We recently moved into a very old farmhouse. The previous occupant was a retired landscape architect. The barn was stocked with all manner of artificial fertilisers and a complete collection of pesticides – against insects, slugs, weeds, fungi… There was even DDT. We took everything to the tip and set about restoring the garden, starting with the soil: lime and compost.
Soil is all the rage in green circles. In recent years, regenerative agriculture has become fashionable. Its glad tidings run as follows: as a farmer, leave the soil in better condition than you found it. This is achievable through crop diversification, farmyard manure, compost, no-till farming, and leaving stubble standing after the harvest. In this way, crops lock carbon dioxide into the soil – good for tackling climate change! It is much the same as circular agriculture, nature-inclusive farming, and whatever else it gets called. The film Kiss the Ground (2020) is about exactly this, and has been rather lavishly praised. I am less impressed. Too many talking heads… And it is old wine in a new bottle. Not that there is anything wrong with old wine, and the exhaustion of agricultural soils cannot be combated enough. The film briefly mentions the billions in government subsidies flowing to intensive, soil-depleting agriculture. Another obstacle also goes unaddressed: lasting soil improvement requires composted excrement. There is too little farmyard manure. Slurry from intensive livestock farming, on the other hand, is in surplus: slurry contains mainly nitrogen, and soils are already saturated with it. Spreading slurry causes ammonia pollution, and injecting it destroys the soil structure. Moreover, our livestock population depletes the soil across a vast area both at home and – above all – abroad, where animal feed is grown. We import that feed, export meat, and saddle ourselves with unusable urine and dung.
Without the big message, nothing will come of the glad tidings
Regenerative agriculture requires human excrement. For whatever we all eat largely comes from the ground, whilst we flush our waste out to sea. In the Netherlands, sludge is admittedly extracted at sewage treatment plants, but composting does not follow – if only because of the potential contaminants it contains. So our excrement never returns to the soil, even though that is a prerequisite for soil restoration.
That is why composting toilets were invented decades ago. Before I moved, I had one. The excrement ended up as a compact mass alongside the green waste. Composting your own excrement is, however, illegal under a nineteenth-century law. At the time, people used raw, uncomposted excrement on the vegetable garden, and this gave them worms. But during full composting, those organisms are killed off by the heat. Routing our excrement via the organic waste bin to a composting facility would be a sound solution.
Excrement may be necessary, but it remains a taboo subject, and Kiss the Ground skirts around the issue – apart from a brief detour to Uganda. There, white aid workers tell local people they should save their excrement. The people laugh awkwardly; it is not going to happen. Meanwhile, we in the West flush away roughly 130 grams of faeces per person per day (four thousand kilograms over a lifetime). In our farmhouse, the two of us produce just over 1.8 kilograms a week – which would fit perfectly in the organic waste bin. For without the big message, nothing will come of the glad tidings.
Koos Dijksterhuis writes daily nature observations in Trouw, and is the author of books and formal rhyming verse.