- If you're like me,
you've probably seen this device all over the internet.
This is a Lomi Composter,
and it is the device you guys have sent me the most
over the past year or so.
So in this video, I'm gonna go through
a ton of different tests,
and even have a special guest on
to talk about if it's worth it
for a home gardener.
So cultivate that like button for bacterial decomposition,
and let's get into the video.
So as a home gardener,
with obviously a pretty large compost bin here,
as well as a chicken coop,
what would a Lomi do for me?
Well, what is it?
It's touted as a countertop composter,
and basically what you do
is you pop the top open,
you've got this little bucket in here,
and you toss in things like food scraps,
or as you'll see later,
you can actually toss in a couple different,
more interesting things,
and then choose a mode,
one of the three modes it has,
press the button,
and then magically you get
what they call dirt
coming out the other side.
So some of the benefits that are described are,
no smell,
you don't have to turn a compost bin,
you don't have pests getting in here,
it's a lot quicker,
and that is all true.
From a gardener's perspective,
what comes out the other side
isn't technically compost,
and at least in my opinion,
it's not even like a dirt product.
I like to call it a pre-compost.
But if you don't have the space
for something as large as a system like mine,
even a compost tumbler,
or certainly a chicken coop,
it starts to look like an attractive option.
To be clear, I was not paid or sponsored to review the Lomi.
This is our unbiased review of it.
What I'm gonna do is take it through
three different composting modes,
the three that it offers,
with four different ingredient mixtures,
including the bag it actually came in,
which is a bioplastic.
(upbeat music)
The Lomi approved cycle is done.
So about five to eight hours worth of runtime.
So let's open this up and see what we have.
I'm pretty sure this yellow stringy material
is the bioplastic,
which, I have to say,
it's pretty well broken down.
Maybe you could run it even through twice
and see what happens with it.
We've got some cardboard,
and then we have the citrus.
And I have to say it's like
kind of hard to identify what everything is.
It seems relatively well broken down.
So I'm gonna take this out,
and put something new in.
This time I'm gonna try a more realistic input of
some snack foods, some peppers,
just some food waste, and some greens.
So all this is gonna go in right now.
And we'll run it again and see what comes out.
So right now I have it on the eco express mode,
which is the faster and higher heat,
and if I press down and hold,
I'll get to the Lomi mode,
which is what we just ran for the bioplastics.
I want to go over to the grow mode,
which is the slowest and lowest heat setting,
and run that.
So while that batch is running,
you guys have sent me a million questions about this thing,
and quite frankly, I have have a few myself.
So I figured I'd ask the guy
that I saw in all of the ads
to answer them for me right here at the Homestead.
(whoosh)
And here he is.
This is Matt, the CEO of Lomi, here at the Homestead.
The first question I have for you, Matt, is,
do I need one of these things?
(Matt laughs)
- Dude, we're in front of a chicken coop.
You do not need a Lomi, no.
- I don't need a Lomi.
The CEO's telling me I don't need one.
- No.
- So why don't I need one?
- I mean, I'm looking around your property here,
and you've got four or five compost bins,
you have chickens.
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- [Matt] I mean, you've put the work in,
and you do the right thing,
which is like, do it the old way.
- Yeah.
- There's nothing better than that.
- So if I'm a composter already,
there's not really a need for it,
because why would I if I already have a system?
- The only ones that will have a Lomi,
that we've seen-
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- They live in cold climates. Right?
So the piles don't really work in the winter.
- In the summertime, in the springtime,
they're still composting.
- Oh yeah.
- As soon as you get to fall, winter,
they switch over to the Lomi,
and then they'll use the breakdown material,
and just dump it in and wait for spring?
- Yeah.
- That's the only ones I've seen.
- [Kevin] Okay.
- Like, so 75% of our, like users of Lomi-
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- Do not have some kind of compost.
- So it's like a gateway drug
into a composting world, right? In a way?
- I sell a drug.
- [Kevin] Yeah.
(Matt laughing)
- Compost drug.
- It's a better drug than most, right?
It's a better drug than most.
- Yeah. It's better for the planet.
Probably better for you. Yeah.
- Okay. Let's take a look at the food scraps
now that they are done.
It's honestly pretty darn compressed.
Take a look at this,
and it kind of looks as broken down
as I guess I could expect it.
Let's dump it out on this plate here.
About every three cycles,
you should remove all
of what I'm gonna start calling the pre-compost,
which is this material here.
Just so you don't clog this up.
But I'm gonna mix this in with another batch later on.
And for now,
I'm gonna go ahead and put in some leaves
to see how quickly I can break those down.
Just pure leaves.
We'll see what happens.
