Robbing the soil

The production of fertiliser has an unhealthy history

By Vron Ware

If 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 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

This satirical drawing of the inmates of the Workhouse fighting over old bones intended for fertiliser was published in The Penny Satire in September 1845. Alongside it was another cartoon of ‘The Commission of Inquiry discussing the subject over a good dinner’. This depicted seven well nourished gentlemen seated at the dining table, talking amongst themselves while filling their plates and glasses to the full.

The images were jointly captioned: ‘The Andover Bastille’. The Inquiry was ordered after rumours of inmates gnawing rotten bones reached the ears of the local MP, who raised the matter in Parliament.

By the 1860s, scientists were testing new forms of fertiliser, whether sourced from natural elements like guano (using slave labour) or chemically produced substances. Baron Justus von Liebig, one of the most pre-eminent agrarian chemists, had come to a more sobering conclusion: once an advocate of artificial fertilisers made in factories, he now believed that the exhaustion of the soil caused by modern agriculture was a disaster. In Britain the situation was particularly critical. Thanks to Chadwick’s new system of sewage disposal, aimed at alleviating the intolerable situation in London, human waste was being flushed into the sea. According to Liebig’s calculations, this deprived three and a half million people of nutrition each year.

In a revised introduction to one of his most famous works, he accused the country of hanging ‘like a vampire’ on the throat of Europe:

‘Great Britain robs all other countries of the condition of their fertility. She has already ransacked the battlefields of Leipzig, Waterloo and the Crimea for bones. She has ploughed up and used the skeletons of many generations accumulated in the catacombs of Sicily.’

Liebig had decided that the systematic extraction of minerals from the soil without replacing the nutrients absorbed by the body amounted to little more than robbery of the earth; more than that, it was an assault on humans’ metabolic relationship with nature. ‘What the soil holds in its womb’, he wrote, ‘is not the wealth of today’s generation because it belongs to future generations.’

Karl Marx, who had long been an avid reader of Liebig’s work, took careful note of this change of direction. It caused him to re-think his earlier optimism that scientific progress would eventually result in the overthrow of capitalism and he adapted the concept of robbery to his own analysis of what he called ‘the metabolic rift’. In the first volume of Capital (1867) he states: ‘All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.’

Today, most gardeners would consider it essential to have a box of blood, fish and bone in their arsenal, but would never dream of applying processed human waste to their roses, let alone tomatoes. Yet increasingly farmers – in the UK and elsewhere – are permitted to use treated sewage sludge on their land. A good source of nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as organic matter, biosolids are slowly re-entering the food chain. It is too soon to know what sort of progress this might represent, if any.

Vron Ware is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Kingston University