It is time to unpack Sir Albert Howard’s legacy and what he learned in Indore. Howard was writing extensively about his composting system in the 1930s and on into the early years of the second world war. He died in 1944, at a time when when mixed arable and livestock farming was still the norm for European agriculture.
The industrial world was preparing to transfer from its wartime activities to a peacetime renewal drive. Stocks of herbicides developed for the military were repackaged for an agricultural modernisation drive. Heavy industry was preparing to declare war on nature, no less.
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Sir Albert Howard argued that civilisation depends on the health of the agriculture that fed it. He cited forest, particularly rain forest as an ideal closed system that renews humus for future growth. There were also civilisations that had disappeared with the passage of history: these may or may not have had a sustainable relationship with the soil that supported their agriculture, but for whatever reason, they had ceased to exist. He was aware of and advocated the sustainable agricultural systems practiced in ancient times across China, Japan, Korea and Asia, where the same fields had been cultivated for up to four millennia and more, while retaining their fertility. He was critical of the rise of “scientific” agriculture in the industrial world, which stripped out soil fertility with no vision of a sustainable method for replacing humus.
Without an agricultural sector that regarded humus as essential for the future of life on earth, Howard saw little prospect of a sustainable future. A botanist by training, he understood the impact of monocultures on the immediate surroundings and further afield. Howard’s work included strategies for reducing the environmental impact of plantations growing tea, coffee, rubber, sugar and sisal, inter alia.
As a classicist, Howard had knowledge of and access to the writings of antiquity. He studied the field cultures of Japan. Accounts of the Japanese agricultural system told the story of continuous and productive cultivation spread over four millennia in the same fields. In 1907 a population of 47 million people lived on the three main islands, supported “…at a rate of 2,439 to the square mile or more than two or three people per acre.”(1) In addition, Japan fed huge numbers of draft animals, up to 69 horses and 56 cattle to the square mile, as well as hundreds of poultry alongside pigs, sheep and goats. (Source FH King: Farmers of Forty Centuries or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan; London 1916)
Through his work on the Indore project, Howard arrived at a fast working recipe for transforming animal and vegetable waste into field friendly compost in a month. The key element was to separate the management of urine and faeces. By mixing urine with earth and a bit of sawdust or similarly finely divided dry matter, there was no nuisance from flies and the like.
Fast forward to the tropical island of Haïti in 2010, when the island’s population was hit by an earthquake. Among the rescue teams was British advocate of Sir Albert Howard’s work, Richard Higgins. Armed with a finely-tuned version of Howard’s earlier techniques, Higgins was able to set up hygienic dry toilets for the earthquake victims in their camps and prove the efficiency of his tweaks to the original Indore procedures. These are the subject of this article: https://www.permaculturenews.org/2012/02/23/the-howard-higgins-ecosan-and-waste-management-system/
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