An Agricultural Testament by Albert Howard

THE UTILIZATION OF TOWN WASTES

The human population, for the most part concentrated in towns and villages, is maintained almost exclusively by the land. Apart from the harvest of the sea, agriculture provides the food of the people and the requirements of vegetable and animal origin needed by the factories of the urban areas. It follows that a large portion of the waste products of farming must be found in the towns and away from the fields which produced them. One of the consequences, therefore, of the concentration of the human population in small areas has been to separate, often by considerable distances, an important portion of the wastes of agriculture from the land. These wastes fall into two distinct groups: (a) Town wastes consisting mainly of the contents of the dustbins, market, street, and trade wastes with a small amount of animal manure.