Finally, remember that over half the excretion of animals is urine.  And far too little value is placed on urine.  As early as 1900 it was well known that if you fed one ton (dry weight) of hay and measured the resulting manure after thorough drying, only 800 pounds was left.  What happened to the other 1,200 pounds of dry material?  Some, of course, went to grow the animal.  Some was enzymatically “burned” as energy fuel and its wastes given off as CO2 and H2O.  Most of it was excreted in liquid form.  After all, what is digestion but an enzymatic conversion of dry material into a water solution so it can be circulated through the bloodstream to be used and discarded as needed.  Urine also contains numerous complex organic substances and cellular breakdown products that improve the health of the soil ecology.

However, urine is not easy to capture.  It tends to leach into the ground or run off when it should be absorbed into bedding.  Chicken manure and the excrements of other fowl are particularly valuable in this respect because the liquids and solids of their waste are uniformly mixed so nothing is lost.  When Howard worked out his system of making superior compost at Indore, he took full measure of the value of urine and paid great care to its capture and use.

Paper is almost pure cellulose and has a very high C/N like straw or sawdust.  It can be considered a valuable source of bulk for composting if you’re using compost as mulch.  Looked upon another way, composting can be a practical way to recycle paper at home.

The key to composting paper is to shred or grind it.  Layers of paper will compress into airless mats.  Motor-driven hammermill shredders will make short work of dry paper.  Once torn into tiny pieces and mixed with other materials, paper is no more subject to compaction than grass clippings.  Even without power shredding equipment, newsprint can be shredded by hand, easily ripped into narrow strips by tearing whole sections along the grain of the paper, not fighting against it.

Evaluating Nitrogen Content

A one-cubic foot bag of dried steer manure weighs 25 pounds and is labeled 1 percent nitrogen.  That means four sacks weighs 100 pounds and contains 1 pound of actual nitrogen.

A fifty pound bag of cottonseed meal contains six percent nitrogen.  Two sacks weighs 100 pounds and contains 6 pounds of actual nitrogen.

Therefore it takes 24 sacks of steer manure to equal the nitrogen contained in two sacks of cottonseed meal.

If steer manure costs $1.50 per sack, six pound of actual nitrogen from steer manure costs 24 x $1.50 = $36.00

If fifty pounds of cottonseed meal costs $7.50, then six pounds of actual nitrogen from cottonseed meal costs 2 x $7.50 = $15.00.

Now, lets take a brief moment to see why industrial farmers thinking only of immediate financial profit, use chemical fertilizers.  Urea, a synthetic form of urine used as nitrogen fertilizer contains 48 percent nitrogen.  So 100 pounds of urea contains 48 pounds of nitrogen.  That quantity of urea also costs about $15.00!