A “Manure Yard” Proprietor Came to the Village

Manure Yard Proprietor

My hometown is in Yili, Xinjiang, where the county seat has both farming and livestock – though the two are run separately. When I went home for the winter break of my first year, I noticed that many of the large-scale cattle farmers couldn’t deal with their cow dung. They had to spend a great deal of money shovelling it away, finding somewhere to dump it, and some simply tipped it into the river, causing serious pollution. Yet the farmers needed organic fertiliser and had no idea where to get it. A few did transport cow dung to their fields, but since it hadn’t undergone proper maturation, it caused problems such as fertiliser burn.

My undergraduate specialism at China Agricultural University was plant nutrition, so I saw it as both a form of pollution and a waste of resources. In my third year, I joined a biology competition with Professor Feng Gu, who mentioned that in Xinjiang the hides, skins and blood from slaughterhouses were all being thrown away – and that they would make excellent raw material for organic fertiliser. It was then that the idea of going back to my hometown to make organic fertiliser first took root in my mind.

This is why I came to the Quzhou Science and Technology Backyard at China Agricultural University for my master’s degree. A Science and Technology Backyard is a model that combines agricultural research, extension services and talent development in one place. There, students embed themselves in front-line production, eating, living and working alongside the farmers.

I specialise in organic fertiliser. Unlike chemical fertilisers, which directly top up mineral nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the core value of organic fertiliser lies in systematically improving soil quality and ecological function.

Healthy soil can help farmers overcome all kinds of problems. Take last autumn’s harvest, when North China saw unusual rainfall: Quzhou was drenched for a whole month running, the maize moulded standing in the fields, and the wheat sowing had to be delayed. Farmers who wanted to make sure the crop came up had to sow several extra jin of seed per mu. If the underlying condition of the soil had been good, they wouldn’t have needed to sow so much. When extreme weather hits – drought, waterlogging, whatever – enhanced water and nutrient retention in the soil means that crops survive far better than under conventional chemical fertiliser regimes. The upshot is that organic fertiliser helps farmers save costs and increase yields in multiple ways – a benefit that is very hard to quantify in the short term.

It was only because I was studying and living at the Science and Technology Backyard that I met the uncle who is now my business partner. It was one morning last March, and I’d gone out for a run. My neighbour the uncle drove past and asked if I wanted a lift. I’d only just reached the village entrance and was already worn out, so I got in his car.

He asked me what I was studying. I said I was making organic fertiliser. His eyes lit up, and he said he’d been wanting to do the same. His day job is landscaping and gardening, and business hadn’t been great these past couple of years. The uncle doesn’t have much formal education, but he is remarkably quick on the uptake. Once he’d learned about organic fertiliser, he was always pestering me about the technical side.

The uncle and I hit it off straight away, and no sooner said than done: we set off to visit the local chicken farms, manure drying sites and organic fertiliser plants. Last year we began running our own experiments – figuring out the technology as we went, while also exploring the business model.

We started with membrane composting technology. With help from Professor Li Yangyang at China Agricultural University, we sourced ePTFE (expanded polytetrafluoroethylene) selective permeability cover membranes – also known as molecular membranes or nano-membranes. The advantage is that these membranes selectively allow water vapour and carbon dioxide to pass through and vent into the atmosphere while trapping odour compounds such as ammonia and hydrogen sulphide. The drawback is that the equipment is incredibly expensive: the membrane alone costs 50 yuan per square metre, and a full setup capable of processing 200 cubic metres runs to 70,000 yuan. The theoretical lifespan is eight years, but from what I’ve observed, a single year of relentless sun, oxidation and all manner of wear and tear has already taken its toll on the membranes – I doubt they’ll last more than a few years.

So we switched to windrow composting. In this method, raw materials such as chicken manure and cow dung are blended with bulking agents like crop straw to adjust the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio and moisture content, then piled into long, open windrows. Oxygen is supplied by periodic turning, and aerobic microorganisms break down the organic matter and convert it into humus. The key difference from membrane-covered composting is precisely the absence of that ePTFE membrane, which means losing the semi-enclosed system’s ability to regulate temperature, retain moisture, preserve nitrogen and block odours. During the composting process, a windrow does smell of manure, which is hardly pleasant for the people working around it, but capital outlay and running costs drop significantly.

We trialled different ratios of chicken manure and cow dung, along with crop straw, maize cobs, spent mushroom substrate and other agricultural waste commonly available locally. From summer through to winter, we composted 800 tonnes of material in total – enough to work out the blend ratios, fermentation methods and all the other technical essentials.

Why Bother “Carving Flowers on Excrement”?

