COMPOSTING is almost as
old as home gardening. Roman farms had their compost pits, where human and
animal excrement were piled up along with weeds, leaves, and whatever household
wastes had accumulated. From time to time, water was added to assist in the
process of decay. A thousand years later, in Moorish Spain, an agricultural
treatise described three methods for making heaps of “artificial dung,” as the
compost was called—pigeon dung being added to hasten decay.
With the advent of community
landfills for waste disposal and no-fuss-no-muss chemical fertilizers for easy
use on lawns and gardens, home composting in general became almost a rarity.
But composting has recently made a comeback. Landfills were beginning to
overflow, states were putting restrictions on what and how much could be
dumped, and dumping fees might range from $30 to $100 a ton. Moreover,
environmental concerns have increased, and this also has made composting
fashionable once more.
Not only is composting back, it
is back bigger than ever. Its eye is on landfills as the next target.
“Composting is a promising technology that may end up helping to solve the
ever-growing waste-disposal problem,” said an article in The New York Times Magazine. “Its proponents believe it is capable of making use of
up to half the garbage—kitchen wastes, yard trimmings, even some waste
paper—that most Americans now throw out. They believe composting can create
farms that build the soil instead of destroying it, that compost can replace eroded
or damaged soils, protect young plants from disease and reduce dependence on
pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.”
Gofta in its effort to help farmers grow rich and
natural food stuff, has intended to imitate his brothers world-wide to also
embark on composting as a way of producing natural manure for our plants rather
than relying on pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.