Is it actually doing something,
because you're plugging it in,
you're using electricity,
you had to make the device.
- Yeah.
- Et cetera, et cetera.
So it's almost like, could I just not?
- Our goal is climate impact.
What you're asking is if you,
if something using electricity,
is that bad or good?
Right?
So the way the UN looks at this is everything
is measured against food waste going to landfill.
But for a lot of people they don't know,
like when food goes to a landfill,
it's gonna break down in an oxygen-starved environment.
- [Kevin] Anaerobic.
- [Matt] Anaerobic.
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- [Matt] And then that produces methane.
Produces methane and nitrous oxide.
- [Kevin] Okay.
- Methane is like 84 times worse than CO2.
The stuff that comes out of the back of your car,
for example.
So if you can keep food waste out of a landfill,
it's a huge win.
- [Kevin] We're done with our leaf test.
So what's interesting about this,
is that it pretty much looks and feels
sort of of like a coconut core type of product.
I'll dump it all out here,
and you can see it's really well broken down.
It's sort of just a way to crunch leaves.
They're already dry.
I don't necessarily think you would have to use the Lomi
for something like this,
but it is kind of a nice texture here.
And you can mix this into a soil mix
in place of maybe a core or a peat.
I'm assuming you've gotten all these questions before.
- All of 'em. Yeah.
- Why does it cost what it costs?
- It's like any new technology, though.
They typically start off more expensive.
Our goal long term is like,
I wanna make this thing so accessible.
I think we have two years
until I can drop the price of this
pretty aggressively.
And that's a-
- Is it a function of scale?
Economies of scale?
- It is.
And it's also parts, like, what's in here-
- Yeah.
- Is not something I can just go out and buy.
Like-
- It's, it's all custom parts?
- We had to create like our own tooling,
our own manufacturing lines.
There's parts in here that just didn't exist.
So like cost,
the engineering that goes into it is high.
The manufacturing costs
when you're building something totally new, high.
So even the next version of Lomi that's coming out,
like its cost is a little higher than this one,
in our manufacturing costs.
- Yeah.
- But the machine's technology
is getting significantly more advanced.
- Ah.
- Like the sensors, and like, because-
- How it knows when to start,
when to shift, or stop-
- Oh and even, imagine like managing,
So this does an okay job of managing humidity.
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- Right?
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- And airflow.
The next one is like,
it'll be able to detect what's in there,
but I'll know like the water content.
- You'll know like this batch is more moist
than the last batch.
- So like we can actually tailor make the output.
- Ah, okay.
So we've done a couple weirder tests
that aren't super representative
of what might be in your kitchen.
So let's do one more
kind of pure play test with kitchen scraps
that you might find after a night of cooking.
Some eggshells, coffee grounds, kitchen scraps,
from the garden and the kitchen.
Probably the most useful test here.
So in we go.
We'll fill it all the way up,
maybe a little bit over here.
So I'm gonna have to make sure I don't go over the line.
On goes our top
and it looks like I'm on the mode
that I don't want to be on.
So I'm gonna move it over to the grow mode,
which is supposed to produce sort of ready-made,
pre-compost right here.
So this actually brings up a really interesting question
of, is it a bread maker?
Because you've seen it online.
I'm sure you've seen it.
Is this coming from a bread maker manufacturer?
- No. We tried.
- [Kevin] They tried.
- So, I tried to get a blender manufacturer.
- [Kevin] Yeah
- A bread maker.
An oven maker.
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- [Matt] Because, so, this is like
some weird combination between like
a Dyson fan humidifier thing-
- [Kevin] Because the air needs to, you need the oxygen-
- [Matt] It needs to move air in and out-
- [Kevin] And it needs to get in and out. Yeah.
- Yeah.
If it didn't, wasn't fully oxygenated the entire time,
it just, it would be anaerobic.
- Okay.
- Which is bad.
If we didn't have that, it wouldn't work.
It's a combination of that, oven.
There's a turnstile in it
that's constantly turning.
Right?
It's not like-
- [Kevin] So you're sort of crushing-
- [Matt] It's not a blade.
It's kind of like it's crushing,
and making sure that things move.
- Yeah.
- A bread maker.
We've actually made videos
that like show the difference in output.
- You ran it against a bread maker.
- Oh my god. It's not even close.
- Cool.
- It's, yeah.
Or like people like, oh it's just an oven.
Just stick the food in your oven.
I'm like, you know what?
You could throw rotten food in your oven all you want.
- See how it works. Yeah.
- Knock yourself out.
- Yeah.
Okay. Let's check out the final batch.
This was our compost materials batch.
And right out of the gate,
there's a lot of material here, so let's dump it in.
Honestly, it's a lot of material.
It's more than I thought there would be.
