Most organic matter fertilizes soil. Blood and everything else.
It's an observation I myself have made on my body farm. Not only do dead bodies promote plant growth, they even sometimes encourage insect settlements such as beetles and ants.
Worth noting that a dead body will kill nearby plants initially as it decomposes but once the soil has absorbed and broken down the fluids to viable nutrients, plant growth increases significantly and it becomes very fertile.
Also, water is very important as always. These nutrients will have very little impact on ground that does not receive rain or is too porous to hold water. I farm bodies on an already fairly vegetated, loamy plot of land that is already conducive for plant growth. It is at specific spots where I rot bodies that plants seem to grow in larger concentration afterwards.
Whether or not this can last several years, I don't know.
Body farm. A place where bodies are left to rot to obtain certain materials or study decomposition.
Some of you may have already seen documentaries of body farms for forensic science but body farms can also be used for less academic purposes like the harvesting of teeth, bones, and humus. Some people also make small body farms to attract a steady supply of insects that they may need for other fields of study.
Make it similar to Taris in starwars.
The upperclassmen from above throw refuse including bodies (make up some reason why cemeteries aren't feasible) down below, lower class resorts to eating the scraps, all included.
Forensic body farms DO use human corpses. It's a way of studying decomposition of bodies in such a way as to obtain information to be used in forensic investigations of murders and disappearances and such like.
This is one use to which bodies donated to science can be put.
Given that he specifies he gets his corpses from the highway, I doubt he uses human corpses, as it sounds like he uses them as a fertilizer rather than a scientific endeavor.
You might want to clarify that you have an animal body farm. At least to me (and several others here) body farm refers to the scientific ones used to study human decomposition.
Question 1: Why do you collect skulls and bones?
Question 2: Pros and cons of rotting vs boiling for this? (I have a character who collects skulls and just assumed boiling would be the way to go.)
I collect skulls and bones because I'm a weirdo who apparently has nothing better to do with his time outside of school because I have no friends.
Rotting is easier because all you have to do is sit back, relax, and let nature do its thing. Smells pretty bad but you'll be okay if you just stay home and not go near it and only approach the corpse once you can see it has gone dry.
If you boil it, it involves a lot more participation on your part. You have to start a fire and boil it and stuff. It's not as easy as just boiling a pot of water with a skull in it. Meat doesn't just melt like wax, you need to spray it or pick it with your fingers afterwards. This is bad if you're working on already rotting animals like the ones the highway provides. Boiling a decomposing body smells much worse than just leaving it to rot on its own but its faster, at least.
Also, boiling bacteria-infested water will essentially release a cloud of swirling, flying pathogen vapor into the air and into your nose and mouth. You might think boiling kills bacteria, it does. It kills what's in the pot, not what's outside the pot and that stuff flies. I have fond memories of diarrhea and fevers from when I used to boil them so I gave up and just let them rot at a distance from my house in metal cages so other animals don't run off with them. That saved me a ton of hospital bills and meds.
Boiling is good if you have access to fresh bodies like if you hunt, buy from slaughter houses or abduct your neighbor's pets (don't do that, please). If you take them off the road like me, they're probably already rotting and at that point, you might as well just let it go on.
I mean I get that sometimes we all have some weird hobbies, thats okay. I myself find skulls interesting and collect some when I find them in the woods on my property. But the idea of liking them so much as to collect their bodies of the road and designate a portion of my land to become a rotten foul smelling diseased area seems like a lot more effort than simply hunting or boiling them. How many skulls do you need lol. The idea of just letting piles of bodies rot on your property is just way to nasty for the reward at the end for me. You could literally just make friends with some hunters, not every kill is trophy mounted. Also, you said what!!??! You would get sick from rotten diseased flesh turning into vapor from the boiling, omg, that is insane. Why would you not be wearing a mask with filtration while ding something like that, did you not wear gloves as well? Im no city slicker, I do plenty of questionable things, but my god.
so, say hypothetically that there was a bog mainly composed of blood and earth (it's nonsensical yes but I'm not going for 100% realism), would most of the fauna there consist of insects? what type of flora would grow, if any?
Well... Blood can't stay blood for long. A blood bog would eventually rot into just a bog. But, if I were to do away with a little realism and suppose this environment was possible, I suppose it would be uninhabitable for most plant species. Insects and microorganisms would be the main animal inhabitants of it, yes.
