Manure

the secret life of poop

Manure

Tis compost season here on the farm so I thought I would talk about one of my favorite subjects, poop. Manure is the life blood of the farm. It makes the world go around and everybody just takes a dump and then takes it for granted. I consider myself a manure connoisseur . Most of my working days I am dealing with some kind of excrement. I know the smells, the textures, and the uses for many types of poop. Poop, shit, crap, doo doo, ick, muck, manure, whatever you call it our ecosystems depend on it to recycle nutrients and feed the plants to do what animals can not do, exchange atmospheric gases and solar energy. Manure is the key to unlocking the fertility of inert rocks, and non noble gases.

We often joke that our farm is oxen powered in more ways than one. We don’t just rely on oxen for the muscle to pull things around the farm. We also use them to produce the manure that is essential to our composting operation. In turn that compost is utilized in our cropping system and the cycle returns to the soil. During our wet winters I bring the oxen into the barn and we work with them every day. Their time in the barn is when we collect and compost all of the bedding and build massive compost piles.

Compost is my life's work. If you look at the root of the word compost it is the same as compose, composition, and it means to put things together. I am a composer of carbon. I am utilizing raw materials to create something greater than the sum of their parts. The manure is the key element in that equation. In theory I could create compost with pure nitrogen like urea and almost pure carbon like sawdust but it would not have the same quality as compost made from cattle manure. The manure gives the compost its life and vigor because it is full of life.

Why is cow manure thought of as the best of the best when it comes to barnyard manures? Chicken manure is higher in nitrogen,and pig is higher in phosphorus, but cattle manure is the most well rounded of the manures. In fact if you just had a pile of cow patties they would compost beautifully and would give you all the nutrients needed for plant growth. But the true power of cow manure starts in the rumen. This is the key to the breakdown of fibrous plant material. The amazing ecosystem of the rumen is like a rainforest in its diversity of microorganisms. It is a thriving and abundant web of biological interconnection and this power is transferred out of the body in the glorious form of a cow pie.

In a brittle ecosystem, one that lacks consistent moisture across the year, cattle provide the necessary ecosystem function that a rainforest provides. They recycle nutrients in the wet and active fermentation chamber of the rumen and keep the mineral cycle going. Without ruminants brittle ecosystems simply start to decline because of the second law of thermodynamics. The way the energy is stored and exchanged is through the contents of the manure. Grasslands evolved to have ruminants transferring solar energy from the plant growth back into the soil through manure. If you remove the animals from the system none of the nutrients are recovered and the ecosystem declines. Poop is the answer.

Cow manure is abundant and rich with all of the necessities of life. In brittle environments it will also dry down and store the energy to be used later. This can happen when the rain reconstitutes the dry cow pie or when it is burned for fuel. Cow dung is an important heating and cooking fuel in various parts of the world. It stores the carbon in stasis like a tree and like a tree it can be burned to release the heat. In India if you come across a cow pie with a stick stuck into it then that one has been claimed by the owner. They will return to collect it once dry enough to move. It is too valuable to be squandered.

Manure has value but in most of the agriculture industry it is considered a byproduct and a cost of doing business. It only becomes a problem when improperly stored and handled. The key to proper use of manure is moisture. If it is too dry then it can be used but it must be burned first. But more importantly if it is too wet then it becomes sewage. Water and manure are a bad combo. Compost needs just the right amount of moisture. Too wet and it becomes anaerobic and toxic, but too dry and the biological life goes dormant. This is the art and science of composting.

This should be a lesson for humans who chronically crap into their own drinking water. Honestly we are worse than chickens about this. We waste our own manure down the drain and into our waterways. I started a composting toilet system fifteen years ago and have saved hundreds of thousands of gallons of water by not pooping into drinking water. The amount of carbon that we have sequestered by simply composting our household waste is staggering, and it is easy. All it requires is five gallon buckets and some sawdust.

Manure has value and I want people to start giving it the credit it deserves. If we didn’t take it for granted but used it as a store of energy then we could create truly independent food systems. After all this is what ecosystems do. At the very least we should ascribe a dollar value to it. I will always remember my old boss Paul. Every time he drove by a dairy farm and the smell of manure he would say, “ah the smell of money.”