Using Natural Fertilizers: Soil Nutrients, Green Manure and Making Compost

Image Gallery This homemade seed inoculator ensures that legumes are properly coated with beneficial bacterial just before planting. ILLUSTRATION: RICHARD LANGER

Special Note: All material here reprinted from Grow It! Copyright © 1972 by Richard W. Langer. The chapter title for this excerpt is Fertilizer. 

If I could play on Homer's lyre
And wing with true poetic fire
To what great theme Would I aspire?
Barnyard manure! 

-Alfred Vivian  

Everything on a farm doesn't smell like roses. On the other hand, manure is nowhere near as odoriferous as the average city dweller thinks, and a well-made compost heap doesn't smell at all. Your farm needs both.

Almost from the time man first began domesticating farm animals, barnyard manure — the livestock's excretions mixed with bedding material — was used as a fertilizer to increase the yield of his crops. Some ancient agrarian civilizations, such as the Mayan, never went into animal husbandry on a large scale. It is now hypothesized that many once-great cultures were destroyed not by war, but by the exhaustion of the land surrounding their cities. The local agriculture could no longer support the urban population. All for the want of manure the fabled cities fell? Quite likely.

Agriculturalists used to believe that plants literally "ate" the soil. But with the birth of Justus von Liebig in 1803, the seed of radical change was planted in agriculture. Liebig's contributions to civilization were many and diverse, ranging from baking powder to chloroform. Among the discoveries backed by his chemical laboratory was the fact that plants merely extract certain substances from the soil, specifically, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash.

From Liebig's new theory there were several corollaries to be drawn, and the nineteenth-century assault on traditional agriculture was soon in full sway. If you added enough of the right chemicals, you could even grow a bumper crop in sand — or, for that matter, in a water solution. The chemical industry rose to the challenge, and Malthus's dragon was slain. There would be food enough for everyone.

Unfortunately, as with all radical theories that presume to save the world by sweeping away the entirety of man's past endeavors, chemical fertilization and its adjunct, insecticides, did not turn out to be the panacea expected. Kept in its place, not all chemical agriculture is necessarily evil. But by overshadowing developments in the other areas of agricultural research, test-tube farming has done enough damage so that it could well take another century to reclaim once bountiful farmlands from their artificially imposed fallowness. And the damage done by the insecticides in the long run will prove to far outweigh the good.

What happened was that chemical fertilizers alone were suddenly deemed the essential ingredients of agriculture. No heed was paid any longer to the tilth, or physical quality of the soil. What did the soil matter? Just add more chemicals if your corn wasn't growing and everything would be all right. The only problem was, as more and more chemicals were added over the years, the organic quality of the soil was lost. Once friable, rich earth turned into hardpan. The essential chemical ingredients were there all right ... the high crop yields weren't. The reason? Simple. You can't grow abundance on macadam.