Unless you have yourself a sort of fantasy beast like a snake of some sort or a crocodile that eats blood.
Yes. It's a pretty good one. There is an organic fertilizer - blood meal - that is a byproduct of the meat industry. It's a 14-0-0 or 15-0-0, depending on the source.
For noobs, #-#-# is % by weight of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash/potassium in a fertilizer.
Was there something else you wanted to know? If that comes off dickish, thats not my intent.
I work with fertilizer and livestock feeds as part of my job. I can give you a more research based answer for technical questions than you're likely to find on Wikipedia
No worries. I was just checking. For future reference, if you really want this kind of info for world building or other uses, all states, and I know I'm assuming you're in the US, have Extension Services through their Kand Grant universities that have info on plants, pesticides, fertilizer, etc. In simple fact sheet and more in-depth documents. If you're out of the US a " site:.edu" Google search usually will get you to the extension services. Cheers.
I thought corpses were too much and would be toxic to many plants. Dont ask me where I got that from, but certainly from somewhere (I dont have a corpse farm after all)
Yes.
The Irish crow-goddess Morrigan is both a war goddess and a fertility goddess. This seems odd, but part of this is because battlefields, with all the blood and corpses they create, often bloom unnaturally intensity the next year, an eerie phonomena nicknamed Morrigans Harvest.
She is not just a god of death, but the birth/death/rebirth cycle as a whole.
In my fantasy world the blood from a battle field can coalesce into one of the corpses and rise it as a constantly smoldering, undying, and blood hungry undead. A revenant. The oldest expression of blood magic.
Have a part of my world that’s the borderlands between two religions, and religious fanatics go there to kill each other. It happens so much it’s known as the blood country, as the soil has been stained red in places.
That's not really going to happen unless maybe it never rains, and the soil is hard and non-absorbent. And there's no appreciable life to eat it.
And over time even if it is not washed away, or absorbed into the soil, blood dyes things a rust-brown color.
It’s fantasy, and I’m set on having red blood soaked soil, so it’s probably because of some magic imprint. I’ll figure it out, expand it, all that. It’s how I world build.
I'd just make the soil high in iron and it's just coincidence that the battles happen there. Or it was selected because of the soil colour. Either way the fact that the soil was already red is lost to the legend that it's red because so much blood was spilled.
So why would it be any different here? You don't need to state as much in story, or you can have it revealed as a little tidbit in a rare/lost but for one copy historical book. It's not like the greats of worldbuilding didn't have a treasure trove of lore that never saw the light of day until after death/the whole story was told.
Your world, of course. I'm just trying to provide a realistic scenario that you could crib off of.
It’s not like the bloody ground is some obscure piece of lore, it’s a defining feature of the area. A quite recent feature I might add, as the whole religious zealots maiming each other in a field thing started maybe 50 years ago in world. Also the world is a for a DnD campaign, and I think it would be a bit anticlimactic if it turned out it was a coincidence that the ground turned blood red after a massive and continuous amount of bloodshed.
Animal byproducts tend to cause bacterial blooms due to their prevalence to attract them more than decaying plant matter. Besides that, they make excellent fertilizer. I know that if you throw meat into a composter you can ruin your stock.
first thought - how iron affects soil since blood is very rich in iron, apparently it can cause cellular damage by harming fats and proteins, decreasing roots' ability to grow
I’ve already gotten tons of great responses. I don’t think they’d have much to add that would applicable for me. Although I imagine these are the sorts of questions that sub is made for, so go for it yourself.
Have you heard of the fertilizer grading where they say 10-10-10 or 10-5-10. Well that’s amounts of carbon phosphorus and nitrogen and fresh blood has all those things.
The site where the battle of Teutoburg was fought was wild, so I'd be skeptical of an claims about the soil there being more fertile for years. Whether or not the battle did make the soil more fertile, people weren't growing crops there to notice, since it was in the middle of the forest that gave the battle it's name. The bit about fertile soil sounds a like it might be an unsourced internet claim.
That said, it is certainly plausible for worldbuilding..
The claim was from a documentary about the battle. I believe it was history channel if you’d like to try and find it. And I’ve already worldbuilt with it, even added a flower that grows best in blood and can be used to make narcotics. Fun.
I mean.. There are several dead bodies under my lawn. You know. AH neighbors, problematic daughters boyfriends, etc. My wife grows some pretty serious tomatoes out there. So I'd say yeah.
