Life in the Bones- Bone Manure

The inevitable process of decay reminds all of death, but decay also brings life. The breakdown of rotting and disgusting manure feeds barren ground the vital nutrients needed for growth. In Victorian England, mills and factories collected, processed, and sold the most blatant symbols of death, bones, to cultivate fertile land.

Originally a German innovation for growing tropical plants, the use of manure made of ground bones spread through English horticulture in the 1840s. Though it first met with skepticism, decomposing bones quickly became the most sought fertilizer for the soggy cold English climate. Before the British public caught on to collecting their waste bones, farmers imported their bone manure from Germany through ports in northern Europe. More than a small taste of the tens of thousands of tons of this valuable commodity exported to England was exhumed from German graveyards. Now every farm features a barrel tucked away in a dry place slowly filling with half-cleaned femurs, vertebra, ribs, and skulls. In the city, a bone collector’s cart stops at taverns, inns, and restaurants to pick up the day’s worth of skeletal waste nibbled clean by patrons. Rag-and-bone men sift through rubbish piles and keep shops where servants take their household’s unwanted but valuable remains.

Many farmers toss bone dust by hand to distribute it over a field during dry, sunny weather or scatter walnut sized bone chunks before planting seeds. The most common method of fertilizing is mixing one bushel of bone manure (weighing nearly 55 pounds) to every ton of traditional fecal manure, but the mixture must be used before the compost completely decompose the skeletal fragments. Fertilizing an acre of land with bone manure costs £10. Fields fertilized with bone manure only require another treatment roughly every ten years.

Decomposing bones fill the soil with phosphate of lime and nitrogen, key elements for growing turnips and potatoes and very helpful for quickly growing wheat and grasses. Chunks of bone also collect and hold moisture underground making it an excellent source of easily absorbed water for thirsty plants. It is not uncommon to pluck a vegetable from the earth and find its roots snaking through a shard of bone also pulled free. Bone manure works best in aerated, sandy soil, and has little measurable effect in clay-rich or wet soil.

Adventure Ideas
As a farmhand scatters bone manure over a field, a strangely sharp sliver of bone scratches his hand. The next day he starts to change.

In the city, the most successful professional rag-and-bone men collect their product from high volume establishments, such as stockyards, and eating-houses. Sometimes the competition at the bottom of the social ladder is just as ugly as that at the top. Theft, hold-ups, bribery, and frame jobs keep the best bones in the best hands.

The first farmer in a remote village decides to try bone manure on his fields. After purchasing and mixing his supply, the local clergy protest this sacrilege of possible human remains. The farmer doesn’t dare spread it with this condemnation, but how can he find out if some of the bones are human before the entire batch rots to uselessness?

In Greek mythology, the hero Cadmus buried the teeth of the Ismenian dragon in a field. Those teeth grew into the dangerous Spartoi warriors. Accidently planting bits and pieces of mythological creatures could have any number of strange side effects.

Several visitors to a rural village disappeared. A barrel of freshly processed bone manure sits in a local farmer’s storeroom ready to be spread over his land. The crime goes unsolved until ominous phenomenon manifests in the fields fertilized by his victim’s bones.

Next Friday, we move on from bone manure’s use to the utterly unappetizing process of its production in bone mills.