I have been gardening this block for 5 years, not an enormous time, but I don’t use animal products to fertilise I just use compost/mulching/weed tea/and cover crops.
Everything seems fine. Yet every gardening show or whatever will be like “slather that manure and blood and bone on each year, use fish emulsion, fucking sacrifice your firstborn on that shit”. Am I an idiot or do you just not need to do any of that?
edit: not looking for the peanut gallery. Interested in opinions from people who don’t use animal products and what their experience has been.
Well it’s more complicated than this. Different plants need different combinations of nutrients to grow optimally. The primary nutrients we talk about are phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium. You would need to test your soil and compare to the needs of the plants you want to grow, then ammend accordingly. The most affordable amendments are typically animal products, and they do work. There’s a reason any commercial operation spends extra money on these things, if they didn’t work, they would just keep that money and get the same yields. If you did this, you would absolutely be able to improve yields, but to what degree and if it is worth it is dependent on all these variables being known. In general, a home garden will do fine just with what you are talking about. Unless you are trying to win a blue ribbon at your local county faire, you are gonna be fine.
I don’t believe you are correct in stating that animal products are cheaper, or that commercial agriculture prefers it:
Issues with the product:
Despite these attributes, there are economic and environmental challenges to expanding the use of manure as a fertilizer. With a low nutrient value-to-mass ratio, manure is more costly to transport, store, and apply than chemical fertilizers. In addition, livestock production tends to be geographically concentrated in the United States, and, in certain regions, animal production generates more manure-supplied nutrients than are needed by nearby cropland. That means farmers often must transport manure longer distances to match its nutrient value with crop needs. Specifically, the nitrogen and phosphorus levels in manure often do not match the nutrient needs of crops, so farmers still must use chemical fertilizers to supplement nutrients from manure. Also, applying enough manure to meet a crop’s needs for one nutrient has the potential to create an environmental hazard from the unused nutrients left on the soil. Excess manure nutrients can leave the fields via run-off and degrade water quality, or they can enter the air.
Manure is not widely used:
A recent study by USDA, Economic Research Service identified opportunities for increasing the use of manure as a fertilizer. In 2020, farmers applied manure to less than 8 percent of the 237.7 million acres planted to seven major U.S. field crops.
Manure use is dependant on local industry:
Manure is expensive to transport, and local animal production largely determines the type of manure applied to regional crops. For example, because most hogs are produced in the Midwest, hog manure is applied predominately to corn and soybeans. Most chickens are raised in the Southeastern United States, so most animal waste applied to crops grown primarily in the South, such as cotton and peanuts, originates from poultry farms.
Manure is not what I am talking about, primarily it is animal bones, fish, bat guano, bird droppings, feather meal, blood meal, etc.
I think most farms use synthetic fertilizers but every organic farm I have worked on and every organic farmer I know uses some variation of the above as their primary soil amendments along with plant compost and worm byproducts.
I think most farms use synthetic fertilizers but every organic farm I have worked on and every organic farmer I know uses some variation of the above as their primary soil amendments along with plant compost and worm byproducts.
You didn’t mention your location but for example the USDA definition of organic required that ‘most’ synthetic fertilizers are not used. I’m not questioning your experience, I’m just stating that by nature of being a farmer seeking certification as organic they choose to exclude most synthetics for reasons of certification - not necessarily because it’s less expensive or ‘better’.
https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/blog/organic-101-what-usda-organic-label-means
Produce can be called organic if it’s certified to have grown on soil that had no prohibited substances applied for three years prior to harvest. Prohibited substances include most synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
Please be aware that this is a vegan gardening community. You’ve provided an answer to to OP based on your experience, which is fine but please understand that promotion of the use of animal bodies in gardening is not welcome.
Hey sorry for the confusion, I will rephrase what I said: most commercial non organic farms use synthetic fertilizers but every organic farm i have worked on in the US and every organic farmer I know (at least three dozen commercial organic farms) use animal based fertilizers. The OP asked about these, I am not advocating for them but answering the question about if they work to to produce higher yields than home composting alone.
I didn’t realize this was a vegan instance, I am not promoting the use of these products, just answering OPs question.
On a side note: Does worm casings or worm tea go against vegan principles?
I didn’t realize this was a vegan instance, I am not promoting the use of these products, just answering OPs question.
No worries, I figured that is what was going on. I wanted to get it out there because I agree your comments were not promoting it but I thought you were missing some important context.
On a side note: Does worm casings or worm tea go against vegan principles?
