251. Make Manure Sexy Again!

Posted on November 13, 2025 by Christophe Pelletier

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Manure is probably the underrated part of farming, animal farming in particular, paradoxically. It is considered as waste and as a burden. It sounds like everyone would love manure to not exist. Big mistake.

It used to not have this negative image, though. Here is an old picture taken in the Lorraine region of France. There, villages are laid out along the main street. They are called villages-rue, which can be translated as a street village. Houses are on each side of the main street and that is about it. The particularity of this region is that in the old days, the houses were piling the manure in the front, right by the street. You might not realize it right away, but having the pile of manure in front of the house had some major significance and was actually playing an important social function.

The boys of the village would be quite interested in courting the girls coming from homes with the most manure. Apparently, manure was rather sexy in those times. The reason is simple. The more manure, the more cows and therefore the bigger the farm and the wealthier the family. Manure was the promise of a nice dowry. In a way, manure was a status symbol, a bit like a big expensive SUV on the driveway nowadays. In those times, people valued manure. This is no longer the case today. Yet, it is high time to reinstate it at its righteous place. We need to rediscover the sexy in manure.

Why is that, you might ask?

First of all, manure is extremely valuable because it is very rich in nutrients and is a formidable fertilizer. That said, manure is at its best only if we know how to produce it properly. In the old days, farms were mixed. They produced both crops and animal products. The crops -and pastures- would feed the animals and the manure would be used to fertilize the land on the same farm. In the modern times, farms have specialized. They produce either crops or animals. The circular system between plants and animals has been broken open. Crop farms use mostly synthetic fertilizers and animal farms store manure without having the land where to spread it themselves, and that is one of the issues of modern manure. I explained that in one of my YouTube videos: The importance of closing back the loops.

Circularity is one of the fundamental pillars for sustainability. By keeping loops open, and especially by keeping the system linear instead of circular, there is no true sustainability. We can delude ourselves by giving the impression that it is. The reality is that on the long term, a linear system that needs to be refilled constantly at one end will never be sustainable, like it or not,

In the case of agriculture, this is where manure plays its essential role. Manure is the interface between crop farming and animal agriculture. Crop farms crave fertilizers and organic matter. Manure, if well done, is the answer. By creating circularity, manure is at the very core of sustainability and of regenerative agriculture, which is too often more of a buzzword and a renaming of the term sustainability, which has been more and more accused of being mostly greenwashing. I have another YouTube video (A thin line between greenwashing and excessive enthusiasm? Example of regenerative agriculture) in which I go into more details about this.

As I said, the key about manure is to do it right. What does this mean?

It means that we need to look at the quality of the manure. Manure is one of the products coming out of an animal farm and as such, farmers should have a similar quality approach to manure as they have to their other products, be it milk, eggs, wool, meat or livestock. Manure quality is of the essence. The most detrimental assumption about manure is to look at it as an inert product. It is definitely not. It can evolve and ripen and that is what changes everything.

How does this work? Manure is nitrogen-rich product but it is carbon-poor. That is the weakness of “modern” manure compared to the one that attracted boys as much as flies. The carbon-rich components can be found in crops by-products. Think here as products like straw. The “old-fashioned” manure from mixed farms mixed the nitrogen-rich excrement of animals with the carbon-rich components from crop residues.

This is where magic happens!

When nitrogen and carbon are brought into balanced proportions, the bacteria present in the manure are going to make it ripen and mature, transforming it into a wonder product, at no extra cost. In this process, nitrogen and carbon are going to create an amazing synergy. By letting manure ripening, several things will happen with the final product.

There will be less ammonia emissions into the atmosphere, which reduces the impact on climate change.

The manure will smell much less, which no doubt will be appreciated by the neighbors.

The ripe manure has a lower water content than liquid manure (higher dry matter content), which means less transportation of useless water, and the costs associated to it.

The ripe manure will ensure a much better water retention in the soil, reducing the need for irrigation.

It will reduce the mobility of minerals, reducing the need for additional use from synthetic fertilizers and reducing the risk of minerals leaching into the waterway system and into the environment.

The stable organic matter will reduce the risk of soil erosion, thus preserving the soil potential and reducing the need for future amendments.

There you see, the formula of balanced nitrogen-carbon ripe manure (the good old-fashioned kind if you wish) is:

1+1>6

In modern specialized animal farming, the only manure that has such quality is from broiler production, just because carbon-rich material, such as wood shavings, is used as litter on which the birds drop their feces.

