Hundred Families Helping Program Chinese garlic farmers probably never dreamed that planting some garlic would also threaten the security of the United StatesAccording to the BBC, U.S. Republican Senator Rick Scott sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Raimondo saying that Chinese garlic cultivation methods are unhygienic.
What an unsanitary law?
According to Scott's intuitive understanding through cooking blogs and others, Chinese garlic is unsafe and unhygienic because it is fertilized with human feces and sewage, and if the food is not safe, it will pose a "serious threat to public health and economic prosperity" in the United States.
U.S. Republican Senator Rick Scott sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Raimondo saying that Chinese garlic cultivation practices are unhygienic. ** People's Daily Online.
Is this really the case?
To fertilize crops, you can't just pour dung soup!
From a scientific point of view, animal manure is a good fertilizer. There are so many organic substances in the environment, and the substances and nutrients that are searched and enriched by animals are naturally much more, and then they are fully fermented in the animal's digestive tract and are easier to absorb. Even in the animal kingdom, dung eating behavior is also very common, cow dung, sheep dung, horse dung are good nutrients on the grassland, its manure weathered to form humus to make the grass grow more lush, and small animals such as dung shells are also pushing dung balls in the grass to eat dung cakes. Plants take root in the soil, animals eat plants, and animal excrement and corpses are decomposed to plants after death, which is the natural principle and the natural way of carbon cycle.
Husk Lang is pushing a dung ball. People's client.
There is reason to believe that when primitive humans moved from hunting to gathering, it was not difficult to observe the phenomenon of organic matter decaying and fertilizing fields. As early as the 17th century B.C., Sumerian agricultural ruins have evidence that local farmers deliberately left stalks to rot in the ground when harvesting crops, indicating that humans knew the use of fertilizer in the early days of agricultural societies. However, there is no trace of the use of dung in the Sumerian ruins, and although the Sumerians at that time had developed a taboo about dung, and large dung pits were dug in the city to store filth, there is no evidence that the dung was sprinkled into the fields as fertilizer.
Why?Because there is a threshold for fertilizing fields with manure, and the threshold is not low. Human feces contain a large number of pathogens such as bacteria, viruses and roundworm eggs, which can cause the spread of pests and diseases if sprinkled directly into the soilMoreover, the organic matter in the manure may continue to ferment and produce heat after entering the soil, and the local temperature can reach 70 degrees Celsius, which can not support the delicate crops. In agriculture, there is a saying of "burning seedlings", which refers to the high temperature generated by overly fresh manure and destroyed the crop seedlings.
Human feces contain a large number of pathogens such as bacteria, viruses and roundworm eggs, and the picture above shows the virions in the feces. People's New Platform.
So anyone who knows even a little bit of agricultural basics should know how ridiculous Senator Scott's depiction of dung soup pouring garlic on it. No one needs to feel disgusted, because people don't have a chance to eat garlic poured in fresh dung soup, and the first garlic to be poured will die to show you.
Before really applying manure to garlic, the manure must be piled together to ferment and rot for a period of time, dissipate the heat and kill the pathogen, and then mix it in the soil and apply it to the seedlings to play a role in fertilizer. This thing seems to be nothing today, but in the early days of human agricultural society, it was a high-tech technology, and only a few civilizations mastered it.
The Chinese civilization happens to be the best of these few civilizations. As early as the Warring States Period, the Confucian sub-sage Mencius recorded many times that the word "dung" was connected with the field, and there was a famous sentence in "Mencius: Wan Zhangxia":
The ploughman's harvest is a hundred acres per man. 100 acres of dung, the farmer ate nine people, the last time he ate eight people, the middle food seven people, the middle food six people, and the next food five people. ”
Here, "100 acres of manure" is not "100 acres of manure in a field full of manure", but "100 acres of manure farmland", and the good farmers can feed nine people, and the worst farmers can only feed five people. When telling Teng Wengong about the way to govern the country, Mencius said: "In the fierce year, the dung is not enough. This means that there are too many taxes and miscellaneous taxes, and in the famine year, the peasants can vigorously fertilize the fields, but the harvest is not enough to pay taxes.
The Han Dynasty book "Shuo Yuan Jianben" even asked Mencius to say a particularly flavorful sentence: "People know dung their fields, but they don't know dung their hearts." The dung field is better than the seedlings to get the valley, and the dung heart is easy to do and get what it wants. Dung is directly used as a verb here, which shows that the understanding and understanding of dung at that time was quite positive. But Liu Xiang, the author of "Shuo Yuan", is a ** family and loves to make up stories, so it is doubtful whether Mencius said this sentence.
