Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Fertilizer prices putting manure in the limelight
by Gene Logsdon 16 Dec 2010 11:32 AM
http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-12-16-fertilizer-prices-putting-manure-in-the-limelight

I never thought I'd see the day when shit -- the bodily kind -- would make 
headlines the way it is right now.

When my book about managing manure, Holy Shit, came out recently, erstwhile 
friends grinned and remarked, "You've been shooting the bull all your life 
so, sure, why not write a book about it?"

But this time what I'm writing is definitely not B.S. The current fertilizer 
crisis is real. Chemical fertilizer prices rise and fall with every change of 
pulse in supply and demand, but they are definitely on a long-term rise -- 
not only because production and transportation costs are increasing, but 
because of anticipated shorter supplies in the future. People talk about Peak 
Oil, but we're also at Peak Fertilizer. Without plenty of some kind of 
fertilizer, there will not be enough food to go around. The headline hype is 
not just overreaction from the press: recently farming news sources such as 
DTN were reporting all over their networks about how international traders in 
phosphorous and potash are elbowing for bigger chunks of the remaining 
fertilizer pie.

I would like to puff up and brag about how smart I must be to see this 
coming, but actually for anyone who has milked cows for a living like I have, 
it's a no-brainer. Although I spent an awful lot of time in classrooms 
studying weird subjects like theology and anthropology, my real education 
began as a hired man for a dairy farmer in Minnesota, who was very astute and 
rather wealthy, too. He made money even though the bright boys at the 
university would say he was backward. He still used horses for much of his 
farm power, and he didn't use any "bought" fertilizer. As a farm boy from 
Ohio who thought he knew a thing or two about farming, I was surprised to see 
how well his corn grew anyway.

My employer smirked when I said as much, and patiently explained to me that 
the gods of manure and legumes could keep a farm profitable by keeping the 
farmer independent of all those agribusiness suppliers who so much wanted to 
lead him to the poorhouse. Since then, my own experience milking a hundred 
cows has taught me the same lesson. Manure can be the key to real farming 
success. It not only fertilizes the crop but also builds organic matter, the 
secret to sustainable agriculture. As Edward Janus says in his new book, 
Creating Dairyland, in the days before chemical fertilizers, wheat farming 
nearly impoverished Wisconsin, until it became a leading dairy state.

"You might say that manure was the poop that saved Wisconsin," writes Janus.

I firmly believe manure will be the salvation of the whole world in the days 
after chemical fertilizers run short. That's why I call it holy.

Janus' book also describes a very large dairy and cheese factory business 
that uses its manure to produce methane, generating enough electricity from 
it to power the business and some 450 residential homes. The amount of 
electricity generated is valued at $300,000, a very impressive number. The 
cost of producing those kilowatts is, however, is not offered. In fact, from 
all the research I've been able to do, there isn't any proof yet of 
profit-generating electricity from methane. But even if this idea does become 
profitable, what if the manure used is worth $300,000 for fertilizer, or even 
half that? Will we use such manure to make light bulbs glow or bodies grow?

Stories about holy shit are popping up all over the Internet. Last week, 
Treehugger reported that the Soil Association, a venerable organic farming 
organization in England, had just released a study concluding that we are 
approaching "peak phosphorus" as early as 2033. In addition, deposits of 
potash in Canada, our usual and handiest source of another necessary plant 
nutrient, are declining by all accounts. Commercial nitrogen fertilizer, the 
third of the big three plant nutrients, is manufactured almost entirely with 
natural gas, which has an increasing number of competing uses. Tell me: If 
you heat with gas, are your bills going down these days?

But I suppose the naysayers will have evidence that we have plenty of 
fertilizer left, just as they say that we have plenty of oil deep down in the 
bowels of the Earth, under the oceans.

The point is, no matter what, as population and the cost of business both 
rise, sources of chemical fertilizer will become harder to get at and more 
expensive to process and deliver to the farm. The value of manure will rise 
along with the price of chemical fertilizers but without nearly as much 
increase in their application costs. Throwing away billions of dollars of 
human and animal manure that could be used for fertilizer, plus who knows how 
much money spent in the throwing, is no longer a sane option.

One bright spot is that scientists have found a way to extract phosphorous 
from human sewage to use as fertilizer. But the method is expensive. Another 
alternative is using properly treated sludge directly on farmland, a practice 
that the National Academy of Sciences has twice approved.

But many farmers and environmentalists balk at the use of biosolids, pointing 
out that there is too much danger yet from sludge contaminated with 
pollutants that humans throw away down their toilets, including 
pharmaceuticals. And their point is well taken. We need to find a proper way 
to separate the manure from the heavy metals. However, culturally speaking, 
we are still victims of the flush-it-and-forget-it culture. If we can learn 
to live with our own human manure (and see the benefits from its proper 
application), we'll realize we're sitting on a gold mine. Literally. 
[Editor's note: Grist agrees -- see our coverage of "humanure" and our 
special series on poop.]

The same problem will no doubt come from fertilizing with animal manures from 
large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations. It's not as simple as 
taking crap from CAFOs.

However, while these operations couldn't give their manure away a few years 
ago, now farmers close enough to afford the transportation costs are lining 
up to buy it, because it's being sold cheaper than chemical fertilizers. If 
this practice grows, factory-animal manure will come under closer scrutiny, 
and well it should. Indeed, it bears its own risks because of the levels of 
antibiotics and other additions to the feed and insecticides used in the 
buildings and on the grounds.

In fact, I remember clearly about 15 years ago, soils on which poultry manure 
from large-scale operations had been spread were found to be so highly 
contaminated with copper -- which if I remember correctly was being added to 
the chickens' water. Farming had to be suspended on that land.

In other words, it's not as simple as just taking the manure and spreading 
it. We need to know where the manure comes from, how it was treated, and what 
the lives of the animals that excreted it were like. Otherwise we'll just 
encourage the production of poop on a massive scale, for production's sake, 
reinforcing an agricultural system that doesn't value animals, a healthy 
environment, or sustainability in any way.

The key is re-imagining our current system into something that values manure 
as the holy, healthful, fertilizing substance it is. Sustainable shit, in 
other words, is the only holy kind.