In my opinion, yes. I agree with Naeve’s comment but will add that for me the concept of speciesm is important. Other beings are here with us, not for us.
My soil is full of worms and life. I get bunny poop deposits regularly. I achieve this by creating an environment where they have food and a nice place to exist.
Does worm casings or worm tea go against vegan principles?
In general yes. Veganism is about respecting other living being’s right to live unmolested. Worms farms artificially constrain the lives of creatures which may not appreciate that, and the process of breeding and distributing them harms many.
It is completely vegan to say have a compost pile open to the ground and make it attractive to worms, provided of course you’re not making a deathtrap etc. But worm farms tend to be about preventing worms from leaving. I can’t think of a way to collect the liquid that wouldn’t interfere with their ability to burrow.
You might think this absurd, but we literally don’t know how consciousness arises or how widespread it is. Because we don’t need to have worm farms, and worms may not enjoy being interfered with, it is a position of unjustified arrogance to risk harm for our convenience.
Thanks for giving me a thorough answer! I appreciate you taking the time to lay it all out for me.
No worries. We have a reputation on lemmy for being insane zealots that hate you all but we’re really just trying to find a way to live that makes consent and respect the core of it all.
Feel free to ask questions in good faith, nobody is going to bite your head off.
Removed by mod
TIL it’s fine to put babies in a cage because they don’t form nations.
Please, if you’re going to be stupid could you at least be polite and stupid? Read the rules of the community.
It’s all a sham. There’s so much blood and bone that needs to be sold so it gets put in fertiliser and a bunch of other crap. No need to put commercialised corpse in your garden, but you may want to reconsider readding your first-born. I had great success with my garden going that route…
100% a way to squeeze more profit out of all the murdering.
spoiler
Tina Hull specializes in making small farms profitable and is a recognized authority in organic fertilizer, according to the following article in the Commodity Futures Trader. And while the fish processing industry is looking for ways of utilizing the inedible waste from their plants for ever higher purposes, some material may be best suited for the production of agricultural fertilizer- liquid, fish emulsion organic fertilizer.
Once again, we need to repeat that organic growers need not worry that fish emulsion fertilizer is depleting our oceans of the important Menhaden fish or other fish that people need for food. Fish emulsion if primarily made from fish waste of the established animal feed and fish oil industries, which would have been dumped in landfills if not used.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956053X20303913
Fish industries generate a substantial amount of FW (fish waste). Depending on the level of processing or type of fish, 30–70% of the original fish is FW.
The amount of FW available in Norway for production of fertilizers may facilitate the establishment of an industrial product that can replace the currently common use of dried poultry manure from conventional farming in organic farming.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3614052/
Efficient utilization of by-products has direct impact on the economy and environmental pollution of the country. Non-utilization or under utilization of by-products not only lead to loss of potential revenues but also lead to the added and increasing cost of disposal of these products
Waste products from the poultry processing and egg production industries must be efficiently dealt with as the growth of these industries depends largely on waste management.
The United States Dept. of Agriculture Economic Research Service has found that 11.4% of the gross income from beef is from the by-products. The figure for pork is 7.5%.
Meat and bone meal (MBM) was widely recommended and used in animal nutrition as a protein source in place of proteinaceous feeds because of its content of available essential amino acids, minerals and vitamin B12. MBM and related rendered protein commodities have potential for use in applications other than animal feed, including use as a fuel or a phosphorus fertilizer
I don’t use animal products intentionally. I can’t know for certain if soil I buy contains compost that includes animal manure, but other than that nope.
It’s really hard to find compost but if you don’t need the bulk and you just need the PKN, synthetics are readily available. We’ve been growing plants specialty to compost so that we can get that bulky material to add to our heavy clay soil.
Personally I use synthetic on houseplants and alfalfa meal/kelp meal outside.
Yeah I use synthetics inside as healthy living soil in a pot long term is hard.
Our council hooks people who don’t compost with people who do. So between an overgrown garden and the street I have plenty.
That’s amazing! Most of my neighbors just have grass on their land and leave the clippings there but I should definitely ask around. We have municipal compost but I compost everything that I can at home.
Yeah I have mixed opinions on my council after they had a vegan hate fest when one member suggested they live their goal of a green council by not serving animal products at events.
But some of the initiatives are defs v cool.
You could try with some (treated) urine to get some extra potassium into the soil. In combination with terra-preta charcoal for nutrient storage it can really help soil fertility.
But you are probably lucky and have good soil for which compost and mulch is sufficient.
You’ll probably have the answer in another five years…
Much will depend on the soil you inherited and the crops you plant.