Farmers who might use carbon-rich material in productions for which specialization has hindered the use of such material probably end up with better manure than their counterparts.

For farms where no or little carbon-rich material is available the synergy formula cannot apply. The same thing is true for farms that do not use manure. They may use cover crops but those tend to be high in nitrogen. They may use liquid unripened manure but it lacks the synergies from the carbon. In all those situations, their formulas can be 1+0=1 or 1+1=2, but no more than that. That is far from the 6+.

Conclusions and further thoughts

The most important conclusion is that good manure is the best there is. The second most important conclusion is that we should take good care of manure and that animal farming is essential for the sustainability of food and agriculture at large. A world without animal farming would only lead to a massive additional use of synthetic fertilizers that have a major environmental footprint.

An interesting person to follow about manure management is Twan Goossens, a Dutchman who has broad knowledge of the topic, especially since The Netherlands have been struggling for some 50 years with manure surpluses and have been struggling the past few years with their own nitrogen legislation, which is horribly convoluted and so far rather ineffective. So far all they seem to have achieved is spending billions on buying out farmers without really getting benefit from it. Recently, the Dutch government started to change course on their approach to ammonia reduction in farming. They started to look at the issue in more pragmatic and practical terms, instead of using standards based on averages -and also on ideology- that depicted quite poorly the reality of farms. The recent elections of October 2025 brought a change of government and the future will tell which direction the coming cabinet will choose.

The main mistakes that the Dutch have made over the past decades have been:

To look at manure only as an inert mineral solution instead of looking at it for what it is: a living and evolving product.
To not realize that manure quality is key.
To confuse intensification and efficiency (see my previous post).
To not think circular.
To focus on expensive technologies that turned out to not be economically viable, instead of letting Nature do the work at low cost (just feel the temperature of a manure pile to realize that microorganisms actively work for free).

Another interesting source of information is the Wageningen University and Research agro-innovation center De Marke, which focuses on solutions to make animal farming sustainable and where manure management is one of their research areas.

You might have your own opinions about animal farming. The real issue is not animal farming as such but how we can close the loops again between crop farming and animal farming. The production system is really what matters. Specializing farms does not mean that it is impossible to close the loops. We need to be creative. India exports cow dung over long distances to overseas countries, even to the US. If they can do that, then has to be possible to move both carbon-rich material (high dry matter) and ripened manure (higher dry matter content than liquid manure) between regions. If you look at Europe, North and South America, just to take to obvious examples, the distances between crop production regions and animal farming regions are not that big, and certainly less than between India and the US.

One last thought, though.This article was about animal farming, and animal farming exists for a reason. We must not forget what is probably the least circular part of the entire food chain: people. In the end, food ends up in the homes of consumers, and then what does happen to the “human manure”? It does not return to where the food has been produced and it does not fertilize anything, not to mention the incredible amounts of water wasted to flush the stuff. Human poop and pee, being the end destination of the food chain also accumulates all sorts of contaminants. Think here of all sorts of pharmaceutical and chemical compounds people use. Those would be a challenge to recycle. It will only get worse, as the population is not only going to increase and will be increasingly concentrated in urban centers, making the consumer end of the food chain even less circular.

Next week’s article: Three key Technologies that will transform Food and Agriculture, plus a bonus one

Is animal farming really on the way out?

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Christophe Pelletier

Lately in the food world, one can read many stories about alternatives to protein from animal farming. Animal farming also gets blamed for its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. With so much finger pointing, one can wonder whether animal farming has a future. Proponents of alternatives do all they can to convince everyone that the writing is already on the wall. Personally, I believe that things are far from being that simple.

To predict what scenarios are likely for the future, it is necessary to look at the issue from its many dimensions, both on the production side as on the consumption side. I prefer to look at it first from the consumption side because consumer markets shape production systems more than production systems shape consumer markets.

