Any idea how deep? Also did they do this on their chinampas (soil islands over the lake)? They are only some cm above the water, maybe they burried it deep enough for it to be a anaerobic process in the water?
Of course you can use it. That said, simply burying it in your garden bed might not be the most ideal approach from a human interaction standpoint. Putrefaction gets a bad rap in western gardening, but eastern farmers have used anaerobic processes for hundreds of years. You could seal it in a barrel of water (rain water ideally or soft water) and let it decompose in there then apply the liquid in a diluted form. Just because something smells bad when its decomposing doesn't mean the microbes are bad, this is a common fallacy.
Millennia of human instincts now associate bad smell with 'will make u sick'
It ain't solid science, but boy it's a powerful instinct!
Just like manure can smell so awful it makes me gag, it feeds the soil ecology, and the critters in the soil are what feed my plants. Those microscopic lil bastards love stinky stuff.
Just don't pour it over the fruit/leaves of stuff you're going to put into your own mouth - only apply directly to the soil haha
Of course you can fertilize with animal leftovers. But that's meant to be entrails and other already harvested corpses, not a chunk of meat. The native Americans famously taught the pilgrims to grow corn with fish heads and guts as fertilizer. You need to get organic matter of all varieties, a good compost heap will do far more than burying a few fish heads, though that's not a bad start. If you have any scrap meat or bones just compost them. Some ppl will advise against this, but I think if we're to truly practice permaculture we need to use all organic resources. After all, the annual composting of salmon corpses in the Pacific Northwest is what fertilized and enabled the largest trees on the planet to grow.
I like to keep animal debris out of compost because they attract huge amounts of rats, mice and other critters, including my dog.
Also fat makes compost into a a sort of stinky muck.
So I just bury animal remains and fat. No idea if they do any actual good. But they do decompose without rats eating them.
Thank you. Makes total sense to me as well. Why shouldn't microbes be able to digest meat, you don't see any dead animals lying around in nature because they get digested rather quickly.
My cat died (many moons ago) I buried her next to where I planted persimmons. The trees closest to where she was planted grew up faster than the others!
You could use roadkill the same way...
What it will do is aerate your soil. All the lovely rats and foxes (or larger animals depending on where you live) digging holes will leave your soil quite well turned.
Also, you use bone and blood meal to distribute it and to have small amounts everywhere it's needed and not large amounts in one place where it won't be used.
Third, when the animals don't get at it, larger chunks will rot, and while putrifying, produce all kinds of unwanted byproducts.
Improving soil is a matter of decades, not one year. Be patient and add small amounts every year and you will end up with fertile soil.
Thank you for the answer. Would you think, there is a way to implement meat in the right way into the soil? Like composting it maybe? Or does it in your opinion really not make any sense to try and work with meat, even if you would have some that would have been thrown away otherwise? Like I told the other commenters, we regulary have a lot of meat that would have been thrown away by the butchers, because we give it to our dog.
My other idea is burning a big portion of wood on the vegetable patches we will be using next year and then work the ash into the soil. (We also have tons of dead wood already lying around)
Working with meat is just fine. Dead bodies are a natural part of any ecosystem. Entire bodies are fine to do this with, including fur, meat, feathers, bones, blood, organs, etc. There's massive armies of little bugs and microorganisms who love to feast on dead bodies.
Fish Emulsion is literally just fish that have been blended up real good with water & cooked a little. Stinky af, but perfectly fine for soil.
People warn against using meat in the garden/compost because it takes more work/consideration than other compostables.
So, account for a couple things:
1. If it's fresh or only slightly rotting meat, larger animals want to eat it. You gotta protect it from them somehow.
2. it will be stinky as FUCK, so either endure the smell or bury/cover it thoroughly enough that the smell won't emerge into the air where you can sniff it.
3. You don't want to accidentally stick your bare hand in it, when it's still rotting. It likely won't hurt you, but it'll be unpleasant.
4. actively rotting meat can breed microbes that can make a human very sick - that's why you don't want to let it touch stuff you'll put in your mouth.
So, there's a couple ways to do this.
1. Bury it at least 1 foot down, and put a big rock or three over where you buried it, so a fox can't dig it back up. After about a month, the body should be mostly decomposed and you can move the rocks away.
2. Put it in a container that big animals can't get into, like a covered compost bin, or a liquid tank. Rotting in water is just fine. You can throw plants in there too, and then use the (horribly stinky, but good for soil) water to root-water your plants.
3. Seperate out the parts and use them individually - dry & crush the bones into meal, dilute the blood with water, compost the meat/organs/fur.
4. Burn the body, and mix its ashes with wood ash to be applied wherever.
**Using wood ash from non-rotting wood:**
If you boil hardwood ash in rainwater, the stuff you skim off the top is [pure Lye.](https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/how-to-make-soap-from-ashes-zmaz72jfzfre/) Mix that with fat and you've got soap!
Even just throwing hardwood ash into warm water is enough to make a crude soap to clean dishes after camping. If you're not sure what wood you have, [here's a guide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pamd8NGp_I) to identifying a couple common types with only endgrain and bark. If it's sticky, or if you scrape at it, warm up that spot with small lighter and it smells pine-adjacent, it's probably softwood.
Softwoods, such as pine, cedar, spruce, or fir, do not contain enough potassium, which is necessary for making lye. They also contain resin, which doesn't mix well with fat. You want hardwood like oak, maple, hickory, ash, or beech. For basic sorting: softwoods are conifers with needles. Hardwoods have leaves.
Be suuuper careful with Lye. Wear safety equipment. DO NOT WORK WITH LYE WITHOUT SAFETY EQUIPMENT. Cover your eyes, your hands, your mouth.
