Well I'm an "oldtimer" ;) and I can still remember my grandmother's garden and the compost pile and the mixed straw and old chicken manure mulch she used.

Composting and using composted manure has been around forever - well since English fiefdoms and the Roman Empire anyway. Fussell in his book Farming Systems of the Classical Era discusses the use of animal manures and "grain field residue" in the garden as early as 350 BC and how olive trees were mulched with manure.

Straw and hay have been commonly used as mulches for eons. Many of the other old farming and gardening books I used to collect discuss how to build a compost pile and use it and how to scythe straw leavings in the field and then chop them to use as a mulch around plants.

True, they didn't have cardboard or compost tumblers but if they had livestock they likely had a compost pile. ;)

But if your grandfather didn't use either he certainly wasn't alone. Sadly, even today many gardeners have no knowledge of or experience with either composting or mulching and the many benefits of both.

Dave

We practiced sheet composting on the farm. Litter from the cow barn went on the fields as well as the chicken litter, along with any yard debris including leaves and small trimmings, and the leftover plants and stubble from the crops was left in place. When we prepared the veggies whatever we didn't use was returned to the fields including all hulls, shucks, etc. plus all kitchen waste. Some years we got barn waste from neighboring farmers if they didn't need it for their pastures. All of this was then plowed or disked in and allowed to mellow over the winter.

Most farmers I was familiar with never "mulched" as we know it, nor did they compost. They cultivated between rows with the tractor and hand hoed up close to plants. (I remember lots of time spent with a hoe!) Composting seems to be more of a small garden technique. The amount of debris from a farm would be impractical and expensive to compost. It could be done but why go to that trouble when disking it directly into the soil will give basically the same results? Turning the soil with a small tiller or a shovel as is done in small garden plots makes it more practical to compost first since compost is easier on the gardener than tilling in the stuff in its original condition.

Sandy

As the barns were cleaned out, it was usually piled in a convenient place, not so much to compost as to await a time when the fields were empty so it could be applied. They knew the fresh manure would burn the crops if it was put down during the growing season but would be of great benefit the next year if put down in the fall.

The farmers I grew up knowing were definitely "modern" chemical farmers who used fertilizers on their crops and sprayed with pesticides that would make us cringe today. But they were also "old school" enough to realize the need to return the organic matter to the soil.

Sandy

Composting seems to be more of a small garden technique. The amount of debris from a farm would be impractical and expensive to compost.

Not at all! ;) Seriously, we farm by the acre and live in farming country. Everyone down here has huge compost piles. All you have to do is pile it up some place and let it do its thing.

Dave

My uncle farmed (mixed and grain) from 1947 til he 'retired' a couple of years ago. He never had a compost pile for the farm. My aunt had/has one for her garden though.

Manure from the daily cleaning of the barns got piled up back of the barn over the winter. In the spring, usually after spring planting, this manure, as well as the manure from the pole sheds, was hauled out by spreader to a nearby fallow field.

The dairy farmer and beef farmer I worked for back in the 70's did the same thing. In fact I'd never heard of composting until I moved back onto the farm in '94 and started doing it myself.

Now, around here, it is too expensive to let land be out of production to allow for spreading of manures so mostly crop rotation and synthetic fertilizer is the norm.

Lloyd

Did your grandfather have a manure spreader?

Most farmers spread manure on their fields.

We were a community of subsistence farmers until about 1948-50. I would have been in grade school. Everyone had ridiculous surplus of food and fuel but were cash poor as transporting farm products to market was quite difficult due to the locations.

Surplus food, some fresh vegetation, was fed to pigs or chickens which in due time were eaten as meat.

These people did a bit of spreading of manure in the fall. Sometimes they used fresher manure spread thinly. Often it was left in a pile for years before use. Some of the most impressive vegetables that I have seen were grown in an abandoned chicken pen. The waste had set there for several years.

My dad grew up on a real working family farm that raised crops and livestock in the 30's and 40's. He mentioned to me that they used composted manure and grew clover to replenish their fields (in addition to those nasty chemicals from sprayers, planes, etc.). He said they also sometimes harvested the clover seed for sale or reuse. The draft (and subsequent opportunities) got him off the farm which he suggested was a harder life than the army.

