Strange Encounter with Poo: East-West Roots of Organic Farming
Poo, pit toilet and my hesitation
I was born in a farming village along a south stream of Yangzi River in Guangdong Province, South China in the late 1980s. I moved to Hong Kong with my family at the age of ten and, in my teens, I hesitated to visit my village. Although I always wanted to go, the public toilet and its unforgettable smell hindered my return. In this two-storey building, one would squat and shit on the upper level, and the poo would directly drop to the ground floor. The human waste was then collected by villagers and used as a backyard fertiliser. Years later, however, all my friends left for the city and as a part of mass cultural change across rural China, the traditional public toilet also changed. A modern flush toilet with an attached septic tank was its replacement. This modern toilet, as its name implies, was intended to offer a better environment for villagers and — for the local government’s promotion of tourism — the thousands of tourists who visited this village for its cultural history of intellectuals. This dramatic change in my village also happened to other millions of villages in China. An old villager told me that the traditional public toilet was built ages ago in their ‘commune-era’ which is how they refer to the socialist agricultural transformation (Revisiting this historical period is worthy doing, maybe I will write about it in another article).
Reading Franklin King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries (1911), the very first western study of Chinese traditional farming a century ago, helps me rethink the recycling of human waste, night soil. As King argues, it is the secrete that Chinese farmers could have fed themselves with just a small piece of land and limited recourse. It inspired the British soil scientist Albert Howard, whose work, ‘An Agricultural Testament’, published in 1940, became the holy scripture for the organic movement in the west. And, King’s book returns to Chinese world after a century and it draws the attention of people who are active in the farming-and food-activist circle. In this article, by reviewing those works, I will show why and how night soil/human waste should be seen as the root of organic farming.
Tracing the East-West Roots of Organic Farming
Written over a century ago, Franklin H. King’s account of Chinese traditional farming brings me back to my experience of the public toilet in my village. In his seminal work Farmers of Forty Centuries: Permanent agriculture in China, Korea and Japan, the American agricultural scientist’s main concern lay with the possible solution to the food crisis — the decline of American agriculture and its overcrowded, deteriorating soil base, did not allow America to feed its increasing. King’s work was also Malthusian in its vision — predicting that population growth would outpace agricultural production. King travelled extensively through Japan and Korea looking for a solution in their ancient farming practices. Finally arriving in republic-era China[i], he investigated how, over generations, Chinese farmers fed themselves with just a small piece of land and limited resources. The key, he found, was farmers’ ‘religious’ efforts to make the soil fertile. Night soil, an economical term for human waste, is definitely the liveliest scene repeated in King’s writing:
Among the most common early morning sights on the journey…there were the loads of night soil carried on the shoulders of men and on the backs of animals, but most commonly on strong carts drawn by men. Each cart carried from six to ten tightly covered wooden containers holding forty, sixty or more pounds each. (1911:30)
According to King’s field notes, night soil — referring to the urban business that provided farmers with fertiliser in the countryside — was widely found in the coastal areas of mainland China, as well as (British colonial) Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. Unlike in other parts of the world where human waste ended up being discharged into the sewer, King noticed that in China human waste was fully utilised by peasants.
This Chinese way of recycling human waste had previously drawn the attention of Victor Hugo who called it the ‘black gold’ of soil[ii] in Les Misérables (1862). Writing about the famine caused by soil erosion on the continent of Europe, Hugo said something extraordinary about the treatment of human waste: human waste was just flushed into harbour water via the modern sewage system in Paris, while it was called ‘the black gold of soil’ in China (Elspeth Probyn, 2019).
Night soil taken from cities and towns to the fields was just one of the technologies for soil stewardship used by Chinese traditional farming. In his exploration of Chinese farming techniques for better soil health, King found various methods of manure production exemplary, such as the paddy field in hill-land of South China:
In China enormous quantities of canal mud are applied to the fields, sometimes at the rate of even 70 and more tons per acre. So, too, where there are no canals, both soil and subsoil are carried into the villages and there between the intervals when needed they are, at the expense of great labour, composted with organic refuse and often afterwards dried and pulverized before being carried back and used on the fields as home-made fertilizers. Manure of all kinds, human and animal, is religiously saved and applied to the fields in a manner which secures an efficiency far above our own practices [of American agriculture]. (1911:6)
Chinese peasants dedicated their labour to generate manure of all kinds to maintain the humus of the soil, e.g. use of canal mud, rotation with green manure and, of course, the human and animal waste. The use of human and animal manure can still be seen today in rural China and peasants tend to use it for the self-served plot. King remarked on ‘the almost religious fidelity’ of Chinese farmers who ‘have returned to their fields every form of waste which can replace plant food removed by the crops’ (75). In contrast, King was critical of the farming practices of America which he considered to be wasteful, destructive and careless. In order to address his primary concern of American food crisis, King observed the methods of Chinese farmers who learnt from their bitter experience. At the very practical level of smallholding peasantry, making manure fertilised their limited arable land and fed the large population on the Chinese continent.
King’s study of Chinese traditional farming now becomes a critical standpoint on soil from an ecological viewpoint and an activist-oriented reflection on sustainable lifestyles in the west. With respect to ‘good soil’, King insisted that a result of traditional Chinese farming practices is soil replete with living organisms rather than its fertility being viewed as simply a factor of its nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (a.k.a. NPK) content. However, King’s perspective had fallen into disuse, and the NPK-chemical perspective came to dominate the western science of modern agriculture. By the 1930s and 40s, commercial chemical fertilisers became ubiquitous in the west and, under the pressure of increasing population, such new industrial practice seemed to fulfil the promise of the unlimited increase of agricultural production (Worster, 2017).