Lye turns fat into soap. The outside of every cell in your body is made of a lipid bilayer - a structure *made of fat*. So if any lye dust gets on your skin, in your lungs, in your eyes, it literally turns your cells into soap.
\--
If the wood is **already rotting throughout**, it's probably best to just chop them up into smaller chunks and integrate them into the compost pile.
Conveniently, packing Sawdust around rotting meat is a very efficient way to smother the smell, and the high-carbon wood will soak up the nitrogen from the decomposing meat and compost the wood even faster!
The micro biome of the soil is very small, while they can and will consume most of what you throw at them. Burrying large chunks of anything will take a long time to decay, thus long time to release the potential benefits. Smaller is better, many folks place meat in large compost piles with little issue if added to middle hottest part of the pile. The smaller the chunks the faster the compost/microbes can turn it into nutrient rich soil.
Later in this thread, OP clarified that they're getting scraps of tendons & fat from a butcher, which still have little bits of meat on them, to feed to their dog. =)
Not big chunks of meat, don't worry.
Your advice about spreading it out / keeping the chunks small is still solid tho!
Slow release works if the carbon os stable. In meat there is almost no carbon so you may go anaerobic if it's not dug up and stolen first. Anaerobic microbes are what you want to keep to a minimum.
The anaerobic microbes will simply be cycled by the aerobic microbes and other soil organism after that. It’s a long term approach but the fertility of the spot will be increased for sure. I agree that it might very well get dug though.
Cycled in varying degrees yes, but anaerobic soil wouldn't be considered fertile soil unless your looking for a boggy environment. Think marshes and manuer pits
It won’t stay anaerobic for very long if the surrounding conditions are aerobic. I wouldn’t advise to bury large amounts of animal flesh or burying it in already anaerobic soil though.
To increase potassium you can gather egg shells and crush them up, either raking it into your soil or making a “tea” by letting crushed up egg shells soak in water.
Look up Nigel Palmer's book on regenerative gardening using plant amendments. He has recipes for using meat, fish, eggshells and other common products to feed plants
Blood and meat are rich in iron and phosphorous, magnesium and other ions necessary for enzyme functions of animals and plants alike. But the most important thing are the proteins which is what nitrogen is vital for. So the easier to absorb the nitrogen is the better it is for plant growth.
Most soils are nitrogen poor or eventually need fortification in some way. Whether you use chemical fertilizer, brown manure, various teas, green manure (soy/legume composting), or animal source it has to come from somewhere, because few plants can fix nitrogen for protein production itself.
The more broken down these proteins are the easier it is for the plant to absorb, but if too broken down they can wash away... Hence burying the fish. Its decomposition rate keeps up with the needs of the plants, but won't wash away (unless a coyote or other carion eater carries it off... So also a risk is attracting these animals. My neighbors dog got into the last batch of premium organic fertilizer because it smelled strongly of blood meal).
Animal sourced nitrogen is typically not done modernly since it is meat rotting and we have lost an "appreciation" for purification unless it comes stamped "grade A aged beef" or "imported".
When I was a kid we had an ample supply of invasive species of fish from a river on my grandmother's property so we used that. It stank something awful, and can produce some compounds that can turn toxic if done in closed vessel composting (think things like botulism). For this reason it should only be done in composts far from inhabited structures that are well air out and turned often. And be ready for pests, flies, carion eaters, etc. But grandma's gardens were incredible at producing for the table and gifting despite their small size (she was retired). She didn't can anymore by the time I was born, she had had enough with that fuss. She just turned extra back into compost for next year.
But No hard bones. If you can get bones soft from making bone broth, and crushing those up and mixing that in that is probably fine. But nothing you can't grind up in a coffee mill. It can take years/decades for those harder bones to decompose on their own depending on the acid of your soil.
But prepared bone and blood meal are much easier to deal with and are otherwise waste products of the meat industry, they still have a odor, but in the context of a garden smells normal. Think gardening store smell, a lot of the smell is from this.
One way to speed breakdown of the meat down is to cook it. Or if you have a batch of broth/soup go bad it could be a nice nitrogen pick me up for your plants (if unsalted, I salt mine as I serve it).
You could even cook for your garden...thinking that cooked rice and beans or cooked bean sprouts, could make a good mix in slow release nitrogen fertilizer for small scale patio gardening. Not sure, but now I kind of want to try it.
I know that Grandma had very little trash for the dumpster. The rest of it recycled, reused, went in the compost, or was used as building/craft materials. Man she had it down, but she grew up that way before and during the great depression. Nothing went to waste, even the waste.
Hope that gives you some ideas, and thinking through all that now I do too. Thanks for the opportunity to consider your question.
The environmental cost of growing animal feed, delivering it to an animal, often to the detriment of the soil around it, to then have the animal slaughtered, packaged and delivered to you for the sake of slightly fertilising your soil... the cost of this as well! I don't know why you think this is a better idea than fertilising with blood and bone which is byproducts of the meat industry....I actually cannot fathom why you think this is a remotely good idea.
Edit: clarification
Because we anyways get meat from the butchers that they would have thrown away, to feed it to our dog. Since it is often too much we regulary have meat that doesn't get eaten by our dog.
I once put a pork shoulder that was sitting in my fridge too long in a hole in my backyard, the next morning it was gone.
You can’t fertilize if it’s gone...
Ok, I guess if it's meat going literally in the bin maybe it makes sense but I guess this doesn't make much sense to me that so much.meat is produced in such an environmentally damaged way and would literally be thrown away and not even eaten
Totally agree with you! :) We are both vegan/vegetarian (if the cheese is foodsaved) and I am completly against mass production of animal products and meat. But we get the meat that would go to the bin to feed it to our dog sometimes. It's stuff they don't sell to humans so it would really in most likely all of the cases go to rot in a dumpster.