Book Garden" book shadow. It is now in the collection of the Russian State Library.
There is also a record of "manure fertilizer field" in Xunzi Fuguo Chapter, which shows that the hundred schools of thought of the Warring States period still know more about agricultural affairs, and for them, the use of human manure to fertilize the field has already belonged to the category of common sense. In contrast, the Analects also records many of Confucius's high views on agriculture, but the only word "dung" is derogatory "the wall of dung and soil cannot be destroyed", indicating that the scholars of the Spring and Autumn Period did not know enough about manure and fertile fields, and the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period may have been an important period for the promotion of manure and fertile fields in China.
It is related to the grain harvest, which is the foundation of life, and the promotion process of manure and urine fertilizer fields should be very smooth, and it has reached a higher level in the Han Dynasty. There is a model of the Eastern Han Dynasty pigsty terracotta figurines in the Xuchang Museum in Henan, where several pottery pigs are placed in a circle that is approximately circular, and a small hut used as a toilet is in the corner of the circle, and the lower layer is connected to the pigsty, so that human and animal manure can accumulate fertilizer and feast on the field. Why is our word "home" a treasure and a pig?Because pigs are an indispensable part of the farm, they are too useful!
Pottery green glazed pigsty, Han. **Palace museum.
It's not just pig manure that makes people flock to it, but also horse manure. In ancient times, there were no pig farms, and pigs were scattered under the toilets of every household to eat poop, but there were horse farms, and the concentration of military horses could produce tons of horse manure, which could be exchanged for money.
According to the records of "Zizhi Tongjian", during the reign of Li Zhi of Tang Gaozong, there was a young government supervisor named Pei Kuanshu who was "good at profit" and wrote to the Son of Heaven that the horse manure in the imperial garden could be sold for money. Tang Gaozong was immediately moved, and asked the opinion of the famous minister Liu Renliang. Liu Renliang replied: "The benefits are thick, and I am afraid that future generations will say that the Tang family sells horse manure, and it is not a good name." "Fortunately, Liu Renliang is not confused, and Tang Gaozong can also listen to his opinions, otherwise it will be recorded in later generations that the dignified Tang Emperor is still fighting with the people for that little horse dung money, is it too low?
During the Song Dynasty, China's economy further developed, and agricultural technology was also among the rapid advances, and manure fertilization had become a basic operation. The Song Dynasty produced the "Chen Yang Agricultural Book", a strange book on rice planting technology, which has a chapter "The Appropriateness of the Dung Field", which specifically proposed: "If you can add new fertile soil from time to time, and treat it with dung, it will be good and ripe and fat, and its strength should always be new and strong." ”
Even the word "manure" has been escaped, adding the meaning of "fertilizer" to the excrement. Yuan Huang, who served as the county governor of Baodi during the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty, wrote "Baodi Persuading Agriculture", of which "Dung Soil Seventh" recorded:
There are seedling dung, grass dung, fire dung, hair dung, ash dung, mud dung, and mud dung. ”
There is a sentence in the "Shen's Agricultural Book" written at the end of the Ming Dynasty that is still regarded as a treasure by farmers, "Where farming always produces dung, there are four words."
East Asian manure fields vs smelly Paris
Because of its many benefits, it has never been as despised in East Asian cultures as it has been in European and American cultures. Guangdong, Fujian and other places call the feces "night incense" or "night incense", it is said that every household has to put a toilet at the door and wait until the early morning dung truck to pull it away. The smell of the dung truck everywhere is sky-high, and it is simply called "incense" in order to please good luck, and "night incense" gets its name from this.
It is impossible to know when the title of "night primrose" originated, and the earliest ** that can be seen is preserved in the Wilkham Museum in the United Kingdom, and the content is that in 1871, a Fujian woman walked in front of the door with two dung buckets on her shoulder. ** Flush toilets and sewers were not widely available at this time and before, and city dwellers either dug a pit at home to store their feces or pulled them into the toilet and waited for a car to pull them away.
* Flush toilets and sewers were not widely available at this time and before, and most of the general population used manure buckets to solve their personal hygiene problems. ** China Agricultural Museum.
