$17.
50 USD
G e n e L o gs d o n farms in Upper Sandusky,
Ohio. He is one of the clearest and most original
voices of rural America. He has published more than
two dozen books; his Chelsea Green books include
Small-Scale Grain Raising (Second Edition), Living
at Nature’s Pace, The Contrary Farmer’s Invitation to
Gardening, Good Spirits, and The Contrary Farmer. He
writes a popular blog at OrganicToBe.org, is a regular
contributor to Farming magazine and The Draft Horse
Journal, and writes an award-winning weekly column
in the Carey, Ohio, Progressor Times.
Cover illustration by Brooke Budner
Cover design by Evan Gaffney Design
Author photograph by Rebecca Cartellone
Chelsea Green Publishing
White River Junction, Vermont
802-295-6300
www.chelseagreen.com
Holy Shit
Holy Shit
“The most experienced and
best observer of agriculture we have.”
—Wendell Berry C o n t r a ry fa r m e r G e n e L o gs d o n
Managi ng Manure is back with the inside story of manure—our greatest,
“This could very well be one of the most important books ever written.” yet most misunderstood, natural resource. One way
—Joseph Jenkins, author of The Humanure Handbook or another, we not only throw away manure worth
“Gene Logsdon, in his naughty and inimical style, has captured the essence
t o Sav e M a n k i n d billions in fertilizer value—but spend a staggering
amount of money to do so. If we do not begin turning
G e n e
of soil building, pathogen control, food ecology, and farm economics. What a
manure into fertilizer to help feed a growing population,
great addition to the eco-food and -farming movement. Read and heed.”
Logsdon argues we will all be in deep shit.
—Joel Salatin, Polyface, Inc., author of You Can Farm and other books
“No one knows more about the backside of agriculture than Gene Logsdon, Holy Shit completely covers the manure field including
L o gs d o n
truly one of the shrewdest practitioners and wisest observers of farming and information on:   
agriculture. This is Logsdon at his best; Holy Shit is a national treasure.”
• How to build a barn manure pack with farm
—David Orr, Oberlin College animal manure
“Gene Logsdon is one of only three people I know who are able to make a living • How to recycle toilet water for irrigation
exclusively out of writing what should be common sense. Here he has done it again.” purposes, and
—Wes Jackson, President of The Land Institute • How to get over the fear of feces and muck
with the best of them.  
“In the revolution Gene Logsdon envisions, we need pitchforks, but not to
mount the barricades. And what a joyful, reverent, irreverent, hard-working, With his trademark humor, his years of experience
down-to-earth, realistic, Whitmanesque, animal-loving, microbe-nurturing, writing about farming and waste management, and
compost-making, farmer-sensical, manure-pitching revolution it is!” his uncanny eye for the small but important details,
Chelsea Green
—Woody Tasch, author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money Logsdon artfully describes how to manage farm and pet
manure to make fertilizer. This fresh, fascinating, and
entertaining look at an earthy, but absolutely crucial,
Gene Log sdon subject is a small gem and is destined to become a
classic of the agricultural canon.
 CHAPTER 2

The Nitty-Gritty of the Shitty

Obviously, animal manures come in two forms, solid and liquid,

except in chickens and other fowl, where both are more or less
excreted together. The distinction seems too obvious to mention
but is important in terms of preserving the plant nutrients in
manure for use as high-quality fertilizer. The urine, pound for
pound, is richer in plant nutrients than feces, and those nutrients
are more readily available to plants. Urine also is a more profitable
source of fertilizer because the water consumed by the animal is
cheaper than feed, especially when the animal is drinking from
pond, creek, or spring. A medium-sized cow eliminates about 20
pints (or pounds) of urine per day, roughly about one-third of the
animal’s total manure output.
The total output of manure varies with circumstances, of course.
Manure science is not pure mathematics. My bible of husbandry,