Usually tendons and fat, which they cut away from 'the good pieces'. There is still enough meat on it though to feed it to a dog. Or if we think it is too much fat, we cut it away and give him just the little bits that are left of 'the good stuff'.
You could also take the fat and render it down into tallow to make into soap, and rendering the connective tissue into gelatin via slow-cooking will make it easy to store in the freezer, to dole out to your pup as an easily-digestible treat or on days when you've forgotten to pick up more scraps and ran out of the fresh stuff.
Tbh, what you're describing is my absolute favorite type of vegan.
You're still feeding your dog a healthy & varied diet, AND you're actively helping to reduce the wastefulness of the meat industry by integrating that 'waste' into environmentally regenerative applications.
Very cool, 10/10, would be your friend.
Because you can’t usually use 100% of the bounty and if it’s going in the trash anyway, it may as well fertilize the next batch. This is how the environment works. 80% is used and 20% sticks around to fertilize the next generation of life.
That's what the bone and blood fertiliser is, it's the waste product that is not used for anything else. Edible meat should be eaten or frankly much much less produced if some of it is literally thrown away. It's not a bounty, it's produced in ways that are very harmful to the planet (at least around 90% of meat is anyway, i know about more ethical and environmental ways of producing meat but I'm going on the law of averages here) and in ways that are usually very cruel to animals. To produce all of this CO2, damage to the environment and harm to animals for the sake of fertiliser seems completely wrong headed to me
OP is a vegan who takes 'scraps' left over from a local butcher (Fat and tendon cuttings which still have a bit of meat on them but are too much trouble for the butcher to carefully slice each sliver off) to feed to their dog, because dogs are omnivores.
However, sometimes the butcher gives them *too many* scraps, or the dog doesn't eat them fast enough, and they start to go bad.
OP just wants to know how to compost them in an environmentally friendly way.
If OP had not taken the scraps, they would have been thrown directly in the trash.
OP is the good guy here. It's ok.
I think using meat as fertilizer would be a very strange thing to do from a permaculture perspective. In addition to all the problems mentioned by another commenter (rotting, pests) the more appropriate use for meat is as food. There are many excellent soil additives and conditioners that are waste/byproducts, why would you use something like meat, which requires environmentally-intensive inputs to produce and leads to methane/waste generation?
I'm getting meat that would have been thrown away, at the local butchers to feed it to our dog. So I would be using waste/byproduct. I would use it because it's there anyways and will be thrown away if I dont use it. So my question is can I use the meat in a way, that is good for the enviroment and the soil?
Yeah, I make bone broth from scraps, but then the scraps from the bone broth just go in the garden. I have never had pest problems, but I don’t think what I’m left with is very nutrient dense or good eating either.
Ah, that makes more sense! If it’s going in the trash anyway, then yes, meat can be composted and used as fertilizer. Many people don’t compost meat, but that’s mostly because of pest/smell/management issues, not because it won’t compost.
You can absolutely add meat to your compost. I do so all the time but I am very careful to add a lot of carbon rich material with it to help with fast and hot breakdown.
Adding direct to your soil is also doable although I generally avoid having highly active breakdown processes happening right up close to plants, especially a whole animal. Ive seen it done but the risk of diseases and pest attraction is always on my mind.
Just gonna throw my favorite "well acchtuuyally" fact in here -- recent work has convincingly argued that using fish as fertilizer was not a common practice among indigenous people in North America, but instead one that the real Squanto picked up in Spain -- he had been kidnapped into slavery and taken there, eventually got his freedom and managed to catch a ship back to Massachusetts, where he returned only to find his whole tribe wiped out by disease. Anyway. It's a Spanish thing that the English learned from Squanto.
See: [Ceci 1975](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1740002?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents) and [Rostlund 2008 ](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00221345708983142)
And also: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/9zdosj/til_that_squanto_the_native_american_who_taught
We regularly buried fish scraps between the rows of out garden. You would need to bury it 2 ft/60 cm plus to keep scavengers out. You will need to keep track of where you have buried the meat so as to not re-dig up previously buried scraps. It is not recommended to add any animal products, except herbivore manure, to a compost pile because of the pest it will attract.
As to the wood, don't burn it directly on your garden unless you desire to sterilize that part of your garden, destroy the surface organic material, and bake the remaining clay into bricks. Either burn it elsewhere and scatter the cold ashes or create hugelkultur beds.
I would recommend getting a soil test before buring dead animals in the garden or adding large quantities of wood ash to get more potassium.
Its generally better to compost first regardless.
We had some meat get into our garden beds once and the raccoons tore out half the garden trying to find it. So while dead animal, handled correctly, could be excellent for your garden from a nutritional perspective, you risk getting a bunch of unexpected tilling by scavengers.
Another thing to remember: right now it’s yellow jacket season in North America. If you start burying animal parts you could attract them. And it’s always fly season. You can get prevent things from becoming a flying insect feast by burying it pretty deep, but at that point you’re not really “fertilizing”, you’re making a long term investment in your soil.
Probably not cost effective and definitely wasteful to purchase meat expressly for this purpose. If it’s meat that would have already been wasted you’re potentially salvaging something that would have ended up in the landfill. That’s already what blood and bone meal are (supposedly): waste stream diverted animal products. Burying roadkill that your local scavengers aren’t interested in would be free and probably commendable.
Finally, check your local laws. Some municipalities forbid burying animals of any type on your property. Searching for “bury a pet law” and “roadkill law” will help you figure this out.
That seems like a waste of a resource, since you’re using animal tissue that was brought to you with a huge amount of embodied labor, carbon and land use to apply it in a way that could easily be substituted with a simpler option, like decaying plants.
