When was manure first used

A team led by Amy Bogaard, an archaeobotanist at the University of Oxford, decided to look for evidence of earlier fertilizer use. In ancient times, manure would have been the most logical fertilizer to use and, due to the fact that manure has a higher than normal concentration of the rare nitrogen isotope N , the team noted that recent research showed that plants treated with manure have more N The researchers collected ancient samples of cereals such as wheat and barley, as well as pulses such as peas and lentils, from 13 early farming sites across Europe that dated from 4, years to 7, years ago.

They analyzed more than 2, individual cereal grains and pulse seeds, from which it was concluded that the N levels were higher than normal and consistent with the use of manure for fertilizer.

So how did farmers thousands of years ago realize that manure could increase their yields? The researchers concluded that early farmers probably first noticed enhanced crop growth in areas of natural dung accumulation where animals gathered.

These areas of high fertility would have been obvious to subsistence farmers who saw differences in productivity between their small plots. The researchers also surmised that cropping and herding developed at the same time and were integral from the start.

Later the Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans and early Germans all are recorded as having used minerals or manure to increase yields on their farms. Styring, N. Andersen, R. Arbogast, L. Bartosiewicz, A. Gardeisen, M. Kanstrup, U. Maier, E. Marinova, L. Ninov, M. Schafer, E. Crop manuring and intensive land management by Europe's first farmers. ScienceDaily, 16 July University of Oxford. Manure used by Europe's first farmers 8, years ago. Retrieved November 10, from www. Researchers in Italy and Ethiopia ScienceDaily shares links with sites in the TrendMD network and earns revenue from third-party advertisers, where indicated.

Print Email Share. Boy or Girl? Can't Find Your Keys? Living Well. Nitrogen is extremely plentiful—it makes up nearly 80 percent of the air we breathe. But atmospheric nitrogen N 2 is joined together in an extremely tight bond that makes it unusable by plants. Farmers of yore might not have known the chemistry, but they knew that composting crop waste, animal manure, and even human waste led to better harvests. European elites realized that feeding a growing urban population from a shrinking rural labor base would be a problem—and that cheap and easy nitrate would be part of the solution.

In , a German chemist named Fritz Haber developed a high-temperature, energy-intensive process to synthesize plant-available nitrate from air.