Joel Salatin, a modern Virginia farmer, keeps his cattle penned during the winter. He does not clean out the pen until summer after the cattle are long gone and the pig has had a chance to eat all the corn he threw in throughout the winter. By then it is compost, turned by the pig. He scoops it out with a front end loader and uses it wherever he needs it.

After the invention of cheap mineral fertilizers most farmers converted over completely, and that is all they used. It wasn't until fairly recently that soil decline after a couple of generations of this practice forced farmers into thinking about mulching, cover crops, organic ammendments etc. So it is very possible that your grandgfather and mine simply used a bag of fertilizer and dirt to grow things. If I hadn't taken over the gardening, my 80 year old mother would be doing the same. I still get greif for all the work I put into improving the soil... "I never had to do any of that and my vegetables grew just fine!"

I can't imagine that very many homes in the early 1900s didn't have compost piles. Whether they used the compost might have been a different matter. My father was born in 1910 and we always had what he called a 'mulch pile'. His father would have had a mulch pile, too. My father was an organic gardener in so many ways that none of my friends' parents were. He used manure, compost, had a cold frame, started all his flowers and vegetables on sawhorses under lights in our basement in soil he made and baked in our oven. I remember him grafting stuff, making slits in leaves and pinning them to the soil. Everyone on our road had a division from a particularly beautiful peony he raised.

But he sure did embrace all the gardening chemicals that showed up in the 50s. I remember him dusting all the beautiful roses that grew on all the uprights of our fence, with little me, standing beside him, breathing in the acrid powder.

My uncle and my grandparents used primarily animal manures, although my uncle did use green manure crops to build up the organic matter in his soil. While my grandparents and my parents put manure on the garden in the spring, because hey were unaware of the potential diseases in that manure, my uncle never grew food crops on freshly manured soil. The kitchen garden on the farm was manured in the fall and that was tilled in then, never in the spring before anything was planted.

Farmers have always needed a way to dispose of manure. When chemical based fertilizers became available, farmers didn't stop using manure. The chem fertilizers supplemented their manure fertilizers.

I know lots of farmers who have always spread manure on their fields, and they will always will. They also use chem fertilizers and pesticides. I think there is a false perception that only organic farmers use manure.

Ditto Joe Pye. Another trend is that a lot of farms nowadays don't have much livestock anymore or only have livestock so they end up with too little or too much manure. "Balanced" farms are not as common as they was.

Don't forget crop rotations in addition to manure applications. Every farmer knows the value of planting a crop of nitrogen-fixing soybeans or alfalfa, followed up by a crop of nitrogen-intensive corn.

I have never known any farmer to maintain compost piles here in MN manure is spread on the fields near the farm every spring when it thaws relying heavily on chemicals mulching is completly impractical on 1000 acres

Given that time and distance traveled is equal to money, this satellite imagery shows how this farmer chose to spread as close to the barn areas as he could. The manured areas are the lighter colored lines on the right.

Lloyd

When I was growing up the farmer across the street from me had 1/3 dairy farm, 2/3 crop fields. The manure usually went into a spreader that kicked it out behind the tractor in the fall. One time something went wrong and there was a river of semisolid manure 5 yards wide 50 yards long and a foot deep in the field.

That must have been a disaster.

Not far from any old foundation around here, you'll find an old glass dump, go a little further and you find a tin dump. I've got both on this property---a wide circle in the woods where there's tons of broken glass. I seen lots of bottle and tin dumps in the woods. There are collectors who try to locate the bottle dumps looking for intact, old bottles. I imagine that it is more likely than not that old farmsteads managed their household and farm wastes right there on the farm. If it was too much of a hassle to spread compost in the fields, I imagine it was not inconceivable that compost got used in the house garden or the flower beds.

Oh my word, you guys have brought back memories. I do remember there always being a huge pile of frozen manure out by the barn. Michigan frozen! I remember climbing on top of it and then realizing there where little clumps of frozen poop. He had dairy cows, chickens, mean geese that chased me, horses, dog and cats and lots of potatoe and corn fields. He also had a corn bin that we always fed the horses some dried corn with. I guess he was a balanced farmer.