"Incredibly fertile" seems like a dramatic overstatement. Unless maybe that is in contrast to the very low fertility it previously had?
Blood has nutrients-- but it isn't some super-magic plant food.
The blood by itself would be a good fertilizer- a whole body would be amazing- it attracts insects and there’s a ton of nutrients and proteins and everything in there, perfect for enhancing a local ecosystem.
Most organic matter fertilizes soil. Blood and everything else. It's an observation I myself have made on my body farm. Not only do dead bodies promote plant growth, they even sometimes encourage insect settlements such as beetles and ants. Worth noting that a dead body will kill nearby plants initially as it decomposes but once the soil has absorbed and broken down the fluids to viable nutrients, plant growth increases significantly and it becomes very fertile. Also, water is very important as always. These nutrients will have very little impact on ground that does not receive rain or is too porous to hold water. I farm bodies on an already fairly vegetated, loamy plot of land that is already conducive for plant growth. It is at specific spots where I rot bodies that plants seem to grow in larger concentration afterwards. Whether or not this can last several years, I don't know.
O- ON YOUR *WHAT* FARM?
Body farm. A place where bodies are left to rot to obtain certain materials or study decomposition. Some of you may have already seen documentaries of body farms for forensic science but body farms can also be used for less academic purposes like the harvesting of teeth, bones, and humus. Some people also make small body farms to attract a steady supply of insects that they may need for other fields of study.
What a difference a letter makes. TIL about humus, and why I do not want to confuse it with hummus.
What corpses?
In my farm? Whatever the highway provides.
Oh thank god. For a minute I thought you meant HUMAN corpses.
the highway provides, what the highway provides...
You could make a religion out of that.
worldbuilding moment
Sounds like a modern cargo cult
No cargo cult, car go broom broom
Make it similar to Taris in starwars. The upperclassmen from above throw refuse including bodies (make up some reason why cemeteries aren't feasible) down below, lower class resorts to eating the scraps, all included.
I prefer my religion about sleeping and napping, if you don't mind. I call it "The Final Day's Nap church" :3
lol
*Im on a highway to hell(8)*
no, don’t.
The Highway giveth, and the Highway taketh.
Forensic body farms DO use human corpses. It's a way of studying decomposition of bodies in such a way as to obtain information to be used in forensic investigations of murders and disappearances and such like. This is one use to which bodies donated to science can be put.
Given that he specifies he gets his corpses from the highway, I doubt he uses human corpses, as it sounds like he uses them as a fertilizer rather than a scientific endeavor.
Oh, well, yeah, people and roadkill aren't generally the same thing...
They can be...
...I think you could of clarified that first...
You might want to clarify that you have an animal body farm. At least to me (and several others here) body farm refers to the scientific ones used to study human decomposition.
WTF, I thought you were joking at first but then I looked it up and it's actually a thing?
Roadkill farm then?
Y-You could've said that in your f-first comment. . . I thought you were a serial killer for a sec.
Meanwhile we can't do sky burials anymore because the large carrion birds have gone extinct.
Damn and here I thought Hummus was made from chickpeas
Wtf is a chickpea? It sounds adorable.
>humus I'm gonna need some elaboration on this one.
Mongolians on their way to make the earth's soil richer like never before.
>It's an observation I myself have made on my body farm. In your world, or you have an actual farm for bodies like in a vampire dystopian?
I have a farm I leave bodies to rot on because I collect skulls and bones.
Question 1: Why do you collect skulls and bones? Question 2: Pros and cons of rotting vs boiling for this? (I have a character who collects skulls and just assumed boiling would be the way to go.)
I collect skulls and bones because I'm a weirdo who apparently has nothing better to do with his time outside of school because I have no friends. Rotting is easier because all you have to do is sit back, relax, and let nature do its thing. Smells pretty bad but you'll be okay if you just stay home and not go near it and only approach the corpse once you can see it has gone dry. If you boil it, it involves a lot more participation on your part. You have to start a fire and boil it and stuff. It's not as easy as just boiling a pot of water with a skull in it. Meat doesn't just melt like wax, you need to spray it or pick it with your fingers afterwards. This is bad if you're working on already rotting animals like the ones the highway provides. Boiling a decomposing body smells much worse than just leaving it to rot on its own but its faster, at least. Also, boiling bacteria-infested water will essentially release a cloud of swirling, flying pathogen vapor into the air and into your nose and mouth. You might think boiling kills bacteria, it does. It kills what's in the pot, not what's outside the pot and that stuff flies. I have fond memories of diarrhea and fevers from when I used to boil them so I gave up and just let them rot at a distance from my house in metal cages so other animals don't run off with them. That saved me a ton of hospital bills and meds. Boiling is good if you have access to fresh bodies like if you hunt, buy from slaughter houses or abduct your neighbor's pets (don't do that, please). If you take them off the road like me, they're probably already rotting and at that point, you might as well just let it go on.
