During the 1920s, Albert Howard was in charge of a government research farm at Indore, India.  At heart a Peace Corps volunteer, he made Indore operate like a very representative Indian farm, growing all the main staples of the local agriculture:  cotton, sugar cane, and cereals.  The farm was powered by the same work oxen used by the surrounding farmers.  It would have been easy for Howard to demonstrate better yields through high technology by buying chemical fertilizers or using seed meal wastes from oil extraction, using tractors, and growing new, high-yielding varieties that could make use of more intense soil nutrition.  But these inputs were not affordable to the average Indian farmer and Howard’s purpose was to offer genuine help to his neighbors by demonstrating methods they could easily afford and use.

In the beginning of his work at Indore, Howard observed that the district’s soils were basically fertile but low in organic matter and nitrogen.  This deficiency seemed to be due to traditionally wasteful practices concerning manures and agricultural residues.  So Howard began developing methods to compost the waste products of agriculture, making enough high-quality fertilizer to supply the entire farm.  Soon, Indore research farm was enjoying record yields without having insect or disease problems, and without buying fertilizer or commercial seed.  More significantly, the work animals, fed exclusively on fodder from Indore’s humus-rich soil, become invulnerable to cattle diseases.  Their shining health and fine condition became the envy of the district.

Most significant, Howard contended that his method not only conserved the nitrogen in cattle manure and crop waste, not only conserved the organic matter the land produced, but also raised the processes of the entire operation to an ecological climax of maximized health and production.  Conserving the manure and composting the crop waste allowed him to increase the soil’s organic matter which increased the soil’s release of nutrients from rock particles that further increased the production of biomass which allowed him to make even more compost and so on.  What I have just described is not surprising, it is merely a variation on good farming that some humans have known about for millennia.

What was truly revolutionary was Howard’s contention about increasing net nitrates.  With gentle understatement, Howard asserted that his compost was genuinely superior to anything ever known before.  Indore compost had these advantages:  no nitrogen or organic matter was lost from the farm through mishandling of agricultural wastes; the humus level of the farm’s soils increased to a maximum sustainable level; and, the amount of nitrate nitrogen in the finished compost was higher than the total amount of nitrogen contained in the materials that formed the heap. Indore compost resulted in a net gain of nitrate nitrogen.  The compost factory was also a biological nitrate factory.