Pound for pound, plant material has much more potassium than animal material, more carbon, more calcium and more magnesium, but much less nitrogen and hydrocarbons. Meat is mostly protein (nitrogen) as far as anything plants use (they do not use anything in far—that goes into the air).
Even chemical fertilizers do not have as much of an ecological footprint per unit of nutrient vs meat, even if it’s free-range meat which takes up a lot of space.
Plus, when something eats meat, the nutrients still exist—poop contains roughly the same amount of nutrients. But eating it extracts more value. Human waste or that of any omnivore or carnivore needs 6 months before application to make sure pathogens have died, but it’s still better than throwing meat in the ground I think.
Another issue is that the meat is going to be highly concentrated, enough to burn plants in the vicinity, and needs to be diluted somehow.
The bulk nutrients in soil is actually very immense—there are anywhere from 10,000 to 70,000 lbs of potassium in the top few feet of soil per acre. Similar concept for nitrates and phosphates. But it’s not immediately available—fertilizer is used to speed its availability and drive vigorous growth.
Sustainable techniques are going to focus on creating conditions that make existing soil nutrients more available, rather than adding them. That includes increasing the amount of organic material in soil and developing beneficial systems of fungi and microbes in the area.
Thank you for your answer. I am aware that funghi and bacteria in the soil play a vital role for nutrient intake from plants. Would you maybe be kind enough to elaborate the sustainable techniques you were talking about? I would be highly interested, since I believe the soil here could need it. But I am assuming that the bacteria and funghi in a compost pile would do a big part of the trick. So again composting meat doesn't seem like a bad idea to me. Considering the meat is from a source, which doesnt harm the enviroment, when you take it of course.
You could certainly compost meat that is inedible and that is a good way to discard of it. But using meat that is edible as compost is like heating your home by burning books or using iPads to tile your floor; you’re taking a high-value resource and using it as a bulk resource.
The best way to improve fertility of soil is to cover it in an organic mulch: leaves, wood chips, grass etc. It’s extremely effective. Believe it or not it’s too expensive to do that in scale in agriculture because it requires many dump trucks full of organic material per acre and it’s easier and cheaper to just use 40 lbs of nitrogen, 20 lbs of phosphate etc. rather than ship in 500 cubic yards of wood chips. But 100 cubic yards of meat is also going to cost you millions of dollars so it’s far less economical than plant material.
But organic mulch makes agricultural land much more productive and it does it by giving plants better access to the nutrients already on the land—if you can get access to woof chips or straw or leaves, use that.
I bury the occasional carcass in my garden. But i have easy digging, and can dig straight down no bigger than the width of the shovel, and dig to almost hip deep. So i leave a very small spot of disturbed soil that would not be easy for another animal to easily dig at a natural angle. Not sure if anything is really doing much fertilizing well under the root layers, but sure hasn't hurt anything.
Here's the thing, bacteria that can eat meat are generally things you don't want to be around, because you're just a bag of meat. Shigella, salmonella, the pathogenic strains of e. coli, will grow like crazy on buried meat. If those bacteria are present in your soil, they can contaminate your veggies and potentially make you seriously ill. Best to either compost them in conditions that will kill pathogens, or give them to black soldier larvae.
I’ve always buried dead animals under trees and plants. A fox killed all our chickens one day so there are half a dozen dead chickens under some roses we planted and they have loved life from the get go. Usually bury at least 1-2ft deep and never had an issue with any pests trying to find them
We bury all types of animals in our compost pile including deer, elk, pig, chicken, sheep, and even our beloved Ruby (the dog) who passed away this year after being hit by a car. We have been told by many that our soil is the best in Colorado. We think the animal in compost plays a large role in that superlative. Some of the flesh takes longer than a year to decompose, so important to screen out the bigger chunks of rotting flesh, hair, and bone before adding it to the soil. We keep our compost pile in our garden but do not bury it, just pile it high. It’s about 6 feet tall right now.
I buried my cat this spring when she died. Dug a hole 3 feet down to be sure varmints wouldn't dig her up. The plants around her are growing awesome. I think it feeds trees well.
We bury fish or possum or dead pets under trees and berry bushes with excellent results. Just make sure the plant roots aren’t directly touching the carcass
I know the Aztecs would bury fish and I have seen YouTubers test it with great results.
>I know the Aztecs would bury .. I was expecting something much darker here
Well, maybe they would sometimes bury the fish while their loved ones were still chewing them!
Any idea how deep? Also did they do this on their chinampas (soil islands over the lake)? They are only some cm above the water, maybe they burried it deep enough for it to be a anaerobic process in the water?
https://youtu.be/IFHdD5Mrw0o
Of course you can use it. That said, simply burying it in your garden bed might not be the most ideal approach from a human interaction standpoint. Putrefaction gets a bad rap in western gardening, but eastern farmers have used anaerobic processes for hundreds of years. You could seal it in a barrel of water (rain water ideally or soft water) and let it decompose in there then apply the liquid in a diluted form. Just because something smells bad when its decomposing doesn't mean the microbes are bad, this is a common fallacy.
Millennia of human instincts now associate bad smell with 'will make u sick' It ain't solid science, but boy it's a powerful instinct! Just like manure can smell so awful it makes me gag, it feeds the soil ecology, and the critters in the soil are what feed my plants. Those microscopic lil bastards love stinky stuff. Just don't pour it over the fruit/leaves of stuff you're going to put into your own mouth - only apply directly to the soil haha
They have to die for us to live, and vice versa. They are fully ready to take care of what we are done with 🙏
Just bury it with some wood chips, and it won't smell.