From the consumer end, there is already much to say. First, as the population is increasing and more people are able to afford protein, the demand for protein is increasing and will continue to do so in the coming decades. I wrote already many articles about this during the nine years of this blog and the topic is also part of my books. The fact that more and more people can afford food is a positive development. The problem is that more and more of them now actually consume more than they should. Overconsumption boosts the need for more production beyond what nutritional needs are. Overconsumption comes down to excess, waste and pushes our use of resources too far. The goal must be to help people to eat balanced meals and not to overeat. If the purpose of the suppliers of alternative protein is to push for consumption of their products and not address the issue of overconsumption, they will be just as guilty as the current protein suppliers. The future challenge is not just to replace one overconsumption with another. It is to stop overconsumption. Unfortunately, as long as our economic model is about volume growth, one should not have too many illusions. Future food prosperity is really about having always enough, not about always more. To achieve this goal, we must shift from sheer volume growth thinking to high quality (including production of course but also social and environmental) with faire distribution of the created wealth between all links of the value chains, and in particular a fair price for farmers through proper planning between supply and demand. The purpose is to supply affordable food instead of just cheap food with all the consequences that we all can see of the race towards always cheaper. Unfortunately, the volume-driven model is heavily subsidized in the wrong places and that will also have to stop if we want change.

Consumers also need to realize the true value of food instead of taking it for granted because future food is anything but for granted. Regardless of the type of protein, one thing is sure: it is precious and rare. This is much more so than for carbohydrates. Protein should be treated with respect. Here are two examples why I make this point. I remember in the 1990s the CEO of Tyson Foods explaining in a conference that the poultry industry is a producer of lean protein and he lamented that, in the US at least, the favorite use was to deep fry it in cheap oil, and thus completely change the nutritional quality of chicken meat. The second example was during a presentation by the CEO of a German fish fast food restaurant chain called Nordsee, who was mentioning that breaded fish was very popular, but not so much because fish is healthy but because fish sticks were used to be a carrier of ketchup from the plate to the mouth. If the true purpose of meat for some consumers is to be a carrier of oil or ketchup, then this is a problem. Never should a product that required the sacrifice of an animal be used to soak into cheap and unhealthy product when over consumed. Speaking of sacrifice, it is good to remember that the word “sacrifice” comes from the word “sacred”. It is true that often our dealings with animal protein looks more like sacrilegious. This is a useful detail to think about when considering consumption of meat. The thing is that animal protein should never really be a commodity. It should remain special. But that is not the way or economic model has decided.

From the production side, agriculture has followed a similar pattern as most other industries. It is about lowering costs (nothing wrong with that) and standardization (maybe a topic more susceptible to debate). Regardless of what people may think of intensive animal husbandry, this system is not here per accident. It is the reflection of how we look at economy and ourselves. Have no illusion about alternatives to animal protein; they follow exactly the same economic philosophy. I always say that the dominant production system is the one that matches the desires of the larger number of consumers. The saying “we are what we eat” is very true. If you look at it that way, you can see that our economy is just as much about intensive human husbandry as it is with farm animals. Economy is organized around three components: resources, labor and capital. Depending on the prioritization and distribution of these three components, we build different systems. A simple example can illustrate what I mean is mechanization: workers have been replaced by machines backed with capital investment in machines. The tricky thing about heavy injection of capital is that the system becomes capital-dependent. The capital must deliver a return on the investment and very often the only way is inject even more capital, just to keep the head above water. It is good for the bankers, but as many farmers and food producers will tell you, less so for them.

So, will animal farming eventually disappear? Of course, it is difficult to answer this with certainty. My opinion is that it is not going to happen any time soon, if it ever happens. What will change are the production systems. After all, the current intensive production systems have not been around since the dawn of times. They are actually fairly recent. They have changed and are continuously adapting. Production systems that are not environmentally sensible will disappear, simply because they will not be able to be profitable and competitive. The reason for this is simple: sooner or later they will not be able to ignore the negative externalities anymore from their production costs. Environmentally sensible systems will take over. Note that I do not use the term environmentally friendly but I use environmentally sensible instead. I believe it is a much better reflection of reality. Will this transition be smooth? It might be, but it is much more likely that it will not be.

Another question to reflect about is whether animal farming is unnecessary? My answer to this is: no! First, like it or not humans are omnivores. Our dentition can testify about that. That is the result of dozens of thousands of years and it is ingrained in our system. It is nature. We are mammals, even though there’s no shortage of groups who try to even deny our biological reality and try to reduce people –and animals- to legal entities. Between Laws of Nature and man-made laws, we will see which ones will prevail. Our first food –milk- is animal in nature. There always will be people who want to eat animal protein. Every time that economic prosperity has increased, meat consumption has increased. It does not happen per accident. When money is tight, meat is often the first thing to decrease. To get back to the question, I believe that animal farming is alright, as long as it is respectful of the environment, of the animals, and also of the farmers. I believe that animal protein is a privilege what we must cherish, not a right that we should take for granted. Animal protein is not the sole source of protein and there are many delicious dishes to make with vegetal protein. Look at Indian cuisine! If the purpose of animal farming is to stuff oneself, then yes I am with those who have an issue that approach of farming and consumption.

