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

What’s ahead for animal protein?

Posted on January 29, 2020 by Christophe Pelletier

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As I explained in previous articles about protein, the future of animal farming looks rather good, actually. This does not mean that current productions systems are perfect. They are not, and many changes are necessary. Four drivers are going to make animal farming evolve towards systems that meet future requirements in term of environment, health, sustainability and consumer demands. They will not affect only farms, but the ways entire value chains are organized and even future flows of animal protein in international trade.

Two pillars of sustainability are externalities and the necessity to close the loops. Strangely enough, these two fundamental topics rarely ever get mentioned. Yet, they will define the future. I mentioned externalities quite a few times on this blog and if you are interested to read what I say about it, just do a search on the search window on the right side of this page. Basically, externalities are the long-term economic effects and in particular long-term costs of repairing the damage that any human activity causes. Closing the loops is simply following the basic principle that nothing ever disappears or get created, but that everything gets transformed. These two pillars of sustainability are going to force us to review how balanced -or not- productions systems are. Greenhouse gases and minerals balance from manure will force a change in location of animal productions, in regard to the location of production areas of ingredients for animal feed, feeding programs, logistics of both feed ingredients and animal products, in particular in terms of transport. Distance between markets will be only one part of the equation. Transportation systems will weigh even more. Will trade rely on road transport, rail or water ways? Different transportation systems have very different carbon footprints and this will affect the future of some industries depending on how they are organized and where they are located. It will also force countries to invest heavily in their infrastructure, which is another topic that is too often ignored and yet so critical for the future. Of course, infrastructure is not as sexy as tech start-ups and more importantly, it does not have the same appeal for investors. After all, infrastructure is an expense that benefits all, while the current thinking about money is more about individualising profits. Yet, infrastructure will have more impact than tech. Location will also be influenced by water availability, as water will become an increasingly influential aspect of sustainability. Just as an example, California has been struggling with water availability for decades. Yet, it keep sending water-rich produce to other regions, thus exporting its already scarce water. On top of that, California produces about a quarter of American agriculture. See the danger ahead? For the future, the economic paradigm will shift from “producing where it is the cheapest to do so” to “producing where it is the most sustainable to do so”. The main reason for the shift will be externalities as we will have no choice but internalizing the externalities (sounds fancy doesn’t it?… try to place that one in a cocktail party when you have a chance).

Location is one of the changes, but of course when it comes to greenhouse gases, there will be other solutions to reduce the impact. Feed programs are one, and gas capture from manure will be another one. Tech and innovation will play their roles in those areas. Markets will do to, and I expect manure to become a highly valued co-product, and not a by-product anymore. Just as manure is a side effect of intensification and high densities, so are diseases. Last year saw the huge outbreak of African swine fever in China, which so far has lead to the destruction of 25% of the world’s pigs. That is the perfect example of what can happen again. It is not the first outbreak. There have been other ones before of the same disease and of avian influenza. The risk of diseases and their huge cost will also contribute to a readjustment of location of animal production, in terms of production centers, in terms of density of farms and also of densities on the farms themselves. So will the prospect of possible transmission of diseases from animals to humans.

Next to such production issues, consumer demands will also change the way animal products are produced. The pressure for better animal welfare is increasing and will not weaken. It is just fair and it also makes a lot of economic sense. In my times in the pig industry, the poultry industry and in aquaculture, I did quite some research on the topic and the numbers spoke chapters. Treating animals with the proper respect pays off big time. Yet, I also faced a lot of resistance when I tried to show my conclusions by then. I guess that it did not fit in the thinking of the times. The future proved me right, though. The need for better animal welfare will also contribute to a change in production systems, housing and feeding in particular. Animal densities on farms will also be reduced. This trend is already taking place in Europe and there are more and more farming programs that go in this direction. And so do government policies. Along with animal welfare, environmental concerns from consumers will also push towards more “natural” methods of farming. Intensive animal husbandry is not going to disappear but its excesses will. The problem is that too many people tend to associate intensification with efficiency but it is only true to a point. When we reach that point, any incremental intensification does not lead to incremental efficiency anymore and the further we pass this point, efficiency actually decreases and externalities increase substantially. The future will be about finding the optimum between intensification, animal welfare, environmental impact and long-term effects. Next to that, as consumer markets mature, especially when people already eat more than they really need, demand shift from quantity to quality and we will see more and more quality programs appear. It will be good for consumers, for health, for the environment, for the animals during their life and for the profit margins of farmers.