And it kind of looks the same as everything else.
But let's go ahead and compare and contrast
the four different tests.
Here's where we started.
This is the bioplastic right here.
This is actually the container
and wrapping that the Lomi came in.
There's some cardboard in here as well as some citrus rinds.
And I have to say,
obviously the particle size is much larger.
I think if I double ran the bioplastic
it would've broken down a little bit better.
But needless to say this, this still would break down
if you threw it in the compost.
So this is sort of like a rougher mix,
but it seems like it still worked.
This one here was our snacks.
This was just sort of random stuff,
like chips and other food trimmings.
It's very fine,
and you can still see a little bit of fiber in here,
but for the most part it's pretty well ground up.
Now this one is interesting.
This is just leaves.
So maybe a way to make some finely ground
browns in a compost,
like a traditional composting system
didn't need to be desiccated,
'cause the leaves were already dry.
But this is very finely ground.
Almost smells a little bit like tea,
which is kind of odd to be honest with you.
And then this last one
is probably the most realistic composition
that would've gone into the Lomi,
if you were to get one and use it at home.
This is just standard food scraps.
So, some eggshells,
you can see a couple of the chips in there.
And then just some normal food scraps.
This one, the texture is very fine,
but I think the thing to remember is
all four of these are not technically
dirt, or compost, at least from a gardener's perspective.
These are more pre-compostable materials,
where the surface area is way, way bigger.
'Cause the particle size is smaller,
and they are broken down to some degree.
And if you put any of these in the ground or in a system,
they'll break down a lot faster.
It's called the Lomi Composter.
- [Matt] Yeah.
- Right? But what comes out is not technically compost.
- [Matt] It's like pre-com compost.
It's like it's, we call it dirt.
It's like the beginning of the process.
- Yeah.
- But in a day you're not finishing the pro-
- No. You can't.
- The maturation part of compost takes months.
- It takes a long time.
- Yeah.
- Yeah. I mean honestly, most of us when we hot compost-
- Yep.
- Almost everyone, unless you're Charles Dowding,
who's one of my sort of gardening idols,
you're not you're not even ending up
with finished compost at the end.
- No.
- Like the stuff that we spread on our yard,
even the stuff we order in that's commercially made.
- [Matt] Yeah.
- [Kevin] I would say it's 85% of the way there.
But to get, it's like anything,
like going from zero to 80 usually kind of easy.
- [Matt] Yep.
- Going from 80 to a hundred usually takes a lot longer.
So even for us,
like the finished compost that we're home making-
- [Matt] Yeah.
- It's 80%, 85% finished.
- Yeah. Our goal with this was not to like,
it wasn't to try to get rid of compost.
- [Kevin] Yeah. Yeah.
- Like that's a silly, it's also silly, it works perfectly-
- [Kevin] It also doesn't make sense. Yeah.
- No it doesn't make sense.
The goal was can you get a finished product
that has the same functional utility?
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- As compost?
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- Like that's it.
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- So it's like if you're a gardener,
like this can produce the utility
that you're looking for from compost.
- Because I'm not as educated
as probably many people maybe watching,
or maybe yourself,
about the way that carbon stuff is calculated.
- Oh yes.
- So like how do you compare,
like the manufacturing of the unit
plus the electricity
and then the constant run times into,
I don't know
just like throwing it in the trash
or something like that?
- Two, there's two variables that make this
either carbon negative or carbon positive.
Carbon positive, bad
- [Kevin] Bad.
- Right?
So almost all scenarios, this is carbon negative.
The one scenario in which I would say
you should, we tell people please don't do this.
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- [Matt] So if this was powered on like dirty energy,
say you're like living in a state or a city
where all your energy's coming from coal.
- [Kevin] Okay.
- [Matt] You run your food through a Lomi,
you take the food,
and you throw it in the actual garbage bag
and it goes to landfill.
- [Kevin] Yeah that wouldn't make sense.
- That's carbon positive.
That's actually bad.
- [Kevin] Yeah, 'cause you'd,
why waste the energy to do it if you-
- Just use power for no reason-
- For no reason.
- [Matt] Dirty power.
- Yeah, exactly.
- [Matt] That's even worse.
The second thing is where do you put the dirt?
So like most people who are buying this have a yard.
And if they don't have a yard,
they live in an apartment,
and they have,
either they have lots of plants, or they have access.
Like in New York, we have a weird following of people
who have community gardens that they go and participate in.
- Oh, so they'll just bring it down
and dump it in the soil.
- Yeah. Or like schools.
- Yeah.
- Or like, you know, they bring it somewhere.
- Yeah.
- 'Cause it's not, it's not very heavy.
