F E AT U R E By Vron Ware
Robbing the soil The production of fertiliser has an unhealthy history
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f the answer lies in the soil, then what is the question? By asking why and how the history of fertiliser is inseparable from the chronicle of social reform, in Victorian Britain at least, we can better understand why the rapid industrialisation of agriculture had such a catastrophic impact on our ecosystems. In 1845 the town of Andover, Hampshire, was the centre of a national scandal after it emerged that the local workhouse, first opened in 1836, operated a cruel and sadistic regime endured by men, women and children alike. It was the practice in this particular establishment for men and boys to be set to work in the bone yard to produce fertiliser, which was then sold commercially. This unhealthy and unwholesome task entailed pounding animal bones with a 28-pound spiked pole and then collecting the resulting dust. Not only was this backbreaking labour but it was also dangerous, as flying bone chips led to lacerated arms and faces. The bones, stripped of meat but still containing marrow and occasionally gristle, were supplied by a local butcher. In 1840 a medieval burial ground was exhumed in Andover, and there were rumours that human remains were sent to the workhouse. Witnesses recalled a human skeleton suspended in the yard where the men worked. The issue was raised in Parliament by the local MP who declared that he had heard, first hand, that ‘the paupers of the Union were employed in crushing bones, and that, while so employed, they were in the habit of quarrelling with each other about the bones, of extracting the marrow 14
from them, and of gnawing the meat which they sometimes found at their extremities’. So distressing were the details that a public inquiry was ordered the same day. The allegations were found to be true. It emerged during the inquiry that one of the reasons why the workhouse Guardians, a group composed of local landowners, did not object to the practice was that they were able to buy sacks of bone dust at a considerable discount. Fertiliser was at a premium as yields were diminishing in proportion to the pressure to farm ever more intensively. Early soil science had established that plant roots needed calcium phosphate, which could be obtained from bones. These could be burnt or crushed although the new breed of agricultural scientists were aware that, even in this state, the bone meal took a long time to disintegrate in order to be fully absorbed. Then there was the question of where to find sufficient bones to keep pace with demand. The following press report was noted in the ‘Principal Occurrences’ section of the New Annual Register for 1822: ‘It is estimated that more than a million of bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe into the port of Hull. The neighbourhood of Leipsic, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and of all the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and of the horse which he rode.’
Penny Satire
