From food waste to food abundance | Prema Walker | TEDxRancho Mirage

Prema Walker, Founder and CEO of Prema’s Permaculture & Composting, outlines a durable model for local social entrepreneurship based on California's organic waste diversion law. She details how her proof-of-concept urban farm has successfully diverted over 700,000 pounds of organic waste from landfills to model micro-scale agricultural sustainability. Prema Walker is the Founder and CEO of Prema's Permaculture & Composting in the Coachella Valley. She grew up in India watching her grandfather farm land he had worked his entire life without ever building lasting financial security from it. When she settled in the Coachella Valley in 2020, she saw the same story among local growers, and it became one of the reasons she built her business.
She built that business on California's SB 1383, the state law mandating that organic waste be diverted from landfills. Recognizing that the mandate created a durable market, she has, since 2021, diverted more than 700,000 pounds of organic material from landfills, composting it and returning it to the communities that generated it. That work has secured roughly $275,000 in competitive funding while creating jobs, growing food, opening green spaces for communities,
and cutting the emissions that landfills release. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx