As the world faces a looming shortage of fertilizer sparked by the Iran War morass, it’s time for everybody to get more excited about my favorite type of recycling: compost.
A good mix of rotted organic materials will do wonders for growing plants, including the garden you’ve started because food is so expensive.
There are limits, of course. Compost can’t do as much as a balanced compound fertilizer, but the latest war in the Middle East has disrupted production of the components of synthetic fertilizer — natural gas, urea, phosphate, sulfur — as well as shipments of the actual product. As a result, prices for fertilizer for farmers have soared even more than the price of oil, and the cost is trickling down to the bags of it at your local feed store.
This is serious because fertilizer indirectly feeds the world. The UN is warning of global food shortages as farmers have trouble getting supplies. Closer to home, the American Farm Bureau Federation conducted a survey of farmers and ranchers across the country earlier this month and found more than two-thirds of growers said they couldn’t afford, or even obtain, all the fertilizer they need.
The issue is more of a problem for Northeast farms, which are more likely to buy fertilizer in several relatively small lots. Just one-quarter of Northeast farms reported having pre-booked fertilizer for upcoming seasons compared to two-thirds of large farms in other parts of the country, meaning supply shortages hit us harder. As a result, our CSAs might have less to offer this year.
All in all, compost is looking a lot better. You have to be realistic, however.
Compost isn’t a fast-release energy boost to make your tomato plants erupt; it’s a slow-release soil addendum. Even so, in this fertilizer-constrained world, it makes sense for most of us to start saving our organic scraps, adding a mix of grass and leaves, maybe getting some used grounds from the local coffee shop. Then mix and match them in a pile or a container and create your own future soil through the magic of decomposition.
If you don’t want to start your own pile or don’t have the room (hello, apartment dwellers!) there are a couple of companies that will pick it up and compost it for you. Do a little online searching and you’ll find them. Bonus: Your trash cans won’t smell as they await weekly pickup because they don’t have rotting food in them.
If you are doing your own composting, incidentally, make friends with people who have chickens and offer to clean out their coop when needed, because adding manure is the secret to turning compost into fertilizer. There’s a historical component to poop-as-fertilizer, which is worth mentioning as we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, because it helped make America a global empire.
In 1856, Congress, seeking ways to boost farmland production, passed the Guano Islands Act. It gave us a legal fig leaf for seizing any uninhabited island that contained lots of bird poop, the world’s greatest fertilizer at the time. This worked so well that we decided we liked the idea of controlling other parts of the world, and the rest is history.
Guano was finished as a global industry after the Haber-Bosch process taught us to make synthetic fertilizer in 1913, but maybe it’s time to seek out guano islands again.
Nah — let’s just make a lot more compost.