As the graphs from my articles Cow farts, or quite a bit of hot air? and What’s ahead for plant-based foods? show, demand for animal products is expected to increase and a number of products will do quite well. As I mentioned in the same article, ruminants actually play a important role in the management of grasslands and I mentioned their importance for a healthy environment, I believe that responsible animal production systems will help mitigate climate change. Of course, this means that the necessary changes be carried out as I mentioned earlier on in this article. I also believe that animal productions will play an important role in economic development, especially in developing countries and in regions where the population is expected to increase the most. It is nice to expect that the urban population will increase, but it is essential for a prosperous future that we also make sure that people in rural areas can be prosperous and that we do not end up with a demographic desertification of regions that can contribute to a prosperous future. Just as animal productions, although they were intensive and have had a negative impact on the long term, have helped many European young farmers stay in their regions and make a decent living for themselves, it can play the same role in rural areas in developing countries. It is true that mistakes have been made in the past and grave ones. We cannot change the past, but we can learn form past mistakes and make sure not to make them again. Productions that I expect to be successful and popular as economic development tool are poultry (meat and eggs) and aquaculture. Poultry and chickens in particular have the advantage to have a short production cycle and this helps farmer getting a quick cash-flow, which is essential to limit the need for capital. Aquaculture can have the same advantage with fast-growing species but less with species that have a longer production cycle as capital requirements can be heavy, although this can be attractive to investors. Two big pluses for aquaculture are the strong deficit between supply and demand and the health aspect of aquaculture products. The world is quite short of healthy seafood.

I see many areas of success for certain types of animal productions and I have summed them up in the following illustration. In particular, I would like to emphasize is my expectation for the future to see a surge of grass-fed beef with special breeds in semi-intensive systems in which there will be a minimum amount of high energy feed and no hormones at all. For all productions, I expect to see more and more of old-fashioned “authentic” products and recipes, and also a lot of “happy animal” products to be marketed more aggressively than has been the case so far.

The fertilizer of the future?

Posted on March 12, 2011 by Christophe Pelletier

Among the many challenges that the agriculture of the future faces, soil fertility ranks high on the list of priorities.

Originally, most farms were mixed. They had land to grow crops and they had animals for milk, eggs and meat. Markets were mostly local, and food was consumed in the villages and towns near the farms. Food waste was fed to farm animals; the manure produced was mixed with straw and returned to the fields where the crops had been grown. Over time, farming has evolved. Agriculture has become much larger scale, global and specialized. This evolution has been driven by the use of oil, mechanization, and by the development of mineral fertilizers.

That model, which has been greatly based on cheap energy and resources, needs to be looked at critically as the economic environment changes. Energy is no longer cheap and, like oil, the resources used for the production of fertilizers have been depleted. New solutions are required to be able to produce optimally.

The production of nitrogen fertilizers requires a lot of energy. According to estimates, it uses 5% of the world’s natural gas production, and half the fossil fuels used in agriculture. Because nitrogen is quite mobile when dissolved, as this happens when it rains, a large amount of these high-energy-consumption compounds are lost. An estimated 50% of the nitrogen spread on crops leaches through the soil. It ends up in the water system. The reserves of phosphates, another important mineral fertilizer, are facing depletion. This might happen in 20 years from now. With the development of precision agriculture, the waste of minerals can be reduced. With the development of satellite imaging indicating the mineral status of a field, and the local variations within the field, it has become possible for farmers to bring just the right amount of the right mineral at the right time and at the right place. This follows somehow a similar thinking as fertilizing plants in hydroponics operations where crops are produced without soil and fed a mineral solution drop by drop.

