In the madhouse of agriculture history, feces is treasure.
Up to the mid-1800s, farmers dumped a buffet of blood, bones, sawdust, seaweed, and urine into crop rows to recharge the lifeblood of anemic fields. It was a teeter-totter age of snake oil and scientific inquiry, flavored by a cast of con men, presidents, assassins, and disappearing buffalo, all playing parts in agriculture’s most bizarre alchemy—guano into gold.
For one brief blink, guano—bird dookie by any other name—ruled the world.
Fountain of Youth
At the dawning of America, strip-and-step was standard procedure for many a farmer: Strip out soil nutrients and step toward better land further west. When 30-bushel corn yields shrank to 15 bushels, it was time to pull stakes and find virgin ground or go belly-up. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Prior to the modern science of agriculture, the why’s and how’s of soil health largely were mysterious. How soil additives functioned, or the knowledge of which minerals were needed and when, was the realm of the blind.
Beyond animal manure, farmers added soil amendments by the barrel—composts, human waste, fish, coal byproducts, chalk, or whatever unholy concoction was hawked by the latest charlatan to pull up a wagon at town’s edge and promise a yield boom.
Decade upon decade, the pitfalls of fertilization tormented growers—until 1802, when German explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt strolled down a waterfront in Peru and felt his nose hairs curl in ammonia rebellion at an odor emanating from barge loads of yellow-brown, caked guano. Von Humboldt was told the stinking bird droppings covered the nearby Chincha Islands in deep layers and were massively popular with Peruvian farmers.
A little dab’ll do ya. Curiosity building and nostrils burning, Von Humboldt took home a scoop of guano to Europe, and turned the spigot on agriculture’s fountain of youth, i.e., he sparked a fertilizer war.
All Aboard
Species and feces. Stretched across millennia, millions of seabirds splatted a semi-solid urine of phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen onto islands directly off the west coast of South America and further into the Pacific, at an approximate rate of 1.5 ounces per day. The result? Guano islands topped by a self-regenerating cake of excrement sometimes 25’ to 150’-plus in depth.
European farmers, thanks to von Humboldt, beat Americans to the wonders of guano, but U.S. growers quickly caught wind. By the 1840s, Peruvian entrepreneurs sold guano loads in U.S. ports at approximately $50 per ton, triggering a wildfire of demand from farmers who watched corn and cotton yields triple, quintuple, or even decuple, thanks to a fertilizer that vastly outperformed cattle and hog manure.
However, even with yield boosts, U.S. farmers howled at the price of guano, describes Jimmy Skaggs, author of The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion.
“In 1850, at a time when a single dollar could purchase a man’s tailor-made suit, median agrarian income in the United States stood at about $690 annually, representing the return on a hypothetically average farm of 202 acres; yet, most American farmers—north, south, and west—actually tilled far smaller tracts of land, fewer than 100 acres, and earned substantially less than $200 annually. To expend half that annual income for merely enough bird droppings to fertilize 20 acres was an extravagance many farmers simply could not afford.”
Guano demand was insatiable, Skaggs notes: “Even though the price of Peruvian guano continued to climb, averaging $52.60 a ton over the ensuing decade, its popularity nonetheless steadily increased among American farmers. By 1850 it accounted for 22 percent of all commercial fertilizer consumed in the United States; ten years later, by which time planters had tripled their use of fertilizers in general, guano represented 43 percent of the total, despite an average price of $73 per ton.”
Frustrated by the high price and lack of domestic sourcing, farmers lobbied Congress for action, insistent on guano at a steady, reasonable price. Politicians took careful note of farmer complaints: In 1850, of a total U.S. population hovering at 23 million, about 80% of Americans lived on the farm, and 75% of the gross national product was tied to agriculture.
President Millard Fillmore, dropping his first State of the Union speech on Dec. 2, 1850, hopped on the guano train: Peruvian guano has become so desirable an article to the agricultural interest of the United States that it is the duty of the Government to employ all the means properly in its power for the purpose of causing that article to be imported into the country at a reasonable price. Nothing will be omitted on my part toward accomplishing this desirable end.
Fillmore and his political allies knew lip service wasn’t enough to settle guano unrest. Why? Fake poop was soiling the guano market.
The Donkey’s Tail
In 1855, The Southern Planter published an article emblematic of guano madness. Despite designated inspectors in U.S. ports, guano swindles were the norm, due to a near non-existent chain of custody. With innumerable middle-men in the mix, the chances for guano adulteration dramatically increased, in the same manner that cocaine is cut with talc, starch, laundry detergent, or fructose.
As described in the Planter:
The laws are stringent, and the penalties in case of detection severe, yet the profits are so large and difficulty of proving the fraud so great, that numbers of dishonest men are willing to brave the chances of detection … inferior guanos are often sold under an assurance that they are equal to the best Peruvian, but we had no idea that there was anyone in this country engaged in the manufacture of guano. We are sorry to say we have been deceived.
…We were informed that an article known as Mexican guano was taken to an establishment, near Newark, N.J., and there mixed with plaster, salt, sugar-house scum, Peruvian guano, and quick-lime, the whole ground up together and put in bags, marked ‘Chilian Guano.’
No matter. Guano demand only soared higher, and with no other comparative product to apply, farmers paid $50 to $75 per ton for guano purchases that often were splashed with acidified bone, oyster shells, petroleum refining leftovers, or dirt, according to Skaggs.
