Using Horseshoe Crabs For Fertilizer

Photo:Delaware Public Archives

 

Modern Farmer saw the same story I did last month about scientists harvesting horseshoe crab blood for medical testing, and they were also surprised that the crabs were used as fertilizer back in the day.  Unlike me, they were motivated enough to write a post about it:

Way back in 1603, French explorer Samuel De Champlain noticed Native Americans in Maine planting dead horseshoe crabs within fields of corn, marking one of the earliest observations of apparent fertilization in the New World.
According to Horseshoe Crab: A Biography of a Survivor, colonists picked up on the idea. When the U.S. industrialized near the end of the 19th century, a few coastal companies decided to turn the practice into a big business.
Rather than wading off marshy beaches to collect the crabs as earlier harvesters had, they built a series of horseshoe crab “pounds” on the shorelines of New Jersey and Delaware. When the tide ebbed, a network of nets, wire poles and wooden platforms forced spawning horseshoe crabs into holding pens. In most cases, workers would then collect the crabs and stack them neatly along the shoreline to rot and dry.
Once finished stinking up the beaches, they’d be sent to a processing plant, ground to a powder and packaged as a fertilizer called “cancerine.” Millions of crabs died before artificial fertilizers phased out the practice in the 1970s.

 I guess pictures of horseshoe crabs stacked like cordwood are much better than pictures of human skulls and bones in Cambodia, but they still look a bit ghoulish.  Of course, piles of dead cows wouldn't be very pretty either, but those got turned into fertilizer, too.