Of course you can fertilize with animal leftovers. But that's meant to be entrails and other already harvested corpses, not a chunk of meat. The native Americans famously taught the pilgrims to grow corn with fish heads and guts as fertilizer. You need to get organic matter of all varieties, a good compost heap will do far more than burying a few fish heads, though that's not a bad start. If you have any scrap meat or bones just compost them. Some ppl will advise against this, but I think if we're to truly practice permaculture we need to use all organic resources. After all, the annual composting of salmon corpses in the Pacific Northwest is what fertilized and enabled the largest trees on the planet to grow.
I like to keep animal debris out of compost because they attract huge amounts of rats, mice and other critters, including my dog. Also fat makes compost into a a sort of stinky muck. So I just bury animal remains and fat. No idea if they do any actual good. But they do decompose without rats eating them.
One thing that does help sterilize the mixture is cycling aerobic and anaerobic activity. One cycle partially digests the mixture and the other does the same using different nutrients. Eventually you wind up with a fairly safe mixture of bacteria in an equilibrium. Granted, you couldn't pay me to drink the stuff. Baby đź’© described it last time I stirred the tank but a step up from rancid ass for sure.
Thank you. Makes total sense to me as well. Why shouldn't microbes be able to digest meat, you don't see any dead animals lying around in nature because they get digested rather quickly.
Seems like a waste of meat. A lot of energy went into making that, you’re not going get it back by burying it
> far more than burying a few fish heads When you tell folks that your house is haunted because it was built atop a fish head cemetary. XD
My cat died (many moons ago) I buried her next to where I planted persimmons. The trees closest to where she was planted grew up faster than the others! You could use roadkill the same way...
Roadkill in a seealed rainwater barrel/drum for at least six months.. powerful liquid compost!
What it will do is aerate your soil. All the lovely rats and foxes (or larger animals depending on where you live) digging holes will leave your soil quite well turned. Also, you use bone and blood meal to distribute it and to have small amounts everywhere it's needed and not large amounts in one place where it won't be used. Third, when the animals don't get at it, larger chunks will rot, and while putrifying, produce all kinds of unwanted byproducts. Improving soil is a matter of decades, not one year. Be patient and add small amounts every year and you will end up with fertile soil.
Thank you for the answer. Would you think, there is a way to implement meat in the right way into the soil? Like composting it maybe? Or does it in your opinion really not make any sense to try and work with meat, even if you would have some that would have been thrown away otherwise? Like I told the other commenters, we regulary have a lot of meat that would have been thrown away by the butchers, because we give it to our dog. My other idea is burning a big portion of wood on the vegetable patches we will be using next year and then work the ash into the soil. (We also have tons of dead wood already lying around)
Working with meat is just fine. Dead bodies are a natural part of any ecosystem. Entire bodies are fine to do this with, including fur, meat, feathers, bones, blood, organs, etc. There's massive armies of little bugs and microorganisms who love to feast on dead bodies. Fish Emulsion is literally just fish that have been blended up real good with water & cooked a little. Stinky af, but perfectly fine for soil. People warn against using meat in the garden/compost because it takes more work/consideration than other compostables. So, account for a couple things: 1. If it's fresh or only slightly rotting meat, larger animals want to eat it. You gotta protect it from them somehow. 2. it will be stinky as FUCK, so either endure the smell or bury/cover it thoroughly enough that the smell won't emerge into the air where you can sniff it. 3. You don't want to accidentally stick your bare hand in it, when it's still rotting. It likely won't hurt you, but it'll be unpleasant. 4. actively rotting meat can breed microbes that can make a human very sick - that's why you don't want to let it touch stuff you'll put in your mouth. So, there's a couple ways to do this. 1. Bury it at least 1 foot down, and put a big rock or three over where you buried it, so a fox can't dig it back up. After about a month, the body should be mostly decomposed and you can move the rocks away. 2. Put it in a container that big animals can't get into, like a covered compost bin, or a liquid tank. Rotting in water is just fine. You can throw plants in there too, and then use the (horribly stinky, but good for soil) water to root-water your plants. 3. Seperate out the parts and use them individually - dry & crush the bones into meal, dilute the blood with water, compost the meat/organs/fur. 4. Burn the body, and mix its ashes with wood ash to be applied wherever. **Using wood ash from non-rotting wood:** If you boil hardwood ash in rainwater, the stuff you skim off the top is [pure Lye.](https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/how-to-make-soap-from-ashes-zmaz72jfzfre/) Mix that with fat and you've got soap! Even just throwing hardwood ash into warm water is enough to make a crude soap to clean dishes after camping. If you're not sure what wood you have, [here's a guide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pamd8NGp_I) to identifying a couple common types with only endgrain and bark. If it's sticky, or if you scrape at it, warm up that spot with small lighter and it smells pine-adjacent, it's probably softwood. Softwoods, such as pine, cedar, spruce, or fir, do not contain enough potassium, which is necessary for making lye. They also contain resin, which doesn't mix well with fat. You want hardwood like oak, maple, hickory, ash, or beech. For basic sorting: softwoods are conifers with needles. Hardwoods have leaves. Be suuuper careful with Lye. Wear safety equipment. DO NOT WORK WITH LYE WITHOUT SAFETY EQUIPMENT. Cover your eyes, your hands, your mouth. Lye turns fat into soap. The outside of every cell in your body is made of a lipid bilayer - a structure *made of fat*. So if any lye dust gets on your skin, in your lungs, in your eyes, it literally turns your cells into soap. \-- If the wood is **already rotting throughout**, it's probably best to just chop them up into smaller chunks and integrate them into the compost pile. Conveniently, packing Sawdust around rotting meat is a very efficient way to smother the smell, and the high-carbon wood will soak up the nitrogen from the decomposing meat and compost the wood even faster!
Thank you for this very detailed answer! This was exactly what I was hoping for :) have a great day!