So what we like to see
and what makes for great positive impact
is if you mix it into soil.
- [Kevin] That's what makes sense to me too.
- Yeah.
- We had, so our editor-in-chief for our blog
had the original Lomi that came out
like way back in the day.
And what she found is, basically,
came to the same conclusion, not compost yet.
- Nope.
- Pre-compost.
- Yep.
- And what she would do is she'd have cardboard boxes
coming in from Amazon or whatever.
- Yep.
- So she'd cross-cut shred those.
- [Matt] Yeah.
- So they wouldn't get to the same particle size,
but they get kind of close.
- Close enough.
- She like will do that,
and then she'll water it in,
and she'll let basically a microcosm
of composting activity start to happen.
- Yep.
- And she'll kind of consolidate consolidate, consolidate.
And eventually she'll have like a bucket of-
- Yep.
- Truly compost material.
- More mature compost.
- Farther down the line.
- Yeah.
And you want a real party trick?
We add in like those paper-based Uber eats containers.
- Oh yeah. Or like a spoon or something like that?
- Yeah, like some of those like paper-based,
like pressed paper materials.
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- Those actually are really good in the machine.
- [Kevin] Interesting. Interesting.
- Yeah, 'cause it's serving the function of like
what you would typically do with your browns.
So there's a lot of those materials.
We're, our hope, our big dream-
- Yeah.
- Is that we can create like a great index for people
to reference any kind of compostable product-
- Put this in, don't put this in, that kind of thing?
- Like this is, yeah.
It's like if you were go to a supermarket
and you saw something was compostable.
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- That like you could take our app,
scan it, and it would tell you-
- [Kevin] Oh that would interesting.
- Like that's the, like-
- [Kevin] If you apped it that would be cool.
- Yeah. We're trying.
- [Kevin] That would be cool.
- We're working on it.
It's just, it's, there's a lot of stuff out there.
- Yeah. Well Matt, thank you for coming down
to the epic homestead
to talk about the Lomi.
- This such a cool spot.
- Yeah, no, I appreciate it.
So the takeaway really, let's leave them with something.
Should Kevin buy one?
- You should not.
- Should Piper on our team
who lives in a New York apartment
and loves to garden on her balcony, buy one?
- We love New Yorkers. Yes.
- Yeah, there you go.
So it's not for everyone.
It is for some people.
And it can be a great
stepping stone into the world that we live in.
- Gateway drug.
- It's a gateway drug
to the epic gardening lifestyle.
Thanks for coming on Matt.
You heard it from the man himself, the Lomi,
it's not a product for me,
but that actually makes a lot of sense.
But the Epic Gardening team,
three members in particular,
really love the Lomi.
First off we have Piper
who's on our marketing team.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York
in an urban apartment
and has a beautiful balcony garden.
So for her, what she'll do is she'll cook,
she'll use the Lomi to break down the food scraps,
get them in a pre-com compostable state,
and then she'll bury those back
into her grow bags or her balcony beds.
And it works really well
because those actually don't go into the waste stream.
They go straight back into a balcony garden.
That's a great use case if you can afford it,
'cause it is a little pricey,
and you're in sort of a more cramped space.
Kind of like the space I used to grow in.
Next up we have Lauren who runs our blog.
She did a review of the Lomi about a year ago or so.
And what she did is she'll take the food scraps,
and then she'll mix in
two to one shredded up cardboard
to those foods scraps,
add a little water,
maybe a little bacterial inoculate.
And it actually turns into a really nice
semi-finished to nearly finished compost
given enough time.
And then she'll toss that in her raised beds.
So kind of a way to speed up the composting process,
given that you actually don't get, in my opinion,
pure compost out of the Lomi.
You still have to break it down even further.
It just speeds it up a lot,
'cause of the surface area being dramatically increased.
The most interesting one, at least to me as a gardener,
is Brianna over at Blossom and Branch Farm
who is our resident flower grower.
She's also not a big fan of using peat moss,
but she starts a ton of flowers.
So what she likes to do
is a method called soil blocking,
where you're not using a tray,
you're kind of just using this machine
that's actually available on our store.
It's like a soil blocking tray.
It squeezes out these little blocks
that you then use to start seeds in.
So instead of peat, she'll run a Lomi round,
kind of a mixture of fallen leaves,
maybe some scraps, et cetera,
has a peaty type of texture.
And she'll use that when she's making
her DIY soil blocking mix.
So there are some really interesting use cases for the Lomi.
Maybe it's not for me,
but it might be for you,
if number one, you can afford it,
or any of those interesting use cases
that I just described
fit your lifestyle.
So, that was the Lomi review.
Now you guys can stop sending this to me
and telling me to review it.
And until next time, good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.