When thinking of commodities, the first thought would probably not be manure. Commodities like oil, gold, coffee, and natural gas have a fairly high demand, but who would pay a premium price for manure? In many cases, large farms need to pay others just to get rid of their massive amounts of manure. However, as the price of man-made fertilizers increases, it is entirely possible that manure will return to its state as a highly valued commodity. Notice that I…
In The Best Kept Secret to Successful Farming, Part I, I examined W.E. Taylor’s book, Soil Culture and Modern Farming Methods (1913). In it, Taylor implores American farmers to use manure as a primary source of soil fertility maintenance. So where does the United States find itself today? Farming as it once was is essentially gone, replaced by automated dairies and self-driving, GPS-guided tractors on mega farms rather than family farms. There has also been an increasing separation of stock-raising…
It is an obvious oversimplification to say that the world has changed substantially over the past 100 years. With the dawn of the Internet and the boom of the information and technological age, there are many aspects of our life today that would be unrecognizable to someone living in the 1910s. This idea of advancement of society can make it easy to be dismissive of the past and view it as irrelevant and outdated. It may be a different time,…