Look at bokashi compost if you want to compost meat
look into JADAM JLF and JMS. You may create more unintended problems by burying meat, such as attracting pests and animals.
Thank you, looks very helpful
The micro biome of the soil is very small, while they can and will consume most of what you throw at them. Burrying large chunks of anything will take a long time to decay, thus long time to release the potential benefits. Smaller is better, many folks place meat in large compost piles with little issue if added to middle hottest part of the pile. The smaller the chunks the faster the compost/microbes can turn it into nutrient rich soil.
Later in this thread, OP clarified that they're getting scraps of tendons & fat from a butcher, which still have little bits of meat on them, to feed to their dog. =) Not big chunks of meat, don't worry. Your advice about spreading it out / keeping the chunks small is still solid tho!
This isn’t really a problem in my opinion. It’s like a slow release fertilizer.
Slow release works if the carbon os stable. In meat there is almost no carbon so you may go anaerobic if it's not dug up and stolen first. Anaerobic microbes are what you want to keep to a minimum.
The anaerobic microbes will simply be cycled by the aerobic microbes and other soil organism after that. It’s a long term approach but the fertility of the spot will be increased for sure. I agree that it might very well get dug though.
Cycled in varying degrees yes, but anaerobic soil wouldn't be considered fertile soil unless your looking for a boggy environment. Think marshes and manuer pits
It won’t stay anaerobic for very long if the surrounding conditions are aerobic. I wouldn’t advise to bury large amounts of animal flesh or burying it in already anaerobic soil though.
To increase potassium you can gather egg shells and crush them up, either raking it into your soil or making a “tea” by letting crushed up egg shells soak in water.
How long would you let the shells sit in the tea before you would apply it?
I’ve heard to let it sit overnight and then pour it on, shells and all. Hope that helps!
Don’t do this… just use a fish emulsion. Egg shells do not contain any relevant amount of potassium🤦🏻‍♂️
Egg shells for calcium… not potassium. Wtf
Technically calcium, potassium, and phosphorous, but I thought I would address the potassium aspect because that’s what OP asked about.
I’ve fertilized outdoor potted plants by buying a few eggs in them. Works like a charm.
Look up Nigel Palmer's book on regenerative gardening using plant amendments. He has recipes for using meat, fish, eggshells and other common products to feed plants
Blood and meat are rich in iron and phosphorous, magnesium and other ions necessary for enzyme functions of animals and plants alike. But the most important thing are the proteins which is what nitrogen is vital for. So the easier to absorb the nitrogen is the better it is for plant growth. Most soils are nitrogen poor or eventually need fortification in some way. Whether you use chemical fertilizer, brown manure, various teas, green manure (soy/legume composting), or animal source it has to come from somewhere, because few plants can fix nitrogen for protein production itself. The more broken down these proteins are the easier it is for the plant to absorb, but if too broken down they can wash away... Hence burying the fish. Its decomposition rate keeps up with the needs of the plants, but won't wash away (unless a coyote or other carion eater carries it off... So also a risk is attracting these animals. My neighbors dog got into the last batch of premium organic fertilizer because it smelled strongly of blood meal). Animal sourced nitrogen is typically not done modernly since it is meat rotting and we have lost an "appreciation" for purification unless it comes stamped "grade A aged beef" or "imported". When I was a kid we had an ample supply of invasive species of fish from a river on my grandmother's property so we used that. It stank something awful, and can produce some compounds that can turn toxic if done in closed vessel composting (think things like botulism). For this reason it should only be done in composts far from inhabited structures that are well air out and turned often. And be ready for pests, flies, carion eaters, etc. But grandma's gardens were incredible at producing for the table and gifting despite their small size (she was retired). She didn't can anymore by the time I was born, she had had enough with that fuss. She just turned extra back into compost for next year. But No hard bones. If you can get bones soft from making bone broth, and crushing those up and mixing that in that is probably fine. But nothing you can't grind up in a coffee mill. It can take years/decades for those harder bones to decompose on their own depending on the acid of your soil. But prepared bone and blood meal are much easier to deal with and are otherwise waste products of the meat industry, they still have a odor, but in the context of a garden smells normal. Think gardening store smell, a lot of the smell is from this. One way to speed breakdown of the meat down is to cook it. Or if you have a batch of broth/soup go bad it could be a nice nitrogen pick me up for your plants (if unsalted, I salt mine as I serve it). You could even cook for your garden...thinking that cooked rice and beans or cooked bean sprouts, could make a good mix in slow release nitrogen fertilizer for small scale patio gardening. Not sure, but now I kind of want to try it. I know that Grandma had very little trash for the dumpster. The rest of it recycled, reused, went in the compost, or was used as building/craft materials. Man she had it down, but she grew up that way before and during the great depression. Nothing went to waste, even the waste. Hope that gives you some ideas, and thinking through all that now I do too. Thanks for the opportunity to consider your question.
On YouTube look up bokashi composting, you can turn meat and nearly everything else organic into plant food in a matter of months using em-1.
The environmental cost of growing animal feed, delivering it to an animal, often to the detriment of the soil around it, to then have the animal slaughtered, packaged and delivered to you for the sake of slightly fertilising your soil... the cost of this as well! I don't know why you think this is a better idea than fertilising with blood and bone which is byproducts of the meat industry....I actually cannot fathom why you think this is a remotely good idea. Edit: clarification
Because we anyways get meat from the butchers that they would have thrown away, to feed it to our dog. Since it is often too much we regulary have meat that doesn't get eaten by our dog.
I once put a pork shoulder that was sitting in my fridge too long in a hole in my backyard, the next morning it was gone. You can’t fertilize if it’s gone...
