I work in a lawn and garden supply center, and we get an online order for chicken manure it is almost always an East Asian name on the order. And when someone buys it in the store 9/10 it’s an older Asian lady. I’m pretty sure without that demo we’d hardly ever sell the stuff.

  • Jabril [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    13·
    16 days ago

    Bird derived fertilizer is common across the board. I think it’s just your area as far as how the demographics are playing out, but it is used in farming and gardening pretty universally

    • uSSRI [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      16 days ago

      I worked caucasianally on a honky farm, old farmer loooooved chickenshit.

      It really would work wonders, like you could see where he would run out or miss spots because the plants would be that much smaller and less robust.

        • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          8·
          16 days ago

          Prior to the advent of the Haber process, actual battles were fought between empires over claims over islands of bird shit. The nitrogen was a really big deal but also access to this as a readily-accessible source of phosphate was extremely important up until the modern era to use for gunpowder as well.

          You can imagine exactly what happens next given these conditions, right? Some fuckass empire discovers the next guano island and their war machine hungers ceaselessly so they go and displace a people, maybe fight a small war over it too, and all so they can maintain their monopoly on violence over their colonies and start more wars.

          Many such cases. Even bird shit itself is not safe from capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.

  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    8·
    16 days ago

    At the risk of stereotyping, older Asian people tend to be very in touch with gardening, unlike most westerners, and chicken shit as fertilizer is one of those mainstays of “rustic” gardening.

    Where I live you will see front yards with lawns that are barely surviving and between them there will be some lush front yard with huge, established dragonfruit/pitaya trees trellised nicely and you can almost guarantee that there’s an East Asian person who is 50+ years old living there that knows exactly what the hell their doing with a garden. And you can almost guarantee that they have bags of chicken manure out the back to make things grow.

    It’s a really good example of a sort of cultural disconnection that I see in most westerners where I live - we are disconnected from community to the point that we barely know how to form and maintain it, we are disconnected from the land that we barely know how to cultivate anything on it, we are disconnected from our food that we barely know how to produce and preserve and prepare it… There’s a sort of widespread colonist malaise here that disconnects us from every facet of life.