The organic fertiliser industry is rather chaotic right now. When the uncle and I were doing our research, we found that it’s not just in Quzhou – across the whole country the industry is a mix of good and bad operators, and the old curse of bad money driving out good is rife. Many factories throw in all manner of junk to cut costs – industrial fly ash, for instance, to pad the weight – but it’s loaded with heavy metals. You might not spot the problem when you buy it; in fact, people think it’s great, saying it’s ground fine and looks lovely and black. But once you spread it on the field, problems emerge – some seedlings die outright.

When it comes to organic fertiliser, farmers all know it’s a good thing, and they know that with us students involved in making it, quality is assured. Yet they find it hard to get their hands on organic fertiliser of reliable quality, and they don’t really know how to use it either. But the biggest deterrent, by a distance, is the feeling that organic fertiliser is simply too expensive.

The direction many organic fertiliser plants are taking these days is what I’d call “carving flowers on excrement”: take basic manure-based fertiliser, then add humic acid, amino acids, functional microbial inoculants, biostimulants such as alginic acid and chitosan, secondary and trace elements, and novel materials like biochar, upgrading the product into a bio-organic fertiliser or soil conditioner with complex functions – soil improvement, growth promotion, stress tolerance, efficiency gains and so on. But once you pile on all those additives, a tonne has to sell for over 500 yuan.

We want to strip the process back, no fancy frills – just get the price down as low as we can. Think of it like this: they sell luxury goods; we sell everyday staples. Of course, the precondition is that quality has to be guaranteed – no heavy metals, no antibiotics.

In truth, smallholder farmers used to manage a crop-and-livestock cycle entirely within their own household. Back in the small county town where I grew up, one farmer grew quinoa. He composted his own cow dung and carted it onto his fields – and the yield and quality of his quinoa were both impressive.

But with the spread of chemical fertiliser and the scaling-up of livestock operations, the crop-and-livestock cycle has been broken. Quzhou itself is a major laying-hen county. Yet there are few organic fertiliser plants here, unable to fully absorb the chicken manure generated within the county. Some farmers simply dump their manure wherever they please, creating stench, polluted run-off and all the rest.

In recent years, national policy has encouraged the composting of agricultural waste – essentially an attempt to rebuild the crop-and-livestock cycle across a wider area.

But it wasn’t until I actually set foot in the industry that I understood why organic fertiliser can’t get off the ground, and it isn’t a matter of technology. The technical threshold for organic fertiliser isn’t high. If you want to rebuild the crop-and-livestock cycle, the difficulty isn’t in composting manure and crop straw properly – it’s in “the in and the out”: the “in” is raw materials, the “out” is sales.

Rebuilding the Crop-and-Livestock Cycle

This past March, we rented a site and started producing at scale. The pressure hit us all at once.

First there’s the site. We leased an abandoned chicken farm at 120,000 yuan a year, and it handles manure from 400,000 birds every day. Getting the chicken manure is free for now – we bought a truck and hired someone to collect it daily from nearby farms. On top of that, we’ve got workers on for compost turning and site upkeep. Add in electricity, water, microbial inoculants and all the other miscellaneous costs, and you’re watching money pour out of the bank account every single day.

Manure has a high moisture content, and crop straw is bulky, so transporting the two of them is basically like hauling water and air. On top of that, collecting straw from the fields is a hassle in itself, and it still needs to be chipped. These days we’d rather use maize cobs and spent mushroom substrate. Even if people let us pick up these raw materials for free, the transport and labour costs alone are already a heavy burden.

In truth, rebuilding the crop-and-livestock cycle can’t rely solely on organic fertiliser plants like ours. Last year I went to an organic fertiliser conference, and peers there told me that an organic fertiliser plant can’t really be classed as a profit-making enterprise – it’s more of a government environmental project, because what it’s dealing with is waste generated by society as a whole.

If there were some kind of macro-level policy that positioned organic fertiliser plants as designated agricultural waste processing points – people haul their waste to us, we process it, and a portion of the transport cost is covered by the farms or the government – then we’d actually be able to keep things running.

What we want to explore is a county-level circular model, which is still very rare anywhere in the country. The organic fertiliser plants I’ve come across generally process their output into bagged granular organic fertiliser to widen the transport radius, even across provincial borders, and that’s not a problem. But I want to run things as a satellite station, serving farms and fields within a 20-kilometre radius. Beyond that, the transport costs simply get too steep.

But the question is whether you can actually source raw materials and find a market within those 20 kilometres – are the livestock farmers willing to hand over their manure? Are the crop growers willing to use it? Everyone has their own view.

So That Grain Crops Can Eat Organic Fertiliser, Too

And now we’re tearing our hair out over sales as well.