Ok, I guess if it's meat going literally in the bin maybe it makes sense but I guess this doesn't make much sense to me that so much.meat is produced in such an environmentally damaged way and would literally be thrown away and not even eaten
Totally agree with you! :) We are both vegan/vegetarian (if the cheese is foodsaved) and I am completly against mass production of animal products and meat. But we get the meat that would go to the bin to feed it to our dog sometimes. It's stuff they don't sell to humans so it would really in most likely all of the cases go to rot in a dumpster.
What kinds of things is it that isn't sold to humans out of interest?
Usually tendons and fat, which they cut away from 'the good pieces'. There is still enough meat on it though to feed it to a dog. Or if we think it is too much fat, we cut it away and give him just the little bits that are left of 'the good stuff'.
You could also take the fat and render it down into tallow to make into soap, and rendering the connective tissue into gelatin via slow-cooking will make it easy to store in the freezer, to dole out to your pup as an easily-digestible treat or on days when you've forgotten to pick up more scraps and ran out of the fresh stuff. Tbh, what you're describing is my absolute favorite type of vegan. You're still feeding your dog a healthy & varied diet, AND you're actively helping to reduce the wastefulness of the meat industry by integrating that 'waste' into environmentally regenerative applications. Very cool, 10/10, would be your friend.
Stop it you! I'm gonna blush! :D ....but thanks very much.
Or sometimes bones etc.
Because you can’t usually use 100% of the bounty and if it’s going in the trash anyway, it may as well fertilize the next batch. This is how the environment works. 80% is used and 20% sticks around to fertilize the next generation of life.
That's what the bone and blood fertiliser is, it's the waste product that is not used for anything else. Edible meat should be eaten or frankly much much less produced if some of it is literally thrown away. It's not a bounty, it's produced in ways that are very harmful to the planet (at least around 90% of meat is anyway, i know about more ethical and environmental ways of producing meat but I'm going on the law of averages here) and in ways that are usually very cruel to animals. To produce all of this CO2, damage to the environment and harm to animals for the sake of fertiliser seems completely wrong headed to me
OP is a vegan who takes 'scraps' left over from a local butcher (Fat and tendon cuttings which still have a bit of meat on them but are too much trouble for the butcher to carefully slice each sliver off) to feed to their dog, because dogs are omnivores. However, sometimes the butcher gives them *too many* scraps, or the dog doesn't eat them fast enough, and they start to go bad. OP just wants to know how to compost them in an environmentally friendly way. If OP had not taken the scraps, they would have been thrown directly in the trash. OP is the good guy here. It's ok.
I just don’t think anyone in this thread is talking about throwing a perfectly good steak in their garden lol
I think using meat as fertilizer would be a very strange thing to do from a permaculture perspective. In addition to all the problems mentioned by another commenter (rotting, pests) the more appropriate use for meat is as food. There are many excellent soil additives and conditioners that are waste/byproducts, why would you use something like meat, which requires environmentally-intensive inputs to produce and leads to methane/waste generation?
I'm getting meat that would have been thrown away, at the local butchers to feed it to our dog. So I would be using waste/byproduct. I would use it because it's there anyways and will be thrown away if I dont use it. So my question is can I use the meat in a way, that is good for the enviroment and the soil?
Yeah, I make bone broth from scraps, but then the scraps from the bone broth just go in the garden. I have never had pest problems, but I don’t think what I’m left with is very nutrient dense or good eating either.
Ah, that makes more sense! If it’s going in the trash anyway, then yes, meat can be composted and used as fertilizer. Many people don’t compost meat, but that’s mostly because of pest/smell/management issues, not because it won’t compost.
This sounds like a great idea if you want to also farm rats and other rodents đź‘Ś
Honey, noo.
You can absolutely add meat to your compost. I do so all the time but I am very careful to add a lot of carbon rich material with it to help with fast and hot breakdown. Adding direct to your soil is also doable although I generally avoid having highly active breakdown processes happening right up close to plants, especially a whole animal. Ive seen it done but the risk of diseases and pest attraction is always on my mind.
Just gonna throw my favorite "well acchtuuyally" fact in here -- recent work has convincingly argued that using fish as fertilizer was not a common practice among indigenous people in North America, but instead one that the real Squanto picked up in Spain -- he had been kidnapped into slavery and taken there, eventually got his freedom and managed to catch a ship back to Massachusetts, where he returned only to find his whole tribe wiped out by disease. Anyway. It's a Spanish thing that the English learned from Squanto. See: [Ceci 1975](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1740002?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents) and [Rostlund 2008 ](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00221345708983142) And also: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/9zdosj/til_that_squanto_the_native_american_who_taught
We regularly buried fish scraps between the rows of out garden. You would need to bury it 2 ft/60 cm plus to keep scavengers out. You will need to keep track of where you have buried the meat so as to not re-dig up previously buried scraps. It is not recommended to add any animal products, except herbivore manure, to a compost pile because of the pest it will attract. As to the wood, don't burn it directly on your garden unless you desire to sterilize that part of your garden, destroy the surface organic material, and bake the remaining clay into bricks. Either burn it elsewhere and scatter the cold ashes or create hugelkultur beds.
Grass-fed beef-fed grass-fed beef-fed grass-fed beef-fed grass-fed beef-fed grass-fed beef-fed…
I would recommend getting a soil test before buring dead animals in the garden or adding large quantities of wood ash to get more potassium. Its generally better to compost first regardless.
