It’s very strange to hear the FDA and food safety people talking about outlawing manure on organic farms. I grew up on an organic farm where I rolled around with my dog on the manure pile (well composted, of course) and, you know, my brother and I were the healthiest kids in school.
Today we live in an over-populated, industrial society where the over-burden of synthetic fertilizers and ag chemicals have broken down the natural ecology of our domestic farming systems, polluted and destroyed our soil and water, and killed our micro-biodiversity.
The people who work to make our food safe seldom get out of their sanitized labs so they can’t see the forest for the trees. They are not looking at the ecology of microbes; they are looking at an isolated group of pathogens. And they are often not real experienced scientists but simply single-sighted technicians directed by food engineers, most likely being paid by the ag industry that profits off the destructive chemicals and synthetic fertilizers.
It makes me think of insane people who become so mentally ill they fight the bugs in their own intestines with too many laxatives.
Sometime back, I met a man touting hydroponics in vertical gardens at an agricultural meeting who said he was a pathologist trying to save people from “bugs.” He saw the future in water gardens in high-rise office and apartment buildings incorporating completely controlled systems. Of course he was investing his money in developing these engineered systems and making deals with developers.
He told me, growing food in the dirt isn’t safe. I told him, he didn’t understand farming. And these days, neither do most urban people who are completely cut off from both nature and the source of their food and exposed to the propaganda of the present corporate food industry.
We do need to discover how to grow food correctly in the polluted environment industry has left us; but we are best taking the real information from many years of conscientious research by people like Albert Howard rather than listening to the fear-mongering of a few heavily invested Monsanto puppets — or even worse, the “sterilizers.”
Gene Logsdon, author of Holy Shit: Managing Manure To Save Mankind, half-jokingly suggested not long ago, “… that animal manure—used livestock, horse, and chicken bedding—was going to be the hottest commodity on the Chicago Board of Trade one of these days..”
It turns out that he might have been prescient! In an article published in the Atlantic, Logsdon reminds us that the waste so many farmers have struggled to dispose of, may actually be worth a lot of money. Not something that should be outlawed!