A consequence of the specialization between crop farms and intensive animal farms is the rupture of the organic matter cycle. Large monoculture farms have suffered soil erosion because of a lack of organic matter, among other reasons. In soils, the presence of organic matter increases moisture retention, increases minerals retention and enhances the multiplication of microorganisms. All these characteristics disappear when the quantity of organic matter decreases. A solution to alleviate this problem is the practice of no-tillage together with leaving vegetal debris turn into organic matter to enrich the soil. This has helped restore the content of organic matter in the soil, although one can wonder if this practice has only positive effects. Tillage helps eliminating weeds. It also helps break the superficial structure of the soil, which can develop a hard crust, depending on the precipitations and the clay content of the soil. Possibly, in the future the use of superficial tillage could become the norm. Deep tillage, as it has been carried out when agriculture became mechanized, has the disadvantage of diluting the thin layer of organic matter in a much deepen layer of soil. This dilution seriously reduces the moisture and mineral retention capacity of soils, thus contributing to erosion as well, even in organic matter-rich soils.

The removal of farm animals from specialized crop farms requires the systematic use of mineral fertilizers because farmers do not have access to manure and the minerals it contains, even though most of these minerals originate from the crops farms.

At the other end of this interrupted cycle of manure, intensive animal farms do not suffer a lack of organic matter and minerals. They have the opposite problem. They have too much of it, and not enough acreage, if any, where to spread it. This leads to accumulation of manure and other related problems, such as stench, high concentrations of minerals in the soil and eventually in the waterways and drinking water reserves.

Since nothing is lost, what has happened to the minerals from fields and from fertilizers? They have been transferred to other places via the global trade of agricultural commodities. Many of these commodities are used to produce animal feed. Phosphate in European pig manure may come from Asian manioc farms. Therefore, the best way to find out where the minerals are is to look at where intensive animal husbandry farms are. As mentioned earlier, nitrogen is washed away into the water system because of its mobility. Unlike nitrogen, phosphates are not mobile in the soil. They will accumulate, which also leads to a loss of soil fertility, eventually. The other area of concentrations of these minerals is in city sewers, and in the soil of slums. Since the purpose of agriculture is to produce food, and since consumers are increasingly concentrated in urban centers, the exportation of minerals is actually gathering momentum out of rural areas.

In the future, we are going to see a new look at fertilization. The economics of agriculture will change. This is inevitable, because the cost of inputs will increase. This will be a direct consequence of the increase of the price of oil, and of the depletion of phosphates reserves. This change of economics will drive renewed interest for manure, and for sewage. These sources will become attractive and competitive, as they contain large amounts of minerals directly available. Because of their nature, they have a high content of organic matter. One of the most efficient ways to remove nitrates from water is to grow plants with it. One of the main sources of phosphates will be manure.

There is little indication that the human population will return to the land, but animal farms can be moved rather easily. After all, they already are segregated from vegetal production. The increased need for manure will call for a relocation of animal productions. In an expensive-energy economy, having the “fertilizer factory” on site, or at least much closer than today makes a lot of sense. This is especially true because manure contains a lot of water, although there are substantial differences between productions. Transporting water is expensive. Mixing crops and animal productions again on farms will also allow the inclusion of vegetal debris together again with the feces and urine, producing a higher dry matter content, with limited transport costs between the field and the “fertilizer factory”. Regardless of the size of the farms, I expect to see a relocation of animal production units on agricultural land. They will be spread more evenly in the landscape than today. This will decrease the density of farm animals in currently high-density areas to levels that will allow a better control of environmental issues, as well as reduce partly the risks of transmission of animal diseases. Animal production units will reappear in areas where they had disappeared because of the fertilizer that they will provide.

This evolution will also come together with a new approach of manure storage and treatment. Open-air lagoons like those that we know today will simply cease to exist. The changed economics of energy will make the capture of gases financially attractive. Manure storage units will be covered; the biogas will be collected to be used for energy purpose, for the farm and the local communities. The solid and the liquid fractions of the manure will be processed and transformed to provide organic matter and the fertilizing minerals necessary for crop production. The location of the “manure units” will be influenced by the type of animal production, and therefore by the physical quality of the manure. There will be a logistic optimization of manure collection to the crop farms. It will be based on efficiency and optimization of resources. Therefore, the new farm structure will be efficient, as much financially as environmentally. Similarly, open-ocean fish farms that currently do not collect the feces will see the financial value in recuperating the fish waste and sell it. In cities, there will be an increasing interest to recycle the sewage. The purpose will be to recuperate the organic matter and the minerals it contains. A similar approach for human waste will apply as for animal production units as I described above. This will also be integrated in the future approach of urban farming, as it will provide the necessary nutrients for an efficient urban food production. It will be a source of revenue to the cities.

