The Workforce Nobody Hired

On the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River in northern Idaho, my grandfather ran cattle on a place we always called the farm, though it was really a ranch. From about 1979 until 1985, part of my job was the manure. We’d shovel it out of the yard into the spreader, hook the spreader to the tractor, and drag it around the hay field until the load ran out. Then we’d buy nitrate by the ton and spread that too.

I thought I was spreading fertilizer twice. I was actually doing two completely different things, and nobody ever told me so.

The bagged nitrate was a finished meal. Somebody in a factory had burned natural gas to pull nitrogen out of the air and hand it to my plants ready to eat. The manure was something else. The manure was a workforce, and its lunch.

Here’s what I didn’t know at the time. Soil isn’t dirt. Soil is a city. There are billions of bacteria in a spoonful of it, and they’re the ones actually running the place — breaking down what’s dead, holding nitrogen where roots can reach it, trading sugar with plants for minerals. All of it happens out of sight, for free, and nobody sends you an invoice.

And then there’s the clover. That field was hay and clover, and part of it went to alfalfa — both planted deliberately. That was my grandfather’s call.

Clover and alfalfa are legumes, and legumes grow nodules on their roots — little knuckled swellings where nitrogen-fixing bacteria live. The plant feeds them sugar. They pull nitrogen straight out of the air and hand it over in a form the plant can use. My grandfather was running a nitrogen plant in that field, twice over. He almost certainly couldn’t have told you the chemistry. He’d have said clover’s good for the ground.

That’s the pattern I keep finding. Somebody knew, three generations back, without knowing why.

The tank out back

My grandfather did something else I never got explained to me. He’d cut up cabbage and put it in the septic system.

I didn’t learn the reasoning until my father told me, years later. Everything from the house goes into that one tank — not just the toilet, but the sink, the laundry, the bath. All the soap, the bleach, the drain cleaner. And that stuff kills the bugs. A septic tank isn’t a holding tank; it’s a digester. It works because anaerobic bacteria are eating what you send down there, breaking it apart into water, sludge and gas, so that what leaves the tank won’t foul your ground. Kill the bacteria and you don’t have a septic system anymore. You have a box of sewage.

So the cabbage was meant to bring them back.

Now, I’ve looked into this, and the extension offices will tell you the cabbage doesn’t do it — a healthy tank reseeds itself from what you send down every day, and the bacteria already in there outnumber anything you could add.¹ Fair enough. But I’d argue my grandfather was more right than wrong. If you keep pouring bleach down the drain and never put anything down there they want to eat, that population goes down and stays down. Starve them long enough and you’ve got nothing left to recover from. Feed something what it wants and it multiplies. That’s not folklore. That’s just how living things work.

Right diagnosis. Maybe the wrong medicine. But he was thinking about the bugs, which is more than most people do.

Inside us, too

Same story in your gut. You don’t digest your own food, not all of it. There’s a workforce in there doing a share of the work, making vitamins, keeping worse organisms crowded out. Take a course of antibiotics and you’ll feel what happens when you thin out the staff.

Soil, septic tank, gut. Three different jobs, same arrangement: a population of invisible workers doing something essential, and no line item for them anywhere. Back in September we wrote about two other members of that same invisible crew — worms and bees — and the nitrogen this whole loop runs on has its own leak-management problem once you seal it in a hull, which we worked through in The Gas Nobody Budgets For.

And in the barrel

Now put all of that in a can, in orbit, with nothing outside it.

There’s no truck coming to pump the tank. There’s no farm store selling nitrate by the ton. If the soil workforce dies, you can’t go get a shovelful of healthy dirt from outside the fence, because there is no outside the fence.

Biosphere 2 ran this for real. All of the human and animal wastewater went into anaerobic holding tanks first, then through constructed wetlands — a built marsh where plants and bacteria cleaned it — and the water came out the far end and went onto the crops. It was a two-stage system treating all of the habitat’s human and domestic-animal wastewater, running roughly 240 to 290 gallons a day. Over the two years, the wetland plants grew over 1,200 kilograms of dry material, harvested and used as fodder.² The sewage grew fodder.

Which is the manure spreader again. Same loop my grandfather was running, just with people instead of cows and a marsh instead of a field.

There’s one hard line in that loop, and it was paid for the hard way. Mad cow disease spread through the UK cattle industry because rendered cattle protein — meat-and-bone meal made from other cattle — was fed back to living cattle, tissue straight back into the same species.³ The plant step is what makes a loop safe. Waste goes to plants, plants go to animals. Break it down to elements and build it back up. Skip the plants and you’re asking for something you can’t fix.

So here’s what I’d put on the list. Every habitat needs a bug budget. Not just how much air, how much water, how many calories — how much living biological workforce, where does it live, what does it eat, and what happens the day somebody pours the wrong thing down a drain. Cleaning chemistry in a sealed can isn’t housekeeping. It’s life support.

My grandfather planted clover and chopped cabbage into a tank. He didn’t have the words for it. He just knew something was working down there and it needed feeding.

That’s the whole job, up there too.

Ideas in Star Bound are published open — take them, build them better. Our open proposal.

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A note on where this comes from. I am not a metallurgist, a spacecraft engineer, or a degreed engineer of any kind. But I am a practical one, with more than forty years in heavy industrial construction: welding, millwright work, hydraulics, mining, and thirty-three years of electrical construction and commissioning on the North Slope of Alaska, in a place that punishes anything built wrong. Much of that time I have worked as a field engineer, which means I am the one standing in front of the equipment when the drawing turns out to be wrong, and the fix has to be made on the spot, with what is on hand, and has to work the first time. Anyone who has done that long enough learns that a lot of engineering gets corrected in the field by people with more experience than the people who drew it. That is the eye I bring to these subjects: not what should work on paper, but what actually gets built, and what breaks. The facts I take from other people are footnoted so you can check them and read further. The ideas built on top of those facts are my own, and I would rather see them knocked down by somebody who knows better than left standing because nobody looked.

Sources

1. Washington State University Extension — a healthy septic tank already contains far more bacteria than any additive could add; the natural bacteria greatly exceed additive dosing, providing little if any benefit to wastewater breakdown — https://extension.wsu.edu/clark/wp-json/wp/v2/pages/16368 ↩
2. Nelson M. et al. (1999). “Bioregenerative recycling of wastewater in Biosphere 2 using a constructed wetland: 2-year results.” Ecological Engineering 13 — two-stage anaerobic tank and constructed-wetland system treating all human and domestic-animal wastewater at 240–290 gallons per day; 720 kg emergent plus 490 kg floating dry-weight vegetation harvested as fodder over the two-year closure — https://oldsite.ecotechnics.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/EcolEng1999B2wwsystemperformance.pdf ↩
3. CDC, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report — BSE (“mad cow disease”) amplified among cattle by feeding rendered, BSE-contaminated meat-and-bone meal back to cattle — https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5253a2.htm ↩