A Brief History of Composting

Are you new to composting? People call the SWRC office with questions about starting both backyard and large-scale composting programs. It is wonderful to have the opportunity to help people get started or solve problems they have encountered.

What is new to us is really a technique that has been used since ancient times. The vocabularies of the Greeks and the tribes of Israel contained a word for compost. The making of compost was a familiar practice for many European peasants. Farmers of Forty Centuries, published in 1911, details the extensive use of composting in China, Japan and Korea. The author, Dr. F.H. King, a prominent American scientist, found that virtually all plant material was composted before it was returned to the earth. Even green manure crops (crops grown only for the fertility value) were cut and layered with soil to decompose.

The most popular current composting practices developed from the Indore method, devised in the late 1920s by husband-and-wife British scientists, Albert and Gabrielle Howard, and the Indian chemist Yeshwant Wad. The Howards were plant breeders who worked in India from 1905 to 1931.

There was no established composting tradition in India and dung was used as fuel. The British were concerned about both the need for fertilizer and fuel.

The Howards thought compost was a likely answer. They devised and demonstrated a system that collected plant materials, used them as animal bedding, and mixed them for composting with urine-rich soil collected from the barns and a quarter of the dung produced by the cattle (leaving the rest of the dung for use as fuel). The moistened materials were composted in shallow windrows made inside pits of the same depth—the pits were used to keep the materials from drying out. With planned additions of water and three turnings, they were able to make high quality compost in 90 days.

The Howards’ method, building on the best science available at the time, formalized attention to the heating phase, carbon-nitrogen ratios, the importance of aeration and the need to keep materials moist. The results were published in a book The Waste Products of Agriculture: Their Utilization as Humus in 1931. The Indore method was widely adopted in tropical areas throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Its basic tenets continue to shape compost processes throughout the world—including here in Saskatchewan.

We are finding our own ways to use this age-old technique.

(Source: June 2005 WasteWatch)

Back to Composting main page

Back to Resources main page

Back to Home page