Wheat harvest is just around the corner. These past few days we’ve been busy promoting organic fertiliser to large-scale crop growers. A farmer can get a tonne of organic fertiliser for just over 100 yuan, and at that price we even include spreading it. It’s practically giving it away. Yet still no one wants to buy.

Last year’s batch cost us roughly 260 yuan a tonne. To break into the market, we set the promotional price for farmers at 250 yuan a tonne. Then Teacher Zhang Weifeng from China Agricultural University chipped in a further 150 yuan subsidy per tonne. That brought the farmer’s cost down to just 100 yuan a tonne, and we threw in field application as well.

This year our price for arable farmers is 240–260 yuan a tonne (tied to distance), and Teacher Zhang still subsidises half the fee – so the farmer only pays just over 100 yuan. That price covers the application service: we not only get the fertiliser spread onto the land for them, but also offer advisory support – for instance, telling them what this year’s soil conditions are like, how much they need to apply, and how much organic fertiliser is appropriate within their budget.

But we can’t lean on Teacher Zhang’s subsidy indefinitely. Once things stabilise, I’d like to bring the delivered-to-field cost down to 200 yuan a tonne at one tonne per mu.

In truth, though, this is still a bit pricey for farmers – especially those growing grain. Organic fertiliser is typically sold to vegetable and cash-crop growers; those crops command higher returns and demand fertile soil, so those farmers are happy to spend.

Very few organic fertiliser plants set their sights on grain growers. Using organic fertiliser on grain crops introduces an extra step into the farming cycle and pushes production costs up accordingly, yet the revenue gain for grain growers is modest at best. Organic fertiliser is not something that pays off overnight. The net benefit in the first year is very slim – it can even be negative – and profits only start building as the soil gradually improves.

I applied our own compost across a nearly 400-mu experimental plot. When the wheat came into green-up in early March, the treated plots were growing splendidly. A green-up assessment showed that those wheat stands met the Grade I seedling standard almost across the board – vigorous tillering, deep green leaves, strong root vigour. The farmers who bought our fertiliser ran their own side-by-side test too: they said if you dig into the soil in their fields, you can see the soil compaction has eased slightly – it’s a good deal looser.

But farmers – smallholders in particular – are often unwilling to spend money and time on organic fertiliser; if they can avoid the hassle, they will. Even the smallest-scale growers go straight to off-farm work once planting is done – farming isn’t their sole source of income. It’s those who truly farm as a profession for whom organic fertiliser makes the better case.

So That Nourishing the Land Can Pay

Farmers know that organic fertiliser is good for crops and soil – it’s simply that their budgets don’t stretch that far.

We’ve grown used to taking from the earth with reckless abandon. Now, with land-transfer arrangements, some people treat the land as a single-use commodity – they farm it for one year, then let it go: ‘Whoever wants to farm it next year can have it.’ There’s little awareness of soil protection. In the end, all it does is leave the land stripped of fertility, and that’s far from healthy.

Northeast China has now rolled out policies on black soil protection and a ban on reselling black soil. I think nurturing the land will become a profitable business in the future – and one we simply have no choice but to do.

But for now, our goal this year is simply to survive – to establish a working model and order for the plant’s operations.

The plant has only been running for two months, so output is still modest – around 400 tonnes a month. We’ve stockpiled nearly 800 tonnes of compost so far and plan to sell it to large-scale grain growers once the wheat is harvested and the next crop of maize goes in.

As the grain-planting season approaches, we produce arable fertiliser in bulk. The composting process is a bit rougher because we need volume. As long as quality is assured, it’s more than adequate for arable fields.

For different customer segments, I plan to keep the product range differentiated. For the rest of the season, we’ll make fertiliser for vegetable growers, with more additives – humic acid, for example – so the quality is higher and the price can go up.

Since we set the organic fertiliser plant up, all of us have been under enormous pressure. We’ll need to lay a hardened surface on the yard shortly, getting the paving done plus waterproofing and leak-proofing before the rainy season. That will set us back nearly another 400,000 yuan. I’ve even been eyeing the university student start-up loan – at least the interest is low.

No matter how hard things get, we pull together and press on. Uncle sends voice messages to our group chat every day – ideas, discussions, and technical articles he’s come across forwarded my way.

I’m uncertain about the future, too – I don’t know whether this will actually work. I could just step back, wait until I graduate, and leave. But I’ve already been part of it all; I can’t drag Uncle into this and then walk away unscathed. That would be a real betrayal.

– This is Foodthink’s 813th original piece –

Unless otherwise noted, all images are provided by the author.

Told by: Xianzi

Compiled by: Ling Yu

Edited by: Xiaodan

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