So a lot of crops are fertilized with manure, which usually comes from the cattle industry, and to my knowledge, there’s no reliable way to tell what the plant-based foods you’re buying is fertilized with.

Some crops are fertilized with processed sewage sludge and/or food waste, but since most humans still eat meat, would you consider this vegan? Side note, processing of sewage and food waste is often also used to generate electricity, heat, and in some cases the methane is added directly to the municipal natural gas supply, would you consider these services no longer vegan in that case.

Finally, and I guess this is mainly relevant to those who are vegans for environmentalism, but the only real alternative to manure is chemical fertilizers, often made from petroleum, and have their own environmental problems. I guess you could cut out the cow by harvesting hay and putting it in a digester to make fertilizer, but as far as I know, no one currently does this since it would be a lot more expensive than both manure and chemical fertilizer.

What do you make of this? Does it bother you, or are you okay with it, or have you even found alternatives to these problems?

  • DessalinesA
    3•3 years ago

    I have to look it up to find the actual numbers, but manure hasn’t technically been needed since the haber process. Sure they use the manure because its surplus and they have nothing else to do with it, but the rapid growth in food production is because of soil nitrogen-fixation via NOT animals, but synthetic fertilizers.

    From wiki:

    Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process.[50] Thus, the Haber process serves as the “detonator of the population explosion”, enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018.[51]