Of course, most of the opposition to animal farming takes place in Western countries. It is kind of a First World problem. If certain animal farming systems are environmental time bombs, other systems are actually beneficiary. In many developing countries, having a few goats or cattle is actually essential for the economy and for the survival of farmers. Pastoral systems contribute to prosperity and social stability. Another important point is the biology of ruminants. Just as much as I was mentioning the biology of humans as the results of dozens of thousands years of evolution, the same is true for animals. Ruminants are amazing processors of cellulose. Humans can thrive on grass, because we are not equipped biologically to extract nutrients from it. Ruminants are experts at that. Since there is about twice as many hectares of grasslands as there is of arable land, grasslands represent a huge food potential and ruminants are superb transformers of cellulose in high-value foods for humans in the form of milk and meat. The key is that must be done sensibly and by taking future consequences into account. Many societies around the world know the value of farm animals. If ruminants are excellent transformers of cellulose, it is also important to mention that they have never evolved to be grain eaters, at least in large quantities. Sooner or later, this will become a much more vivid issue than it is now.

Suppliers of alternative protein bring a number of arguments why their products have the potential to replace “traditional” animal meat. The environment plays a central role, in particular the issue of greenhouse gasses. They also address the animal welfare as a driver for their products. The issue of slaughterhouse by-products is also a valid argument. Theoretically, texture proteins, lab meat, insects and vegetarian diets do address these concerns, indeed. So can alternative protein push animal farming out of business? The answer is complex and I will try to answer it as concisely as possible.

The animal protein market is huge and one cannot expect to replace it overnight. Since the demand for protein is going to increase further, alternative protein would probably happy to take only a chunk of the growth. They have to create their spot in an existing and very competitive market. Textured proteins have been around for decades and they have never represented a threat to traditional meat. That does not mean that it could not change of course. Lab meat is all new and there is at this stage no solid indication that they can even compete with traditional meat on world markets any time soon. They are still a long way of representing a force in the animal protein business. Time will tell. An important detail for both textured protein and lab meat is the number of factories, incubators and texturing lines that they need to build to replace animal farms. That will represent huge investments for which they will have to earn the money to carry out. Competing with traditional animal proteins means engage fully in a commodity markets where margins are often thin. They will compete with independent farmers who are often contracted by corporations and often hardly make minimum wage. These suppliers will have to fight against the huge animal protein corporations and deal with retailers and food service companies with strong bargaining power. Will they really want to take the road to commodity markets? I doubt it, or it will be a very long journey. When I hear or see their pricing objectives, nothing tells me that they are really willing to target the mass animal protein market. It looks more to me that they will try to work from a targeted marketing strategy and will work their way into niches for quite some time. Another hurdle is the consumer perception for their products. Vegetarian products already have exposure and are well-perceived. Lab meat may be a more difficult challenge. The mere fact that lab meat producers want to call it clean meat instead and are already facing opposition from meat producers who claim that lab meat is not real meat shows that they have not solved the perception challenge, yet. Even the term meat is not a given.

Where does that leave us for the future and the issue of animal farming greenhouse gas emissions? Considering the time that I believe it will take for alternatives, I do not see that they will play as big a role as they think and/or claim. I believe that reducing greenhouse gasses emissions will have to be enforced. Regulations on production systems will have to address this. This has to happen today already. There is no time to wait until these emerging industries will have developed critical mass. Also production volumes will have to be addressed. It is likely that if we want to be serious about curbing the environmental footprint of animal husbandry, they will not be many alternatives to capping production volumes. That will be a tough one as nobody will want to be at a disadvantage with their competitors. There will be the exact same discussions as there already are with climate change and those who refuse to participate. Neither governments nor corporations will take effective measures. The answer lies with consumers. They are the ones who have the power to reduce animal protein production and changing production systems. From an environment point of view, the only real option is a reduction of global consumption of animal protein. That is the easiest and fastest path to solve the problem, but I do not expect a massive shift from omnivore to vegetarian of such amplitude that anything significant will happen. Unfortunately and just like with anything else related to climate change and overconsumption, only a minority will really act voluntarily. On the consumer side, if prices remain too cheap to trigger a change in behavior and a reduction of consumption, then overconsumption will simply continue. What I wrote in my previous article will fully apply to the topic of animal protein and animal farming.