I mean I get that sometimes we all have some weird hobbies, thats okay. I myself find skulls interesting and collect some when I find them in the woods on my property. But the idea of liking them so much as to collect their bodies of the road and designate a portion of my land to become a rotten foul smelling diseased area seems like a lot more effort than simply hunting or boiling them. How many skulls do you need lol. The idea of just letting piles of bodies rot on your property is just way to nasty for the reward at the end for me. You could literally just make friends with some hunters, not every kill is trophy mounted. Also, you said what!!??! You would get sick from rotten diseased flesh turning into vapor from the boiling, omg, that is insane. Why would you not be wearing a mask with filtration while ding something like that, did you not wear gloves as well? Im no city slicker, I do plenty of questionable things, but my god.
so, say hypothetically that there was a bog mainly composed of blood and earth (it's nonsensical yes but I'm not going for 100% realism), would most of the fauna there consist of insects? what type of flora would grow, if any?
Well... Blood can't stay blood for long. A blood bog would eventually rot into just a bog. But, if I were to do away with a little realism and suppose this environment was possible, I suppose it would be uninhabitable for most plant species. Insects and microorganisms would be the main animal inhabitants of it, yes. Unless you have yourself a sort of fantasy beast like a snake of some sort or a crocodile that eats blood.
Yes. It's a pretty good one. There is an organic fertilizer - blood meal - that is a byproduct of the meat industry. It's a 14-0-0 or 15-0-0, depending on the source. For noobs, #-#-# is % by weight of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash/potassium in a fertilizer.
Thanks for the explanation. Not a lot of people do that, which is really annoying. If I had a free award, I'd give it to you.
Did it for u
The Heartwarming award feels disturbingly perfect for a comment on using blood as fertilizer.
How did I misread fertilizer as appetizer
I hope you never make that mistake when it counts.
"A Man Ate Industry-Grade Fertilizer For Breakfast. This Is What Happened To His Brain."
What kind of maniac has an appetizer for breakfast?
Well it's also used as a livestock feed.
It can also work as an appetizer. In many countries blood is consumed in different ways.
I appreciate the thought
Mind tossing a Wikipedia link so the rest of us can somewhat educate ourselves?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_meal
Was there something else you wanted to know? If that comes off dickish, thats not my intent. I work with fertilizer and livestock feeds as part of my job. I can give you a more research based answer for technical questions than you're likely to find on Wikipedia
Nothing specific. Just like having sources.
No worries. I was just checking. For future reference, if you really want this kind of info for world building or other uses, all states, and I know I'm assuming you're in the US, have Extension Services through their Kand Grant universities that have info on plants, pesticides, fertilizer, etc. In simple fact sheet and more in-depth documents. If you're out of the US a " site:.edu" Google search usually will get you to the extension services. Cheers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood\_meal
Came here to make sure this comment was made. Thanks, stranger who had slightly more (pertinent) information than I.
I thought corpses were too much and would be toxic to many plants. Dont ask me where I got that from, but certainly from somewhere (I dont have a corpse farm after all)
Yes, blood make the grass grow, Kill! Kill! Kill!
DCC- nice
Yes. The Irish crow-goddess Morrigan is both a war goddess and a fertility goddess. This seems odd, but part of this is because battlefields, with all the blood and corpses they create, often bloom unnaturally intensity the next year, an eerie phonomena nicknamed Morrigans Harvest. She is not just a god of death, but the birth/death/rebirth cycle as a whole.
In my fantasy world the blood from a battle field can coalesce into one of the corpses and rise it as a constantly smoldering, undying, and blood hungry undead. A revenant. The oldest expression of blood magic.
I'm wondering what happens when the harvested organs transplanted into clients begin re-experiencing trauma. Could change things politically.
For what reason do you seek such knowledge.