The Rise of Organic Farming
Albert Howard, a British soil scientist, fearing soil degradation created by the vast production of crops and animals, took up King’s perspective. In An Agricultural Testament (1940), Howard formulated the ‘Indore method’ for compost to maintain soil health.
For Howard’s ‘Indore’ process, Gabrielle Matthaei, Howard’s wife as well as research assistant, rephrased it as ‘Indore-Chinese method’, which Howard was impressed by King’s study of Chinese compost technique. By applying this method, such losses can be repaired only by ‘maintaining soil fertility by ‘manufacturing humus from vegetable and animal wastes’. With respect to Chinese peasants, Howard confirmed that they ‘pay great attention to the return of all wastes to the land, come nearest to the ideal set by Nature’(1940).
This organic method focused on ‘the return of all wastes to the land’ that ‘come[s] nearest to the ideal set by Nature’. An organic, recurring cycle under the law of Nature was narrated by Howard as a ‘wheel of life’, by which ‘death supersedes life and life rises again from what is dead and decayed’(1947). Then, since the 1950s, this understanding of organism has become the holy scripture for the organic movement in the west. From the 1940s to 1970s, American agriculture was polarised into organic and non-organic camps. Practitioners of organic farming tended to view Howard’s Indore-Chinese method as an agricultural issue over an ecological one due to its potential for advanced production (J. Heckman 2006).
This idea also is central to activists’ ecological criticism about the capitalist mode of production and consumption. Alternatively, the idea of soil organism became central to activists’ ecological criticism about the capitalist mode of production and consumption after the Oil Crisis in the 1970s. Such debates brought the sustainability movement into being and were critical to the consideration of the mundane question of everyday eating. In a critique of the industrialisation of agriculture and even the global economy that populated and exploited natural resources, environmentalist Wendell Berry (1989) reminded people that eating should be an ‘agricultural act’ and feared modern ‘industrial eaters’ who were no longer aware of the connections between eating and the land (Peter Jackson, 2017: 239).
All in all, in evaluating King’s great influence on western natural science, the environmental historian David Worster (2017) in ‘The Good Muck: Toward an Excremental History of China’ concludes that modern science is required to become ‘more organismic in concept and more respectful toward nature’s ways’, and advocates for ‘a conservation-minded society that questions not only wasteful behaviour but also the growth in human population and its environmental consequences’ (18).
Afterwards: Who now feel sceptical about human manure?
Recently, the idea of recycling human waste is once again gaining attention. The US environmental activist group ‘Humanure’ advocates the use of composting toilets, which detoxify excrement into a biosolid which is used to fertilise crops, and consider this recycling to be ‘the end of sewage as we know it’ (The Guardian). And we can also see some start-up projects of humanure happening in Europe lately.
It took 100 years for King’s book to finally be published in Chinese called 《農夫四千年》. To promote its traditional wisdom, the translators Si Yan and Cheng Cunwang brought the book as a cultural frame to the attention of New Rural Reconstruction movement by saying that rural people’s ancient agrarian culture holds promise in addressing the ‘three-rural-problems’ as rural China returns to smallholdings. While the wisdom, morality and resilience of Chinese smallholders were admired by King as ‘resource-saving and environment-friendly’, nowadays these qualities are regarded by urbanities as ‘no culture’ and backwardness for China’s modernisation (see the translators’ preface, 2011).
However, when I spoke with young organisers and farmers in the front line of promoting ecological farming and community-supported agriculture(CSA) who had read King’s book, all of them were proud of such heritage from thousands of years of China’s agrarian society. Even so, they expressed a general scepticism to human manure because of fears about heavy metal contamination accumulated in the human body from a modern diet. For example, recent research shows a dramatic increase in cadmium consumption caused by the excessive use of chemical fertiliser and pesticide (National Soil Pollution Status Survey Bulletin, 2014). In ‘A Country Soaking in Chemicals’, Fu integrates data from different official sources and highlights the statistical reality: ‘China’s consumption of chemical fertiliser was 3.6 million tons in 2015, and its usage of 21.9 kg per mu was more than two times than the world’s average usage, of which 55 percent of cadmium applied in fertiliser retains in soil’; thus, ‘each Chinese person intakes 2.67kg of pesticide and 50 kg fertiliser per year’ — a frightening consequence. The accumulation of cadmium in the human body via the food chain has been shown to result in increased cancer rates, attracting public attention to the prevalence and seriousness of chemical-based farming. The young farmers’ worries about this food scare thwart the possibility of continuing our conversation about human manure.
In contrast, who are still practising human manure? The popular image of Chinese agriculture is deeply associated with a devastating, unshakable statistical reality juxtaposing the overwhelming chemical methods, the destruction of the agricultural environment and the ensuing food scares. Surprisingly A survey shows that 85 percent of Chinese farmers are more likely to recycle human waste (National Patriotic Health Campaign Committee of China, 2007). And, according to my fieldwork, some villagers in some southern western and southern area are still practising organic green method by turning animal waste into manure, soil stewardship they learnt from the collective production team in the Mao’s era. Another study is more explicit to point out their coexistence, as food scares create the need searching for ‘entrusted’ food, Si et al (2019) survey from 2015 to 2017 to show that more than 62% of householders are increasingly practising ‘one family, two systems’, meaning that a household apply chemicals on the commercial plot for profit, but apply organic manure on their subsistence plot producing ‘food for life’ for their family, relatives and friends.
This parallel reality, the massive, existing practice of humanure, seems not quite fitting into the organic movement narrated within the civilian-orientated and activist-based community. However, it is a historical legacy that is worthy of more public attention and critical assessment.