Since it can fertilize the fields, the nightshade can be sold for money, and the dung will be collected and sold by whoever sells it, and it will become a unique river and lake. At that time, there were more or less several "dung tyrants" in the cities of China, and Yu Deshun, president of the Beijing Dung Industry Association, was in charge of 36 streets and hundreds of dung diggers under his command, and relied on the dung diggers to dig out more than 100 houses one by one, and he was also considered a top rich man in Beijing before the liberation.
After liberation, the dung tyrants were eliminated, but for a long time before the popularity of flush toilets, manure dumping was still done by manpower. Guangdong's newspaper "Yangcheng Evening News" once recalled that the local farmers who dumped dung got along with the residents for a long time, forming a kind of emotional relationship, and when they arrived in the month of Layue, they would send some sweet potatoes and taro to the residents' homes to express their gratitude. Residents are not at a loss, and if they don't farm their own fields, the dung is filth, and they are happy to have someone take it away and clean it up.
Under the influence of Chinese farming culture, neighboring countries such as Japan, North Korea, and Vietnam regard human feces as treasures. In 1649, the Tokugawa shogunate, which ruled all of Japan, issued an edict prohibiting the dumping of manure into rivers, not for the sake of hygiene, but to prevent waste of manure resources. At that time, there were also professional dung collectors in Japan who were similar to those who took dung to exchange with farmers for fruits and vegetables, and later the industry grew and farmers had to use silver to buy dung.
Sometimes the price of rice rises, and the price of dung also rises, and there has even been a phenomenon of stealing dung in Japan. In the summer of 1724, there was even a large-scale dispute between two villages in the Osaka area of Japan over the ownership of a portion of the dung. This kind of quarrel over excrement is not uncommon in East Asian history, but it is a new thing for Europeans and Americans, and this record is rare in Chinese and Japanese history books, but it has been widely circulated in English literature.
Not only that, when I was young, I also saw that farmers had to go to their own fields to "defecate", and the more frugal farmers would carry a dung basket, and pick up the dung in the basket when they saw it on the road. It's all high-quality fertilizer, and only when it reaches the field can it be considered to have completed its mission.
The thrifty peasant carried a basket of dung, and when he saw it on the road, he picked it up and put it in the basket. ** 1961 edition of "The People".
Come to think of it, it's a good thing that someone in the city picks up feces and the countryside goes home to poop, so that at least feces don't cause much public health trouble.
While farmers in East Asia are accumulating manure in their fields, in Europe is a different story. This is not to say that ancient Europeans were not concerned with manure fertilization, on the contrary, it should not be an uncommon practice in ancient European cultural circles. In the Gospel of Luke in the Bible, Jesus tells a story about a gardener who saw that a fig tree was not bearing fruit and asked the gardener to cut it down. The gardener said so
Lord, keep it this year, until I dig up the earth around me and add dung, and then if it bears fruit, then I will cut him down again. ”
This shows that in Jesus' day, manure on crops was not only a normal operation, but was also considered a good act of healing fruit trees. But that was only in the countryside, the cities of ancient Rome chose a different path, as the Roman Empire occupied the whole Mediterranean, the city of Rome expanded more and more, and the feces were pulled more and more, and how to deal with it became a big problem. This led to the development of a sewer system, and the city of Rome simply developed an underground sewer network system that extends in all directions, remember the Super Mario Monster that I wrote about before, right?(Why does Super Mario always fight monsters in underground pipes?)The sewer system of the city of Rome was built of solid marble, with arched gates, and its width was up to nearly 5 meters, wider than some streams!
2,500 years after the construction of the Roman sewers, modern Rome is still in use. The sewers here are all made of rock. Rococo "How Busy Are the Sewers".
As Europe entered the dark Middle Ages, the countryside could still collect human manure and fertilize the fields, and the cities were in trouble. With pipe systems failing and the lack of industrious manure diggers like in East Asia, many European cities are once again faced with the dilemma of being surrounded by manure. I believe many readers have read descriptions of European cities full of smell, such as Paris, the fashion capital of Europe, where people pour the toilet directly from the second floor, and if they are not careful, they may be drenched in drenched in their heads. For example, although the Louvre is a temple of art, it is also a temple full of filth, and people and pee directly in the stairwells and balconies, which is Xi.
There is even a saying that the French did not invent high heels for aesthetics, but so that long skirts would not be mopped on the floor, so that they would be less contaminated with some of the feces that can be found everywhere. It wasn't until after the Renaissance that the city's sewers were once again in all directions, and Parisian feces were able to be removed smoothly.
