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.
Manure bull run leaves US farmers queuing
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.
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.
