It is not only the viability and variety of the seed that makes the harvest look plumpy. Sometimes, the soil must value the value of the seed. When the soil is not supportive, the seed's value becomes a waste!

You have a manure pile of memories. Nothing you can do about that. Now, you can drown in the stink, or turn it into compost and grow a garden.

In California, the state's huge dairy herd produces twenty-seven million tons of manure a year, the particulates and vapors from which have helped to make air quality in the argiculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley worse than it is Los Angeles.

I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.