April 20th, 2022 - Poop to Pots. It is not a gimmick!

source: cowpots.com

Well, that was just to get your attention. I wanted to share some insight about manure as a fertilizer and then also talk about CowPots.

According to the NY Times crucial portion of the world’s wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war, while an even more significant part of the world’s fertilizers is stuck in Russia and Belarus. The result is that global food and fertilizer prices are soaring. And availability is an issue. Farmers around the world are scrambling for fertilizers and looking for alternative solutions. Maybe this can provide the impetus for other solutions like organic fertilizers and manure-based fertilizers. 

Manure vs Fertilizer is an article I read this week and I wanted to share this insight. It is not that recent but so is the use of manure as a fertilizer. Maybe this is a more mundane topic but nevertheless very important when we talk about soil health, recycling and reuse, and organic farming. We wrote about nutrients in the last two posts, so I thought this could be an interesting topic. 

Agroecologists claim that manure adds a lot more than crop nutrients to your soil. A few benefits that manure offers over chemical fertilizers are:
  • The addition of organic matter enhances the physical properties of soil. Manure lightens the texture of the soil, enhancing rainfall infiltration.
  • Increase in the capacity of soil to hold on to nutrients and pesticides and make them more effective than if you are just applying fertilizer.
  • Improvement of soil quality by making the microbial community in the soil more active.
Researchers say that most of the 21 nutrients needed by grain crops, including trace nutrients like sulfur, zinc, boron, and molybdenum, can be gleaned from manure. Manure is rich in nitrogen and that can be lost as the manure sits on the barn floor or in a storage lagoon. There are ways to reduce those losses; one is to cover the manure storage. This is an example where manure can play the role to replace or reduce the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers as prices have gone up and availability is an issue. The other vital nutrients required by crops—potassium and phosphorus—can also be recycled effectively through manure. The energy trapped in the waste itself can be harvested either through combustion, gasification, or pyrolysis. 

Manure is not a panacea for everything. There are some issues with disease from cows that you have to address so that they don't spill into crops. Also, manure is bulky and much less concentrated than commercial fertilizer, so the transportation cost is an issue. Research shows that manure also has pathogens and antibiotics that may be harmful to aquatic systems and soil systems.

We have talked about the Green Revolution and the use of commercially produced nitrogen fertilizers after World War II. Before the 1950s manure was the only fertilizer that farmers in many societies had and so it was essential and will continue to be necessary.

I think it is clear that manure as fertilizer can play an essential role in farming. I want to leave with you an interesting product that is being produced and marketed by a dairy farm in Connecticut that I again read this week. CowPots is a serious business on Freund's farm and it has enabled the next generation to come back to the farm. In the 1990s using some USDA grants and by trying to find alternatives to peat-based (whole another topic with respect to peat harvesting and impact on carbon sequestration) flower pots the farm's owner purchased some paper-making machines and figured out that instead of using cellulose, an essential part of the pulp-molding process as this provides the fibers that keep the materials together he could use manure as the fiber source. They applied other techniques to make this commercial. The farm has sold millions of CowPots over the years and is a thriving secondary business. 

Maybe this is not novel when you think about the many ways manure is put to use in India! I would love to hear your thoughts. 

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