Finally, in 1856, William Seward, a New York farm boy, made a massive play for guano on behalf of U.S. agriculture. Why not cast a dragnet of Americans across the Pacific Ocean and grab whatever unclaimed guano was there for the taking? Why not give citizens the power to conquer poop islands?
Brain or Jugular
Son of a doctor, businessman, and grower, Seward was born in 1801, on a farm roughly 60 miles northwest of New York City. A weak childhood constitution favored a career indoors, rather than farm life in the outdoors.
Seward found a calling in politics, winning offices as New York governor and senator. When the guano crisis erupted, Seward understood the plainspeak of U.S. farmers. He responded by piloting the Guano Islands Act of 1856, permitting U.S. citizens to claim any guano-covered “island, rock, or key not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government,” and mandated that any guano obtained had to be sold to U.S. farmers at a fair price.
Signed into law, the Guano Islands Act birthed U.S. acquisition of almost 100 islands (including the Midway Atoll) between 1856 and 1903, a staggeringly unique means of expansion whereby Congress deputized every American citizen to claim territory—a move that “has no parallel in history.”
Shaped by his farming background, Seward recognized the dire fertilizer needs of U.S. farmers. He also understood the value of land. In 1867, only 11 years after the Guano Islands Act, Seward made one of the greatest land purchases in world history, paying $7.2 million for Alaska—375 million acres of land. (Pilloried by the public and mocked in the press, Seward presciently predicted the Alaska deal, at less than 2 cents per acre, would be the crowning achievement of his career, but it would “take the people a generation to find out.”)
However, in between the Guano Islands Act and the basement-bargain purchase of Alaska, John Wilkes Booth tried to send a bullet into Seward’s brain or swing a blade through his jugular. Pistol or dagger—whatever worked.
A Hideous Dream
One month prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Abraham Lincoln gave Seward a Cabinet post, appointing him as Secretary of State. Four years later, in 1865, and five days after the Civil War’s end on April 14, John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators attempted to murder three of the highest officials in U.S. government: Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Seward.
Booth sent Lewis Powell (also a farm boy from an Alabama cotton-growing family) to Seward’s D.C. two-story residence to assassinate the secretary. Seward, convalescing in an upstairs bedroom after a near-fatal carriage accident days prior, was sheathed from chest to neck in a metal immobility brace. Powell knocked on the front door, burst past the butler, and dashed upstairs.
Stopped on the second floor by Seward’s son, Frederick, Powell pulled a revolver and fired into Frederick’s face, only for the gun to misfire. “Like the scenes of some hideous dream, came the bloody incidents of the night,” Fredrick recalled.
Powell turned the revolver into a cudgel, hammering the faulty pistol onto Frederick’s head (skull fracture), and then proceeded to Seward’s bedroom. Powell pulled a bowie knife and stabbed wildly at Seward’s throat, but the metal brace denied a slice to the jugular or carotid. Powell escaped into the D.C. night, but was later caught and sentenced to the gallows. Seward, clinging to life despite horrific wounds and blood loss, survived Booth’s assassination plot.
As U.S. farmers’ guano champion, Seward lived seven more years until 1872, and at his passing, agriculture remained gung-ho for guano. However, the realization of a finite resource was apparent to all, i.e., birds couldn’t crap fast enough to replace the rapidly disappearing layer cakes across the guano islands. The hunt was on for a proven alternative: How about buffalo bones?
Bone Collectors
In the early 1800s, an estimated 30 million bison roamed the United States, mainly in the Great Plains. Hunted to the cusp of extinction, bison numbers dwindled to 325 by 1884, turning the Great Plains into a giant boneyard.
Sun-bleached and scattered by the billions, bison bones (15% phosphate) became cheap fodder for a host of industries: sugar refinement, dry lubrication, bone China, and—fertilizer production.
During the heyday of bone collection, 1880-1892, farmers grabbed a financial lifeline as bone hunters. Sold between $5-20 per ton, millions of tons of bones were gathered across the Plains states, hauled to railheads and shipped east, bound for the grinding boxes or chimneys of processors. (Kansas state records, for example, record the export of 3.2 million tons of buffalo bones.)
Bones were no threat to the guano trade, but their demand was indicative of a fertilizer pursuit outside guano. After 1870, guano imports began declining, and by 1880, most of the guano islands had been mined beyond profit. U.S. agriculture began a gradual shift to rock phosphate prior to the advent of synthetic fertilizer in the first quarter of the 20th century. The final loads of bird droppings sourced from Seward’s Guano Islands Act passed through U.S. ports in 1898.
The impact of the guano rush still reverberates, according to Skaggs: “As the first commercial fertilizer to achieve widespread use in the United States, guano educated farmers about scientific agricultural techniques, augmented their productivity, and increased their incomes. It also helped to politicize them. Their repeated calls for public action that would afford them cheaper fertilizers were an early step toward the transformation of individual farmers into a distinct political pressure group, the agrarian sector, and helped lead them to the creation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1862 as the first advocacy agency within the federal government.”
The story of the fertilizer wars is remarkably simple: Decade by decade, century over century, agriculture is in constant flux with few guarantees except change. Until the clock struck midnight, guano was once agriculture’s belle of the ball.
For more articles from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Power vs. Privacy: Landowner Sues Game Wardens, Challenges Property Intrusion
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud
Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic
Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market
Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.
