Been reading a book about compact produce farms. Profiles a bunch of them. Something that stands out to me is that while yes, most use cover crops and compost, they almost ALL also fertilize with manure of various types, feather meal, bone meal, blood meal, and many add liquid fish fertilizer to their water. These are professionals who test their soil often. and basically every grower interviewed uses those kinds of amendments
Anyways, what I'm getting at is that if you're buying organic, ethically and locally grown produce from the farmer's market... you still rely on products from animal farming.
Only vaguely related but this reminded me. I had a small garden back in Indiana. One yr I fertilized with some compost and a couple soil amendments. The next yr I only used HUGE quantities of aged sheep manure. That time around it was nearly twice as productive. If you garden and don't have access to like, obscene amounts of compost, you should really consider the various animal product options
Anyways no idea where I'm going with this except that manure, feathers, bones, blood, and meal can and should be added back into the food cycle on a different level and I'm interested to try some things out next yr!
Farms are ecosystems! They may be heavily managed by humans, but no matter what, they are still systems in which life exists, aka ecosystems. And that means they rely on plants, animals, fungus, and bacteria in combination to perform nutrient cycling! That’s just How It Is.
In basically any other ecosystem, nutrients would be returned to the soil by animal poop and decaying bodies, as well as leaf litter and woody matter being broken down. If you remove all the leaf litter and wild animals from your farm ecosystem, you have to add those nutrient sources back in! Vegetative matter from compost and cover crop is all well and good, but it doesn’t have the nutrient availability of animal byproducts. Because... once again... that is the natural role of animals in the nutrient cycle....
It’s also worth noting here that farms tend to need a much higher volume of animal-derived nutrients added in than your average ecosystem would, because harvesting food from them removes a massive amount of nutrients from their natural cycle. In effect, all humans eating the produce of a farm are part of the animal load of the farm ecosystem, but none of us are giving our nutrients back to it!
Livestock manure is a great option, and so are by-products of the meat processing industry (like the feather meal, bone meal, and blood meal mentioned above). Those are all things that can be brought in and used on a farm whether or not the farm actually has livestock.
Farms that have both livestock and produce (or pasture) also have some neat direct options! There’s been some super interesting research recently on intensive grazing - rather than having a big old area of pasture and letting grazing animals wander and disperse, you pen them in a relatively small part of the pasture at a time, so they all eat and poop in that area, intensively stimulating the growth of the forage plants. (Grass and other foraging- adapted plants respond to being physically tugged on by grazing animals with increased growth!) Then you move the pen on to the next area of the pasture. I know this is an increasingly popular strategy with cows, but not a great idea with goats - they eat plants all the way to the ground, while cows just eat the tops off. I’m not sure where sheep fall on that scale. But I recently visited a vegetable farm where the farmer has a small herd of cows *just* so he can rotate them through his fields and improve the soil with them! He plants a cover-crop mix that’s good for cows to eat, then moves them through it over the winter, before planting vegetables in spring.
Any farm that isn’t using animal-derived fertilizer is using synthetic fertilizer, which is ecologically worse in pretty much every way. It requires higher energy inputs to produce and distribute, it does *not* reclaim farm waste into usable fertilizer (which livestock does), it comes in a concentrated chemical form that can be dangerous to the humans who handle it during production and application, and its chemical purity and solubility with water means a large percent of it is washed out of soil by rain, causing massive nutrient pollution issues. In manure, or animal byproduct meal, the nutrients are bound up in a matrix of large organic molecules which helps them integrate into the soil without washing away.
Animal products are vital to sustainable farming! Livestock is good actually!





