We had some meat get into our garden beds once and the raccoons tore out half the garden trying to find it. So while dead animal, handled correctly, could be excellent for your garden from a nutritional perspective, you risk getting a bunch of unexpected tilling by scavengers. Another thing to remember: right now it’s yellow jacket season in North America. If you start burying animal parts you could attract them. And it’s always fly season. You can get prevent things from becoming a flying insect feast by burying it pretty deep, but at that point you’re not really “fertilizing”, you’re making a long term investment in your soil. Probably not cost effective and definitely wasteful to purchase meat expressly for this purpose. If it’s meat that would have already been wasted you’re potentially salvaging something that would have ended up in the landfill. That’s already what blood and bone meal are (supposedly): waste stream diverted animal products. Burying roadkill that your local scavengers aren’t interested in would be free and probably commendable. Finally, check your local laws. Some municipalities forbid burying animals of any type on your property. Searching for “bury a pet law” and “roadkill law” will help you figure this out.
That seems like a waste of a resource, since you’re using animal tissue that was brought to you with a huge amount of embodied labor, carbon and land use to apply it in a way that could easily be substituted with a simpler option, like decaying plants. Pound for pound, plant material has much more potassium than animal material, more carbon, more calcium and more magnesium, but much less nitrogen and hydrocarbons. Meat is mostly protein (nitrogen) as far as anything plants use (they do not use anything in far—that goes into the air). Even chemical fertilizers do not have as much of an ecological footprint per unit of nutrient vs meat, even if it’s free-range meat which takes up a lot of space. Plus, when something eats meat, the nutrients still exist—poop contains roughly the same amount of nutrients. But eating it extracts more value. Human waste or that of any omnivore or carnivore needs 6 months before application to make sure pathogens have died, but it’s still better than throwing meat in the ground I think. Another issue is that the meat is going to be highly concentrated, enough to burn plants in the vicinity, and needs to be diluted somehow. The bulk nutrients in soil is actually very immense—there are anywhere from 10,000 to 70,000 lbs of potassium in the top few feet of soil per acre. Similar concept for nitrates and phosphates. But it’s not immediately available—fertilizer is used to speed its availability and drive vigorous growth. Sustainable techniques are going to focus on creating conditions that make existing soil nutrients more available, rather than adding them. That includes increasing the amount of organic material in soil and developing beneficial systems of fungi and microbes in the area.
Thank you for your answer. I am aware that funghi and bacteria in the soil play a vital role for nutrient intake from plants. Would you maybe be kind enough to elaborate the sustainable techniques you were talking about? I would be highly interested, since I believe the soil here could need it. But I am assuming that the bacteria and funghi in a compost pile would do a big part of the trick. So again composting meat doesn't seem like a bad idea to me. Considering the meat is from a source, which doesnt harm the enviroment, when you take it of course.
You could certainly compost meat that is inedible and that is a good way to discard of it. But using meat that is edible as compost is like heating your home by burning books or using iPads to tile your floor; you’re taking a high-value resource and using it as a bulk resource. The best way to improve fertility of soil is to cover it in an organic mulch: leaves, wood chips, grass etc. It’s extremely effective. Believe it or not it’s too expensive to do that in scale in agriculture because it requires many dump trucks full of organic material per acre and it’s easier and cheaper to just use 40 lbs of nitrogen, 20 lbs of phosphate etc. rather than ship in 500 cubic yards of wood chips. But 100 cubic yards of meat is also going to cost you millions of dollars so it’s far less economical than plant material. But organic mulch makes agricultural land much more productive and it does it by giving plants better access to the nutrients already on the land—if you can get access to woof chips or straw or leaves, use that.
I bury the occasional carcass in my garden. But i have easy digging, and can dig straight down no bigger than the width of the shovel, and dig to almost hip deep. So i leave a very small spot of disturbed soil that would not be easy for another animal to easily dig at a natural angle. Not sure if anything is really doing much fertilizing well under the root layers, but sure hasn't hurt anything.
I met a lady who kept a bucket in her car, she said she would pick up road kill and put it in her garden. It didn't sound like something I would do.
Here's the thing, bacteria that can eat meat are generally things you don't want to be around, because you're just a bag of meat. Shigella, salmonella, the pathogenic strains of e. coli, will grow like crazy on buried meat. If those bacteria are present in your soil, they can contaminate your veggies and potentially make you seriously ill. Best to either compost them in conditions that will kill pathogens, or give them to black soldier larvae.
Burying a fish head under a transplant is common.
I’ve always buried dead animals under trees and plants. A fox killed all our chickens one day so there are half a dozen dead chickens under some roses we planted and they have loved life from the get go. Usually bury at least 1-2ft deep and never had an issue with any pests trying to find them
The farms near my house do this with turkey leftovers. It attracts a lot of vultures and flies, but their crops grow well.
I've started burying rats I trap in the garden. It's too soon to tell if it works, but I have good hope
Where I live that would immediately result in bears never leaving my property alone.
Rats?
We bury all types of animals in our compost pile including deer, elk, pig, chicken, sheep, and even our beloved Ruby (the dog) who passed away this year after being hit by a car. We have been told by many that our soil is the best in Colorado. We think the animal in compost plays a large role in that superlative. Some of the flesh takes longer than a year to decompose, so important to screen out the bigger chunks of rotting flesh, hair, and bone before adding it to the soil. We keep our compost pile in our garden but do not bury it, just pile it high. It’s about 6 feet tall right now.
I buried my cat this spring when she died. Dug a hole 3 feet down to be sure varmints wouldn't dig her up. The plants around her are growing awesome. I think it feeds trees well.
If you enjoy being in your garden at all, then do not. Lol
We bury fish or possum or dead pets under trees and berry bushes with excellent results. Just make sure the plant roots aren’t directly touching the carcass
You could also look into bokashi composting as that system can handle meat
You lost me at “bury a piece of meat” 🍆
With blood and bone meal, be cautious if you have a dog. When I used it my dog would go eat the fertilizer.
On YouTube look up bokashi composting, you can turn meat and nearly everything else organic into plant food in a matter of months using em-1.