Budner Brooke - Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
Holy Shit

Gene Logsdon is one of only three people I know who are able to make a living exclusively out of writing what should be common sense. Here he has done it again.

WES JACKSON,
President of The Land Institute

This could very well be one of the most important books ever written. Few people realize that the subject of excrement is so critically important, complex, and timely. Thankfully, Gene Logsdon has provided humanity with a literary gift that addresses this most basic and fundamental subject with wisdom, humor, poetry and reverence. Holy Shit belongs in every bathroom in every home. The book is great. I love it.

JOSEPH JENKINS,
author of The Humanure Handbook

In our family we have a standard joke that every conversation, even around the dinner table, eventually winds up about manure. And Gene Logsdon, in his naughty and inimical style, has captured the essence of soil building, pathogen control, food ecology and farm economics by explaining the elegantly simple symbiosis between manure and carbon. What a great addition to the eco-food and -farming movement. Logsdons deep bedding approach for livestock housing, elegantly explained and defended, is the primary fertility engine that drives all of us beyond organic farmers. Read and heed.

JOEL SALATIN, author of You Can Farm
and The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer

No one knows more about the backside of agriculture (and the front side, and everything in between) than Gene Logsdon, truly one of the shrewdest practitioners and wisest observers of farming and agriculture. He doesnt care much for social taboos or politeness, and challenges us to see land, animals, ourselves, and, yeah, shit, as parts of one systemwhole and undefiledand maybe discover the Holy in the excremental. This is Logsdon at his best; Holy Shit is a national treasure.

DAVID ORR, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor
of Environmental Studies and Politics and
Senior Adviser to the President, Oberlin College

In the revolution Gene Logsdon envisions, we need pitchforks, but not to mount the barricades. And what a joyful, reverent, irreverent, hard-working, down-to-earth, realistic, Whitmanesque, animal-loving, microbe-nurturing, compost-making, farmer-sensical, manure-pitching revolution it is!

WOODY TASCH, author of Inquiries into
the Nature of Slow Money

With a combination of deep knowledge, longtime farming experience, and great humor, Gene Logsdon tells us everything we dont know about human and animal wastes, and what to do about it. As the author writes, Sooner or later we have to live in the same world as our colons. Not to mention the wastes of all the animals we raise for food! This is the book to read if you give a crap about crap.

SIM VAN DER RYN, author of
The Toilet Papers

Managing Manure
To Save Mankind

GENE LOGSDON

ILLUSTRATIONS BY BROOKE BUDNER

Chelsea Green Publishing
White River Junction, Vermont

Copyright 2010 by Gene Logsdon
All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Project Manager: Patricia Stone
Developmental Editor: Makenna Goodman
Copy Editor: Nancy Ringer
Proofreader: Helen Walden
Designer: Peter Holm, Sterling Hill Productions
Illustrations: Brooke Budner

Printed in the United States of America
First printing August, 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 11 12 13

Our Commitment to Green Publishing
Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because we use recycled paper, and we hope youll agree that its worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the worlds endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Holy Shit was printed on Natures Book Natural, a 30-percent postconsumer recycled paper supplied by Thomson-Shore.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Logsdon, Gene.

Holy shit : managing manure to save mankind / Gene Logsdon.

p. cm.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60358-310-7

1. Manures. 2. Manures--Management. 3. Organic wastes as fertilizer. I. Title.

S654.L64 2010
631.861--dc22

2010021451

Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Post Office Box 428
White River Junction, VT 05001
(802) 295-6300
www.chelseagreen.com

They are cowshit farmers...

... Notice how many times
I have said manure? It is a serious business.
It breaks the farmers backs. It makes their land.
It is the link eternal, binding man and beast
And earth...

... the link of the manure, that had seemed eternal,is broken.

From the poem Marshall Washer,
by Hayden Carruth, in Collected Shorter Poems, 19461991

Dedicated to the Steve Zender family, the Jerry Goldstein family, the David Kline family, and the Maury Telleen family, all of whose publications have generously supported my writing habit all these many years.

CONTENTS

I am most grateful to the people at Chelsea Green Publishing for their warm enthusiasm when I suggested this book. I was actually quite surprised that anyone would appreciate the possible importance of a book about shit, much less have the courage to allow me to title it Holy Shit. Bless you, Margo Baldwin and your staff.

Longtime readers will notice occasional strains and refrains of previous writings in this book. My thanks for allowing me the freedom to recycle older writings goes especially to Steve Zender, who has published my weekly column in his Progressor Times newspaper for thirty-some years now; to David Kline and his family, who carry my stuff in Farming Magazine; to Lynn Telleen and Maurice Telleen, who do the same in the Draft Horse Journal; and to Nora Goldstein, editor of BioCycle magazine, and all of the Goldstein family. These are the people whose support through the years has allowed me to range far and wide in my writings, even to writing novels, without ending up in the poorhouse. Thanks also and especially to Dave Smith, who oversees my websites, The Contrary Farmer, thecontraryfarmer.com, and Organic To Be, organictobe.org, and who has been of so much help and inspiration in many ways.