In rural areas and in urban areas, organic matter and fertilizing minerals will become strategic activities. They will serve the purpose of feeding sustainably the world population.

The future price of meat and fish: up

Posted on July 17, 2009 by Christophe Pelletier

With a world population increasing strongly and an agricultural area that will not grow accordingly, the law of offer and demand clearly indicates that agricultural prices will increase in the future. This is true for agricultural commodities such as grains, but the increase will be even stronger for animal products, such as meat, poultry, dairy and fish.
This will be the result of an increasing and very likely quite aggressive competition between the need to feed people with the basic commodities, the need to feed farmed animals and possibly for some time the need to produce biofuels.
Since it takes more than one and even several kilograms of animal feed to produce one kilogram of meat, the feed conversion ratio (FCR) will affect by which factor the price of the various animal products will increase.
Efficient productions like chicken will be successful and will remain quite competitive pricewise against other sources of animal proteins, thanks to its low FCR, to its low water use and to the good agricultural value of its manure. In the aquaculture sector, efficient productions such us tilapia and pangasius have a bright future ahead, as they can help feed a large population for an affordable price. In general, aquaculture has the opportunity to fill the huge gap left by depleted wild fish stocks, although it will have to solve some issues in order to be successful (see my article titled “The lessons of intensive animal husbandry to aquaculture“). In terms of price, the scarcity of wild fish will make these quite expensive for the future.
Less efficient species such as pigs and beef cattle will see the price of their products increase relatively much more. Pigs also have the disadvantage of producing low quality manure, which will limit the level of intensification. However, pork plays an important role in some cultures, and therefore, it will still show a reasonable volume growth, with geographical variations.
A high FCR species such as beef cattle will probably undergo the most dramatic change. Higher feed costs, linked to a relatively high capital need will probably push a number of farmers to shift to other more efficient productions. Highly intensive systems such the feedlots will also undergo major changes, as regulations on the use of antibiotics and hormones will make them financially inefficient. Further, their high impact on the environment because of the manure will also work against them. I do not expect the 99-cent beef burger to be here for all that much longer, burgers will continue to exist, but just quite a bit more expensive. On the other hand, I can see good possibilities for specialty beef products, such as grass-fed beef, but customers will have to pay the right price for it. Grass is the animal feed that we all seem to underestimate, yet it covers vast areas of very often fragile soil, and cattle is one of the few species that can transform it into high value protein.
In the aquaculture sector, a carnivore species such as salmon will also meet its own limitations. Although, salmon feed has shifted from mostly fish oil and fishmeal to a much more complex mix of vegetal oils, this production will see its production costs rise strongly. I expect salmon to become a luxury product again.

What will a higher price mean?
There again, simple economics tell us that this will influence the level of consumption per capita. The price increase will moderate the level of consumption and the price differential between the type of protein, as well as health concerns, will cause a shift between the respective consumption of the different products. In Western countries, people consume quantities of animal products that are substantially higher than what they actually need, and this has led to many health issues. The decrease in consumption will help make people healthier, and reduce the burden of health costs in that part of the world.
In developing countries, the situation is different, as consumption trends show an increase of consumption of animal products, from rather low levels, though. In these countries, consumption per capita will increase, but will not reach the levels that Western countries have shown, simply because prices will be too high to get to such levels.
The decrease of consumption per capita that we will see in developed countries does not mean that the meat industry will get into trouble. Less average consumption per capita in the West will be more than compensated by the growth in emerging countries, where population numbers are significantly higher, and this will lead to a higher global demand of animal products. The main change is that the consumers will be distributed geographically rather differently than they are today. This also means that production will be located in different areas than today.

Just as a teaser: if Western countries consumers were to reduce their meat consumption to just the necessary maintenance needs, it would free volumes enough to cover the maintenance needs of meat for the whole population of China!