increased soil fertility, better balanced soil pH, and improved chemical makeup of the soil. It also creates a healthy habitat for microorganisms, and increases drainage, aeration, and the water-holding capacity of soil — all factors that help plants better withstand weather extremes and disease.

Earth Care Farm’s existing composting operation in southern Rhode Island uses 3 acres for its six-stage compost production process and employs four full-time staff and seasonal help.

Merner noted that, with a customer base of 5,000 regional growers, demand has increasingly exceeded production capacity. Hence, the search for more room.

“We’ve been selling out of batches of compost for the last five years. I’ve been wanting to just keep that supply going for the gardening and farming community,” Merner said prior to giving ecoRI News a recent tour of the property. “There’s just so much material out in the world that should be composted. This was just the right place at the right time.”

The Sterling operation will model the Charlestown facility, focusing on the processing of collected materials using thermophilic, windrow composting methods. This new facility, when operational, is anticipated to accept 500 tons of material weekly, according to Merner, to produce about 25,000 tons of compost annually.

“The same operation,” Merner said. “Just bigger.”

It took Merner more than two years to find this quiet gravel pit on a mostly residential street just over the Rhode Island line from Coventry and some 30 miles from Earth Care Farm.

“I looked for two years in Rhode Island and almost rented a site in Richmond, and then it just wasn’t quite working out and I couldn’t find something with enough buffer that I felt comfortable with neighbors,” she said. “I didn’t want to take good farmland and transform it for compost. I was really looking for something unique.”

One of Earth Care Farm’s employees, Justin Boss, suggested looking in Connecticut. They found the gravel bank on Zillow; it had been on the market for about a year. They drove up two days before Christmas 2023 to check it out.

“Just coming down the driveway [dirt with plenty of bumps] felt so similar to the driveway at Earth Care Farm,” Merner said. “Then we pulled up and there was a scale and a scale house. I’ve always wanted a weigh station at the farm to make it easier for trucks to not have to stop at weigh stations. It just felt perfect.”

The real estate agent drove them around fallow cornfields and a stone quarry, and showed them a forest and ponds.

“The potential was so amazing,” Merner said. “It was almost like too expansive for my mind to wrap around. But I knew if I could just focus on this, get this going, and then we’re gonna keep on dreaming about what happens with the other parts of the land. I’m just super focused now on the 14-acre piece.”

The cost to expand the farm’s composting operation was $1.5 million. The sale became official in April 2024.

To move forward with its Connecticut composting operation, Earth Care Farm was required to obtain seven permits through municipal and state government. Six have been approved. The last one, the operation’s solid waste permit application, was filed in late April and it could take up to nine months to be approved. It cost $10,000 to apply.

On the day ecoRI News was given a tour, Merner’s boyfriend — coincidentally named Sterling — was there helping prepare the site for future composting, and dog Birdie was busy laying about. Mike arrived shortly after, to star in an Earth Care Farm video about the importance of composting.

“He just let me run with it, but I think he thinks I’m a little bit nuts,” Merner said of her father’s take on the expansion into Connecticut. “There’s a massive amount of work I’ve got coming.”

Her dad, an experienced farmer, certainly understands the need for more composting infrastructure, but the 75-year-old, looking out over 241 acres of space — for comparison, Earth Care Farm is 27 acres — could be forgiven for being a bit overwhelmed.

“I think it’s pretty urgent,” Mike said of putting food scrap and other organic material to better use. “I think with the climate crisis that we need more composting and conscious sequestering of carbon.”

His daughter noted that as the amount of farmland in the region continues to dwindle — mostly lost to large, unaffordable homes and ground-mounted solar arrays — the need for nutritious compost will only be greater. She hopes to turn this used and abused property into an operation that helps restore soil elsewhere.

During her flirtation with Connecticut, Merner learned the state doesn’t have much in the way of composting infrastructure.

“There’s a large yard material composting facility, and there’s a couple of pilot programs starting up,” she said. “This permit application is the first large-scale, food-scrap composting permit in the state.”

Merner, 44, and her team have plenty of work ahead, but they are up for the challenge.

“There’s moments of pure excitement. It’s so exhilarating,” Merner said. “And then it’s super overwhelming … and the amount of debt I put myself in.”