Would you eat vegetables if they had blood or excrement on them? Most people’s answer would probably be no. But conventional products come into contact with exactly that – albeit in very small quantities and long before harvest.
Is there meat in vegetables?
While organic associations allow excrement, horn shavings, hair and feathers to be used as food fertilizers, the EU also allows blood, meat, bones and other animal meal. This can contaminate the soil with antibiotic residues and multi-resistant germs.
The conventional ones are more vegan than the organic ones.
Jakob Mannherz
Demeter’s guidelines prescribe animal preparations in fertilizers. Plant, mineral and animal substances are combined. But an animal always has to die for this.
Farmers like Jakob Mannherz from Hof Moosfeld see the use of animal waste in vegetable cultivation as inefficient and ethically questionable: “We are only allowed to use organic fertilizers for organic vegetables and as of today, in most cases, this is slaughterhouse waste – conventional vegetables are more vegan than organic vegetables.” According to him, one hectare of organic vegetables is fertilized with horn and hoof meal from around 250 cows. The animal fertilizers often come from factory farming abroad.
Biocyclic-vegan support group
“We believe that our soil is not a disposal site for waste from factory farming,” explains the Biocyclic Vegan Farming Promotion Group on its website, which awarded the Mannherz company the prize.
The support group supports organic farming based purely on plants. This form of farming excludes any commercial livestock farming and slaughterhouse farming and does not use any resources of animal origin. They award the green seal “biocyclic-vegan farming” for this form of farming. Two companies in Baden-Württemberg have already received the seal.
Plant-based agriculture
The Biolandhof Clemens Hund fruit farm in Meckenbeuren has been the first certified biocyclic-vegan fruit farmer in Germany since 2017. The Moosfeld farm near Singen was certified in 2023. Fruit – this is Hund’s advantage – is fertilized differently because it usually does not grow in the soil, but on trees and bushes.
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Jakob Mannherz took over the Moosfeld farm in 2020 as a career changer. It quickly became clear to him that his farming should be done without animal products. It was only when he took over that he learned about fertilizing with slaughterhouse waste. “So I started experimenting in 2021,” says the farmer. The support group supported him with composting training.
“I joined the support group because I want to make the trade seal known and generally draw attention to the problem,” says Mannherz.
As a vegan, I could live with manure fertilization more easily than with fertilization with animal residues.
Jakob Mannherz
The problem is not only the fertilization with animal remains, but also the fact that this is still defended. A third of the land in Germany is grassland. “Of course, we don’t like the taste of grass, we don’t eat it,” he says. Mannherz believes that the intermediate step of slaughtering animals for compost is superfluous: “People always say that you can only produce meat with it and that you have to plough the land – no, we don’t have to,” he explains.
Nevertheless, he is already seeing more and more success. When he planted pumpkins on the humus soil last autumn, he was the first to harvest: “I was two weeks earlier than all my colleagues to harvest.”
Mannherz sees biocyclic-vegan farming as an opportunity to win back customers: “As a vegan, I could live with manure fertilization more easily than with fertilization with animal residues.”
Compost is the answer
“As a nursery without our own livestock, we need methods to get closer to our own farm cycle so that we can avoid importing external commercial fertilizers – especially animal waste,” says Mannherz. Plants such as legumes bind nitrogen and carbon from the air. Composting converts these plants into high-quality fertilizer. However, additional nutrients such as potassium, sulfur, calcium and magnesium are necessary. Every vegetable harvested removes nutrients from the soil that must be replaced. For this, Moosfeld also still needs mineral fertilizer. But the goal is to get away from that too.
With composting, Mannherz can now “make even barren, exhausted soil fertile again.” In this way, he is trying to “close the cycle of human nutrition without the animal in between.”
Note: In an earlier version, the headline, article image and some wording gave the impression that the article was mainly about fruit. This is not the case. We have subsequently corrected this and apologize.