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 14  HOLY SHIT

the twentieth edition of Feeds and Feeding by F. B. Morrison, gives

the yearly output of manure, including bedding, per 1,000 pounds
of live weight as follows: horses, 12 tons; cows, 15 tons; fattening
cattle, 9.8 tons; swine, 18.2 tons. Morrison gives a figure of 4.2 tons
for chickens, but that’s without bedding. The accuracy of the other
figures obviously depends on how much bedding is used.
Generally speaking, over half of the nitrogen and potassium in
manure is in the urine. Human urine sometimes contains twice as
much nitrogen and potassium as human feces on a weight basis.
However, nutrients from urine are more easily lost than those
from feces because they are in a very soluble form and can leach or
vaporize out of the manure in a hurry when exposed to air. That
is why there is no more economical way to preserve nutrients in
urine than by using absorbent bedding.
Manure contains all kinds of goodies: starch, cellulose, lignin,
fat, proteins, carbohydrates of various kinds, minerals, and vestiges
of the digestive juices that began the process of decomposition in
the animals’ intestines. The urine adds nitrogenous compounds
like urea. Feces contain unnumbered millions of bacteria—some-
thing like a hundred million in 1 gram—and the bedding adds yet
millions more microorganisms. These bacteria are the main agents
of decomposition in the manure, literally eating each other out of
house and home. Their numbers decrease as the manure decom-
poses, which is why even pathogens harmful to humans, unlikely
as their presence might be, are for all practical purposes eliminated
in barn manure in a few months to a year of aging. (More on that
later.)
About right here I should present one of those lovely, number-
festooned tables that make the text in this kind of book look so

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 The Nitty-Gritty of the Shitty  15

expert and incontestable. This particular table would list all

the main animal manures—horse, cow, pig, chicken, sheep, et
cetera—with the percentages of nitrogen, phosphorus, potas-
sium, and possibly minor trace elements and minerals in each
type. However, these tables are not worth the space they’d take up
because although the nutrient values of manure do vary from one
animal species to another, they do so within a rather narrow range,
and they depend considerably on what the animal is eating and
the fertility of the soil upon which that food was grown. Generally
speaking, according to Morrison’s book (and confirmed by other
sources analyzing these plant nutrients), manure with bedding
averages 0.7 percent nitrogen, 0.1 percent phosphoric acid, and
0.5 percent potassium, or, per ton, about 12 pounds of nitrogen,
5 pounds of phosphorus, and 10 pounds of potassium. To deter-
mine how much the manure is worth in plant nutrients at any
given marketplace moment, just compare these figures with the
price of these nutrients when you buy them in a bag or in a tank
of commercial fertilizer. But remember, these figures do not take
into account the value of the organic matter that manure adds to
the soil, which just might be as great as its value in plant nutrients.
Without bedding, pure feces and urine may have a higher
content of these nutrients—up to 3 to 5 percent nitrogen—when
they exit the colon. But fresh, pure manure immediately begins to
lose nutrients through oxidation, fermentation, or leaching unless
stabilized with bedding. Even with bedding, some will be lost. Even
with the most scrupulous management, manure will lose 15 to 20
percent of its nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium by the time it
becomes plant food. But hardly any of its organic matter content
will be lost.

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 16  HOLY SHIT

It is generally agreed that manure contains enough of the minor

plant nutrient elements like boron, manganese, and magnesium to
supply what plants need without farmers having to worry about
shortages, as farmers using only chemical fertilizers must do. But
in areas where there are natural deficiencies of trace elements like
selenium, the manure from animals eating food from that soil will
also be deficient. (This is a minor point, but if I don’t make it, I’ll
hear about it.)
Chicken, goat, and sheep manures are at the high end in nutri-
ent content, cows and pigs at the low end, and horses and cattle on
feed in the middle. There’s a comfort in this for the garden farmer
on small acreage: the more practical animals to keep—chickens,
goats, and sheep—are also the producers of the richest manure.
Moisture content varies in the manure of different species too.
Along with having a higher nitrogen content, fresh horse, sheep,
and chicken manures hit the ground drier, at about 55 to 65
percent moisture, and so are considered for aging and composting
processes to be “hot” manures. Cow and pig manures are “cold”
manures with moisture content usually around 75 percent. Human
manure ranges from “hot” to “cold,” that is, 65 to 80 percent mois-
ture. Obviously all this varies with diet. These numbers may seem
a bit boring and inconsequential, but, ignorant of them in earlier
days, I once (and only once) decided to heat-compost some horse
manure right in the barn. I piled the manure and bedding maybe
4 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter in a horse stall. The pile heated
up dramatically, and because there was some more or less dry
bedding layered into the mixture, I thought it was going to catch
on fire. That would have been a good time to observe some fancy,
Olympic-style fork work as I spread the manure out again.

