Organic Fertilizer
Organic fertilizers include naturally occurring organic materials, (e.g. chicken litter, manure, worm castings, compost, seaweed, guano, bone meal) or naturally occurring mineral deposits (e.g. saltpeter). Poultry litter and cattle manure often create environmental and disposal problems, making their use as fertilizer beneficial. Bones can be processed into phosphate-rich bone meal; however, most are simply buried in landfills.
Even if all bones, human, animal and plant wastes were recovered to the extent practical and used for fertilizer, mineral fertilizers and synthetic nitrogen would still be required to make for losses to leaching, to the atmosphere, runoff and the losses impractical to recover.
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Famous quotes containing the words organic and/or fertilizer:
“The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for its shape and comfort.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“...I was confronted with a virile idealism, an awareness of what man must have for manliness, dignity, and inner liberty which, by contrast, made me see how easy living had made my own group into childishly unthinking people. The Negro’s struggles and despairs have been like fertilizer in the fields of his humanity, while we, like protected children with all our basic needs supplied, have given our attention to superficialities.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)