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Xadnem

Food Decay to Fertilizer

15 posts in this topic

I was recently looking at my foodstuffs, which I keep near my farms for convenience, when I noticed that half of it had fallen prey to decay. I then took a look around my farm to replenish what had been lost, only to find my nutrient levels had been depleted. Of course, cycling crops is an easy way to avoid that problem, but why not take it a little further?

 

I propose fertilizer. Now, I know this has been suggested before in the form of manure, but I would like to take a less scatalogical approach to the whole thing.

 

The idea would be that, because there is already a decay system in place, to take sufficiently decayed food and put it into a barrel, then seal it and wait. Inside the barrel, much like alcohol ferments and cheese forms, the rotten food would be composting. Then, after (and this is just an arbitrary amount of time because I don't know what would be a good way to balance it) a week, the composting would be complete, and could be removed from the barrel with a bucket. The compost could then be used on nutrient defficient soil to fertilize it.

 

Additionally, the idea comes to mind that rotten flesh would, hypothetically, make for excellent compost. However, rotten flesh is very easy to obtain, so I would not recommend actually letting rotten flesh be used.

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Rotting meat attracts insects

 

Using rotten meat as a fertilizer would attract insects to your crops

 

Some of those insects would eat your crops

 

Therefore composting should require decayed fruits/vegetables rather than just decayed food

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I don't know that I would go that far, considering that would also require making an entire insect system. Then again, it would actually give a pretty good reason not to allow for the composting of rotting flesh.

 

I think it would be better if the composts all had the same data value, however. It makes everything easier for bioxx. And if they don't have the same data value, then I suggest making them renew nutrients based on what foods are put in. (For example, composting nutrient a foods would give you nutrient a fertilizer.)

 

Using that system, meat would probably provide all nutrient types, as they are not plants and contain more complex protiens.

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True, but the process would likely be more enjoyable and less, if you'll pardon the pun, grindy than the current one. Either way works fine, though.

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it would also change fertilizer from being a semi-rare thing you have to search for to a use for literal garbage items you couldn't use, which changes the balance of fertilizer quite a bit.

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I like this idea because it makes sense, and watching all the food get wasted to decay gives kind of a bad feeling, so having a way to put it to good use would be nice to have.

 

But, it also has to fit into how Bioxx imagines what TFC should be, so we'll have to wait and see :)

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But... Don't rotting food and composting food different? Rotting food is not suitable for fertilizing or at least inefficient at doing so.

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I disagree. Perhaps this would help explain how composting works to you. Rotting food, or rather, rotting vegetation, decomposes and provides sustainance for bacteria, which, in turn, provide nutrients to the soil.

 

As it is, I don't think the same is said of rotting animal matter.

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I disagree. Perhaps this would help explain how composting works to you. Rotting food, or rather, rotting vegetation, decomposes and provides sustainance for bacteria, which, in turn, provide nutrients to the soil.

 

As it is, I don't think the same is said of rotting animal matter.

rotting animal mater works as an excellent fertilizer. 

Native Americans used fish as fertilizer in harsh conditions, like growing in sand for example. 

Just a few weeks ago I watched a special about how there is a forest up north that is kept alive by the leftovers that the bears leave on the forest when eating salmon.

Since the bears need a lot of calories to survive the winter they only eat the brains and eggs living the rest of the salmon to decompose and fertilize the forest.

Off course a good fertilizer would be a mixture of all kinds of food and organic mater, and it should need some time for the bacteria to digest it and actually turn it into fertilizer.  

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rotting animal mater works as an excellent fertilizer. 

Native Americans used fish as fertilizer in harsh conditions, like growing in sand for example. 

Just a few weeks ago I watched a special about how there is a forest up north that is kept alive by the leftovers that the bears leave on the forest when eating salmon.

Since the bears need a lot of calories to survive the winter they only eat the brains and eggs living the rest of the salmon to decompose and fertilize the forest.

Off course a good fertilizer would be a mixture of all kinds of food and organic mater, and it should need some time for the bacteria to digest it and actually turn it into fertilizer.  

Why would they only eat the brains and eggs? Even if that has the most calories, eating the whole fish would still provide more calories than only eating selective parts of it.

But ignoring my inability to understand the ursine psyche there's something you need to consider about that.

 

Rotting flesh can become the most plentiful resource available in the game if you set up a half-decent mob grinder and wait a little while. I understand why one would want there to be a use for it, but it would get out of hand pretty quickly. As of B79, I believe barrels have 12 possible slots. If each slot has a stack of rotten flesh, that fertilizer would likely last for a very long time. As much as I want to see rotten flesh have a use, it would remove any semblance of balance that the fertilizer could have. In fact, even if normal meat from slaughtered animals is used, the overall result would be having way more fertilizer than one would reasonably expect a player to get.The only balance that comes to mind would be making a significant difference in input:output ratio, where you would have to put in some ongodly large quantity of meat to get a relatively small quantity of fertilizer. However, if that were the case, no one would even bother (except probably for rotten flesh because seriously that stuff is unnecessary to have).

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Not really advocating the creation of fertilizer. I just wanted to correct the notion that meat would not be a good fertilizer.

As for the bear, It was a planet animal special. If you search for Alaska forest, salmon and bear you will find on google.

here is a site with a video.

http://www.encountersnorth.org/wildexplorer/salmon/forest-and-sea-salmon.html

http://www.mhhe.com/Enviro-Sci/CaseStudyLibrary/Topic-Based/CaseStudy_WhyTreesNeedSalmon.pdf

The bear needs to get ready for hibernation so it really needs to pack on fat and calories.

Fish don't have many calories, so the bear will concentrate on the brain, eyes, skin and ovaries. The rest is discarded as some bears walk into the forest to eat they drop the remains with in turn fertilizes the forest.

Many years ago people considered exterminating the bears to have more salmon. Today scientists realized that there is a balance between the salmon the bear and forest.

No bear means no forest fertilization, no forest no streams, and no salmon.

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Why would they only eat the brains and eggs? Even if that has the most calories, eating the whole fish would still provide more calories than only eating selective parts of it.

 

I think it has to do with how much you can eat.

Like, if you can only eat 40 grams of food eating 5 grams of something with 1000 calories(per gram) then 35 grams of something with 100 calories(per gram) will give you less calories then eating 40 grams of something with 1000 calories(again, per gram)

[Note: all numbers above are 100% random numbers]

 

But anyways, I don't think rotting food to fertilizer is a good idea. It'll basically tun crop farming into mass-producing crops, having half(or less. Or more) rot away, then used to replenish nutrients to mass-produce more crops, then having a good portion of them rot away to replenish nutrients to(basically, this repeating over and over).

 

It takes away the planning and thought you'd have to put into growing your crop(mainly nutrient management) without the mass-producing fertilizer thing.

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That's actually a very good point, and part of the reason I was questioning the idea in the first place. Balance would be hell.

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