Here’s how to stop climate change in two easy steps: First, stop having so many babies. Next, stop eating cows. We won’t hold our collective breath waiting for either of those things to happen, but, for now, a woman in Malibu, of all places, has found a new use for cows that is beneficial to the environment — it “heals the soil” — and could save cows from the slaughterhouse.
Former screenwriter Denise Ritchie and her husband rescued a dairy cow from a slaughterhouse, named her Bu, and gave her a contented life in a pasture at the coast outside Los Angeles. They use her manure to produce an organic fertilizer that could help save the planet.
Via the Los Angeles Times.
Last October, the Ritchies and Colum Riley, a business partner, began producing Bu’s Blend, now carried in 50 nurseries in California. Master gardener Spitz became a customer of the pricey fertilizer after studying various approaches to gardening and concluding that biodynamics “was the purest, healthiest and cleanest system.” Every seed she has planted using Bu’s Blend, she said, has sprouted and grown “big and beautiful.”
Malibu Compost pays organic dairy farmers an average of $10 a ton for manure. The payments provide a little cash flow for farmers, and the manure — piled in rows on Gena Nonini’s Fresno biodynamic farm — keeps Malibu Compost bustling.
