Open Arsenal

Open Economics for Organic Resource Recovery

OrganicWorks is a specification for building profitable businesses around the recovery and productive use of organic materials. It provides a comprehensive economic framework for collecting, processing, composting, vermicomposting, blending, packaging, distributing, and selling materials such as manure, bedding, agricultural residues, and other suitable organic feedstocks. The model treats these materials as potential economic inputs rather than simply as waste requiring disposal.

OrganicWorks follows the material and money through the entire business cycle, from available feedstock through collection, transportation, processing, production losses, finished-product yield, packaging, distribution, and sales. It calculates labor, equipment, facility, storage, maintenance, insurance, financing, and operating costs alongside revenue, margins, profit, break-even points, required sales, working capital, and startup capital. The specification can also compare different product pathways, including conventional compost, worm castings, blended products, bulk materials, and packaged products.

The system is designed for producers at every stage of development, from a one-person owner-operated business to a small commercial operation, regional producer, or enterprise-scale organization. It helps determine the smallest viable operation that can be started with available capital, the feedstock required to support it, the equipment and labor needed to operate it, and the conditions that justify expansion. Businesses can model conservative, expected, and growth scenarios before committing capital and compare production capacity with available supply and market demand.

OrganicWorks also incorporates supplier management, market intelligence, competitive price comparison, wholesale and retail economics, delivery and route profitability, equipment utilization, inventory planning, demand forecasting, and business optimization. Calculations and recommendations are designed to remain transparent, with assumptions, costs, revenues, constraints, margins, and alternative scenarios available for review. Human operators retain control over commercial decisions, allowing OrganicWorks to function as an economic planning and decision-support framework for turning organic resource recovery into sustainable business value.

This specification is released under the AGPL-3.0+ and is free to use with required Section 7 attribution. Attribution-free deployment is available through a Specification Branding License, with fees based on use and deployment scope.