Two tons of chicken manure, please

“I found a place I can get free chicken manure!” announced my husband with a huge smile on his face. This was before we moved to our new house. Normally, if someone wanted to give you mass amounts of manure, I think you would say “no, thank you,” even if they offered to pay you. Yet, here was my husband, trying to get a hold of some manure, and willing to pay for it, too. So, imagine his surprise at meeting someone who said, you can have as much as you want for free. I mean, I can understand that person’s plight. An ever increasing pile of manure must certainly be problematic. But to think that someone else would actually want it… By the way, my husband decided to accept two tons. Two tons of chicken manure! Any takers? I suppose that’s the difference between your average person and a farmer. We don’t keep our own livestock yet, so we were thinking about what to do in order to make fertilizer. Eggs, milk, and meat are not the only benefit to raising livestock. The animals’ manure is what contains so many important nutrients. The microbes which feed on manure are invaluable in producing healthy soil and vegetables. So, I also rejoiced with my husband, “Chicken manure, that’s wonderful!”

I can understand how spouses influence each other. I see how my thinking has changed since meeting my husband, and especially since we started farming together. I knew that raw garbage could be turned into compost, but I began to see not only scraps of food, but also fallen leaves, weeds, dry grass, bamboo – nearly everything – as important resources. While visiting my husband’s family, we noticed that the people in the neighborhood collected fallen leaves into garbage bags and put them out with the trash. Just around this time, we were gathering leaves for our future hot bed* and couldn’t believe our eyes. What a waste! If we could have fit them in our car, we might have taken them home with us. Our car, however, was already full of used tires. Another plan to turn someone else’s “trash” into a resource. Fortunately, there were lots of fallen leaves around our new house, so we were able to successfully complete our hot bed. And speaking of fallen leaves, they have other uses too, such as the natural leaf compost we gathered from the forest on our property, or the dried leaves we applied to our field as mulch. Overgrown grass and bamboo, a nuisance even if you aren’t a farmer, can also be cut and used as mulch.

Listening to my husband’s ideas and watching him act, I can’t help but be impressed by his ability to turn “useless things” into “useful things.” I’m sure there must be many such things around us, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. I don’t think nature produces waste. Flowers bloom and wither, fruit ripens and falls, and in so doing seeds are spread. “Why do leaves change color?” a friend once asked me. “Because they are dying,” he answered his own question with glee. That may be so, but they look beautiful as they approach their death. And the leaves which dry out and fall to the ground go back to the soil and give birth to new life. Manure is similar. This “waste” which is a byproduct of our eating also goes back to the soil and is used to produce new food. The same is true of humans. One day, we will return to the soil and become food for microbes and give birth to new life.

I understand all of this from a biological perspective. But what about psychologically? There is a part of me that dislikes and doesn’t want to accept filth and decay and death. Flowers in bloom are pretty but no one gives you wilted flowers. Autumn leaves are fantastic, but no one gives a second glance to brown leaves that have fallen to the ground and  been trampled underfoot. We want food, but would like to keep manure as far away from us as possible. It’s fun to be around people who are full of life, but we avoid facing death. Is this not the society we live in? Is this not the attitude in our own hearts? For those who live an agrarian lifestyle, filth and manure and death are part of the package. Maybe that is how people’s hearts are developed; at least that’s what happened in my case. My thinking expanded thanks to meeting my husband and encountering the world of organic farming. I became more aware of the cycle that exists in nature; I am learning that there is no waste and nothing that is without meaning, that everything has a reason or a purpose. This is the world that God designed, a world where death gives way to life. If you have eyes to see and ears to hear. So, when my husband says, “I brought home two tons of chicken manure!” I can now say, “Wow! That’s great!” and mean it.

*Hot bed: A bed made of fallen leaves and other materials which makes use of the heat generated from fermentation. It is a natural way to keep your seedlings warm. No electricity required.