02/28/2026
The Happiest Soil on Earth!
Something most people don't know about Walt Disney World:
It composted. Seriously composted. Four hundred tons of organic waste a day — wastewater biosolids, food scraps, wood chips from constant construction — turned into windrows, managed for temperature and moisture and airflow, run through a trommel screen at the end of eight weeks. The amendment that came out of that process grew two million bedding plants a year: the flowers at the Magic Kingdom entrance, the roadside trees, the nursery beds.
The machine that screened it — a Royer portable trommel, quarter-inch openings — is the machine sitting in our field right now.
We bought it used. We knew it had started its life at Reedy Creek. What we didn't know yet was what we'd find when we followed that thread back to Walt Disney himself.
He said this in 1940: "You never saw a wilderness wrecked by animals. Man does just the opposite. They strip the land of trees and start soil washing into the ocean."
Nineteen forty. Before Earth Day. Before the environmental movement had a name. Before his park was a plan on paper. And Walt Disney was already saying: pay attention to the system. Nothing exists alone. Work with what's there.
That is the entire philosophy of regenerative agriculture, from a man who made cartoons.
Our family has been on this land since 1860. Allen's great-great-grandfather Valentine Fant settled it — 100 acres in Levy County, worked continuously by the same family for 164 years. We know this soil. We know what it was and what it has become and what it needs to become again.
Florida's sandy ground is genuinely among the most nutrient-challenged in North America. Deep quartz sands, almost no organic matter, almost no cation exchange capacity. You can pour synthetic fertilizer on it — and watch the rain carry it straight into the drainage ditches and springs and rivers, feeding the algae blooms that have become a crisis in this state. Or you can return the carbon. Build the biology. Create the pore structure that makes the soil absorb rather than shed, feed the plant rather than the ditch.
That's what composting is. That's what the trommel does. That's what the 100 acres behind us is slowly, measurably, year by year becoming.
Allen — my husband, the no-nonsense one who declined to let us name the trommel — asked three questions when he looked at Levy County's horse bedding problem. What if the barn waste other farms pay to haul away was the solution to the depleted soils? What if composting it correctly was also the solution to the algae blooms? What if this farm was the answer to every stable's waste problem — and their waste was the answer to ours?
Those three questions are why this operation exists. Everything follows from them.
This week’s post in The Common Ground — our new blog about the science and story of living soil — is live. It's about a machine, and a man, and the philosophy they share.
It's also about why what we do here matters: not just for our fields, but for the springs, the rivers, the water every person downstream depends on.
We'd love for you to read it. We'd love even more for you to share it with anyone who gardens, anyone who's curious about Florida's soils, or anyone who has ever wondered why the springs look the way they look.
The answer starts in the ground.
🌱 Fant Farm Organics · Levy County, Florida · fantfarmorganics.com
We bought it used but loved, knowing it had started its life at Walt Disney World. Then we followed the thread back — and found Walt Disney's own words about soil and nature that stopped us cold.We bought it used but loved, knowing it had started its life at Walt Disney World. Then we followed the...