The French invented high heels not for aesthetics, but so that long skirts would not drag the floor. Above, Louis XIV and his family. It is now in the Wallace Collection, London.
Removing the feces does not mean that it is the end. The manure that does not enter the field and other garbage are mixed and mixed to form sludge, which is discharged down the gutter into the river, where various bacteria and viruses are mixed together to reproduce, and then people can drink it to cause infectious diseases. Between 1831 and 1854, there were four consecutive outbreaks of cholera in Britain caused drinking water contaminated with the excreta of cholera patients. Cholera may be avoided if human manure fertilization fields were spread in Europe and the United States, as they were in East Asia.
You see, because a lot of people's feces and urine can't go where they need to go, on the one hand, the crops in the fields lack fertilizer, and on the other hand, the people in the cities are smoked and screamed. Sometimes we should be glad that the ancestors of the Chinese more than 3,000 years ago lit up the technology tree of manure fertilizer.
Today's feces
But we can't be conceited because of that. Europeans don't know how to use manure to manure fields, but they also have their own way of fertilizing fields, that is, crop rotation. Every few years, let the land rest for a year, and then set fire to the land when it is overgrown with weeds, and the burned plant ash is poured into the ground by rainwater, which is no less than human manure and urine high-quality farm fertilizer. In a sense, they were able to do this because they had large tracts of fertile land for arable land and pasture, and in contrast, intensive farming in East Asia was an important advance in agricultural science and technology, but it was also largely a last resort.
The United States and Europe are culturally integrated, and the European set has been widely used in the sparsely populated United States. Agriculture in the United States is dominated by large farms, which are widely used in crop rotation, and the European sewer pipes in cities do not collect human manure, and it is impossible to use this fertilizer. Of course, in order to increase soil fertility, the United States and Europe also need to fertilize the soil, but it is not human droppings but bird droppings that once occupied the major pastures in the United States. In the Pacific Ocean, not far off the coast of Peru, there is an archipelago, where seagulls from the north and south always pull a bubble, and over time accumulate saltpeter, Peru made a fortune selling these guano to the United States for fertilizer fields and saltpeter mines. Later, when the guano was dug up and sold, Peruvians turned to the Atacama Desert, which borders Bolivia and Chile, and is also a natural toilet for birds. The Three Kingdoms fought for this, known as the "Guano War".
South American cormorant, a major producer of guano fertilizer. People's New Platform.
But bird droppings have been piled up and the original appearance of the droppings is not visible, so the average American who grew up in the city had no idea that dung could fertilize the fields, and the taboo against it was not much less because of the use of bird droppings on farms. At the beginning of the 20th century, German chemists invented the process of synthesizing ammonia, which can extract nitrogen and hydrogen from air and water respectively, and synthesize ammonia and ammonia that crops need so much.
Whether in China, Japan, South Korea or Vietnam, most agricultural workers today are Xi using chemical fertilizers produced in chemical plants, which are cheap and easy to use. Residents of the city also have access to flush toilets and an underground network of urban networks dating back to ancient Rome to flush water with the touch of a button to take away their excrement. Human feces and urine play an increasingly small role in the field. In 2005, a graduate student of Northwest A&F University investigated the utilization of organic fertilizer in Shaanxi Province, and the organic fertilizer used in the province accounted for less than one-tenth of human manure, and even less than half of livestock and poultry manure.
1894 British Advertising Painting: Flush Toilet. **Xinhua.
In 2019, several researchers at The Ohio State University also published in the Ethnobiology Letters**, studying the history of human use of human feces for thousands of years, and also expressed regret that in industrialized societies, water flushes and carried away feces.
Back to Senator Scott's question. In fact, the reason why his remarks can be spread in the United States is mainly because he grabbed the word feces to attract attention, and secondly, this matter is also related to the per capita scientific literacy of Americans. The United States is the world's number one developed country, with cutting-edge technology and the world's most powerful scientific talent, but ordinary Americans are easy to be led by politicians to distort the rhythm, coupled with the high degree of agricultural mechanization in the United States, the vast majority of people have never seen farmland at all, and they can't understand fertilization, but it is normal. The matter of manure on garlic can hardly be understood by the ears of ordinary Americans as a process of fermentation and decay, but can only be understood as a fresh dung soup dug out of the toilet and poured directly on the garlic head.
As for whether Senator Scott really thinks the same way, that's just a question for himself.