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 The Nitty-Gritty of the Shitty  17

The odor of manure varies with the animal too, although the
reasons for the differences really have much more to do with the
feed and with how the animal is being treated than with the animal
itself. Almost everyone agrees, at least down on the farm, that pig
manure smells the worst. Commercial hogs are fed high-protein
soybean meal to make them gain weight quickly; that is why
the stench from confined hog buildings is so unbearable. When
hogs are fed high-quality clover hay for their protein rather than
soybean meal, the fresh manure doesn’t smell so bad, or at least
doesn’t feel like it is going to sear the olfactory membranes right
out of your nose. But if you penned up a bunch of cats in a build-
ing the way hogs are kept in confinement, they would smell even
worse, because a cat diet is higher in protein-rich foods. A police-
man once told me that the absolute worst odor he ever encoun-
tered came upon entering a neglected house whose owner (an
elderly lady dying in the hospital) had left some twenty cats to
fend for themselves.
The odor of horse manure is generally easier on the nose because
horses are fed a high-roughage diet and are usually well bedded by
their doting owners. But there is something else to consider here.
The suburban teenager who loves her horse is often quite oblivious
to the smell of its manure, even when it is rank. But should she smell
faint odors wafting from a hog barn half a mile away (entirely possi-
ble), she will object vehemently. The hog producer, on the other
hand, may use any excuse to get out of the horse barn in a hurry
but hardly notices the smell of his hogs. And, as one pig producer
jokingly said, “The higher the price of pork, the better the manure
smells.” The sense of smell is an extremely subjective faculty, and
society would have no problem with manure if decaying organic

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 18  HOLY SHIT

matter smelled like roses. For those who are making money from
manure, it all smells like roses.
The form of the manure varies from one farm animal to
another. A chicken dropping looks like a tablespoon’s dollop of
stiff whipped cream, only grayish to brownish in color with whit-
ish stuff—the urea—mixed in. Sheep normally eliminate feces
as many little ovoid balls, each about the size of a marble. A pile
of them looks sort of like a pile of raisins, and they are about
that black. A cow on pasture will, if undisturbed, generally stop
rambling about while she evacuates, leaving a roundish lump of
manure about the size of a pie. (Hence the name cow pie, cow
flap, or cow patty.) Horses normally eliminate soft, bunlike lumps
about the size of tennis balls—road apples in farm parlance. Pig
feces are shaped like human feces, only larger. Llama feces look
like oversized string beans, and a friend of mine who keeps a llama
says he likes the manure for his garden because it is relatively dry
and decomposes only slowly, thereby saving more of its nutrients
for the plant.
Cows fed a diet high in corn silage excrete exceedingly runny
manure, which makes cleaning up after them in the milking parlor
or stanchion twice as distasteful as it would have to be. “Never
stand behind a sneezing cow,” says best-selling author Mike Perry,
who writes knowingly about manure in his delightful book of
essays, Off Main Street (Harper Collins, 2005). Corn silage is a
principal dairy cow feed because it is relatively cheap and easy to
make. But most dairy cows spend their winters, and sometimes the
entire year, with low-grade diarrhea.
All farm animals eliminate juicier manure in spring, when the
grass is ultra-fresh and full of protein, causing loose bowels. High-

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 The Nitty-Gritty of the Shitty  19

grain diets without roughage can produce runny manure, too.

Generally speaking, loose bowels indicate that an animal is not
eating a healthful balance of food, just as is the case with humans.
Another difference in manures is the participating animal’s
digestive ability. Tradition says that sheep digest their food so well
that most weed seeds passing through their guts are destroyed.
Seeds going through cows, on the other hand, seem to germinate
better than those that simply fall on the ground from the plants.
As a self-appointed examiner of farm animal droppings, I more
or less go along with these observations. I haven’t ever spied any
hard-coated seed, like a honey locust, sprouting in sheep manure,
but I have often seen these seeds germinate in cow manure. Both
sheep and cows like honey locust pods, which are in fact quite
nutritious. Clover seeds pass through cows readily and sprout in
the manure, but don’t with sheep. Therefore I have always followed
a not-very-scientific rule to feed hay with lots of weed seeds, like
sour dock, to sheep—not cows—if I have the choice.
Neither pigs nor cows digest corn very well, and often kernels
seem to pass right through animals without much change in
appearance. If you are a lover of corn on the cob, you no doubt have
noticed this is true of humans, too. It is not the case with chick-
ens, however, which leads me to believe chickens can utilize corn
and other grains better than livestock. The main reason for mill-
ing grain, especially corn, is to make it more digestible. However
(and yes, I have done this), if you stir manure from a corn-fed pig
in water and pour the mixture through a strainer, you will find
your strainer catches a lot of little milled specks of yellow corn
kernel. The outer shell of corn has passed right on through the pig
whether it was milled or not—my grounds for saying that milled

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 20  HOLY SHIT

corn is not much more efficient than whole corn, despite agricul-
tural tradition. In fact, in the old days, milled corn was soaked in
water for a day or so before feeding to soften it and make it more
digestible. I don’t think it helped much, but animals seemed to like
it better that way. In my opinion, chickens and sheep utilize whole
grains at least just as well as milled grains. When it comes down
to it, the only way I know to make corn really digestible is to make
bourbon out of it.

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