Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
But for the organic farmer or the Third World peasant, 130 times as much manure is a reas-
on to sing her praises: if anything it is the human digestive system which is inadequate.
Anybody who has tried composting their own manure for use in their garden will have been
disappointed by the pathetic couple of bucketfuls of dry compost which they end up with -
less in a year than a cow produces in three days.
Farmyard manure - FYM as the textbooks call it - becomes a major problem if you have
too much of it in one place and you manage it badly; and that happens because pointless
overuse of synthetic nitrogen means that manure is both undervalued, and concentrated in
the wrong place. Farmers who value manure mix it with straw, stack it and compost it, or
they may even generate heat or electricity from it. Robert Netting recounts how the wealth
of farmers in the Swiss community of Torbel could be gauged by the size of the muck heap
in the street outside their houses, and if it's clean enough for the Swiss it must be clean
enough for anyone. Cow manure only 'bubbles with organisms' and 'swims with bacter-
ia' when it is mixed with water. Industrial farmers, dairy farmers in particular, in order to
save labour costs, swoosh the muck away with high powered hoses turning it into a 'slurry'
which they store in pits euphemistically called 'lagoons', which do literally bubble with
bacterially generated methane. Then they spray the stuff on their land with pumps and pipes
that easily clog up. The problem is identical to that identified by von Liebig with WCs:
mixing faeces with water gets the stuff out of sight quickly, but it creates difficulties further
down the line and turns a resource into a disposal problem.
Much of the difficulty with manure management could be addressed, not by outlawing
chemical farming, but simply by reversing priorities - by making organic farming the
standard procedure, and chemical farming the certifiable exception. At the moment it is the
other way round: organic farmers have to prove they are organic, a process which involves
considerable bureaucracy and expense, while chemical farmers can just get on the phone
and order a tonne of NPK or a drum of weedkiller. Penalizing good practice with bureau-
cracy and certification fees is a bizarre way to encourage it. We don't, for example, make
bicyclists and pedestrians prove that they don't drive, and then award them a certificate -
we make motorists buy a licence.
If farmers had to apply for a licence to use chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and if
food in supermarkets was assumed to be organic unless it had a label on it saying 'pro-
duced with the aid of artificial fertilizers and pesticides', then the tables would quickly be
turned. Without in any way restricting the public's right to choose, organically produced
food would become the norm, once again, and farmers would be keener to manage manure
and nutrients efficiently, and achieve a balance between livestock and arable on their farm.
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