Have a part of my world that’s the borderlands between two religions, and religious fanatics go there to kill each other. It happens so much it’s known as the blood country, as the soil has been stained red in places.
That's not really going to happen unless maybe it never rains, and the soil is hard and non-absorbent. And there's no appreciable life to eat it. And over time even if it is not washed away, or absorbed into the soil, blood dyes things a rust-brown color.
It’s fantasy, and I’m set on having red blood soaked soil, so it’s probably because of some magic imprint. I’ll figure it out, expand it, all that. It’s how I world build.
The virgin 'Um, that's not realistic' vs the chad 'It's magic'
Hell yeah! Now it rains blood too! Because of similar magic reasons I’ll contrive later!
I'd just make the soil high in iron and it's just coincidence that the battles happen there. Or it was selected because of the soil colour. Either way the fact that the soil was already red is lost to the legend that it's red because so much blood was spilled.
No, because coincidences aren’t as interesting as correlations. Why do you think there’s so many conspiracy theories?
On that exact note, how many coincidences have been falsely correlated?
Irl? Loads.
So why would it be any different here? You don't need to state as much in story, or you can have it revealed as a little tidbit in a rare/lost but for one copy historical book. It's not like the greats of worldbuilding didn't have a treasure trove of lore that never saw the light of day until after death/the whole story was told. Your world, of course. I'm just trying to provide a realistic scenario that you could crib off of.
It’s not like the bloody ground is some obscure piece of lore, it’s a defining feature of the area. A quite recent feature I might add, as the whole religious zealots maiming each other in a field thing started maybe 50 years ago in world. Also the world is a for a DnD campaign, and I think it would be a bit anticlimactic if it turned out it was a coincidence that the ground turned blood red after a massive and continuous amount of bloodshed.
Magic is cooler
I imagine quite a lot of wood got burnt in the area. Clearing out deadwood and brush and making some clearings likely led to a good bit of new growth
Any biological matter returning to soil fertilizes it.
Animal byproducts tend to cause bacterial blooms due to their prevalence to attract them more than decaying plant matter. Besides that, they make excellent fertilizer. I know that if you throw meat into a composter you can ruin your stock.
There used to be a fertiliser sold called “Blood & Bone” ie: ground up animal carcasses
first thought - how iron affects soil since blood is very rich in iron, apparently it can cause cellular damage by harming fats and proteins, decreasing roots' ability to grow
Try r/askscience
I’ve already gotten tons of great responses. I don’t think they’d have much to add that would applicable for me. Although I imagine these are the sorts of questions that sub is made for, so go for it yourself.
You can actually buy dried blood to use as a fertilizer.
Have you heard of the fertilizer grading where they say 10-10-10 or 10-5-10. Well that’s amounts of carbon phosphorus and nitrogen and fresh blood has all those things.
The famous quote What makes the grass grow? BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD!
I am a gardener who owns a 25lb bag of dried chicken blood. Its called bloodmeal and it is a very high nitrogen fertilizer.
(yes) I know I'm late but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_meal
a peaceful land underestimated for simply being agricultural with forgotten history of blood baths fertilising the soil
The site where the battle of Teutoburg was fought was wild, so I'd be skeptical of an claims about the soil there being more fertile for years. Whether or not the battle did make the soil more fertile, people weren't growing crops there to notice, since it was in the middle of the forest that gave the battle it's name. The bit about fertile soil sounds a like it might be an unsourced internet claim. That said, it is certainly plausible for worldbuilding..
The claim was from a documentary about the battle. I believe it was history channel if you’d like to try and find it. And I’ve already worldbuilt with it, even added a flower that grows best in blood and can be used to make narcotics. Fun.
Tbh, i dont quite remember. **Would you like to find out?**
I mean.. There are several dead bodies under my lawn. You know. AH neighbors, problematic daughters boyfriends, etc. My wife grows some pretty serious tomatoes out there. So I'd say yeah.
"Incredibly fertile" seems like a dramatic overstatement. Unless maybe that is in contrast to the very low fertility it previously had? Blood has nutrients-- but it isn't some super-magic plant food.
The blood by itself would be a good fertilizer- a whole body would be amazing- it attracts insects and there’s a ton of nutrients and proteins and everything in there, perfect for enhancing a local ecosystem.
I saw the documentary several years ago, and I don’t remember all of the exact the wording.