I grew up around manure. It was on my boots before school, it was in the garden every spring, and the smell of a cow barn in August is still one of those things that puts me right back in my father’s place. I helped him patch a shed wall with a dung and clay mix when I was ten, and I remember thinking it was the strangest thing, spreading cow patties on a building like frosting on a cake. That wall held up for another twenty years.
What I never understood is why manure barely comes up in prepper circles. Homesteaders get it. Anyone running animals knows the pile out back is doing half the work on the property. But in the broader survival conversation, people will talk for hours about water filters and ammo storage and never once mention the single most renewable resource sitting right behind the barn.
Last fall I drove out to my father’s old county to visit a few of the families still running small operations out there. I wanted to pick their brains on the things they were doing with manure that I’d never tried myself. What I came back with was a list long enough to fill this article twice over, and a real education in how much I’d been leaving on the table.
15. Build Your Own House
Cob construction, a mix of clay, sand, straw, and animal dung, has been used to build entire homes across West Africa, South Asia, the British Isles, and the American Southwest. Some of those structures are still standing after hundreds of years.
The dung works as both binder and fiber reinforcement. The digested plant material in cow manure holds clay together the way rebar holds concrete, preventing the shrinkage cracks that ruin a pure clay wall as it dries.
You mix roughly equal parts clay soil and manure with chopped straw and enough water to make a stiff dough, then pack it onto a stone or rubble foundation in courses about a foot high. Each course dries and hardens before you add the next one.
A wall built this way is load-bearing, naturally insulating, fireproof, and it breathes moisture instead of trapping it. You can shape window openings and door frames directly into the wall as you build. The finish coat is a finer plaster of the same materials, screeded smooth, and it takes a lime wash or natural pigment if you want color.
For a SHTF shelter, a foundation of stacked fieldstone, walls of cob, and a simple pole-and-thatch or salvaged metal roof gives you a weathertight building that holds heat in winter and stays cool in summer.
14. Your Manure Pile Can Run a Stove
One of the farmers I talked to on that trip had a 55-gallon drum behind his milking parlor that he called his gas station. He’d been cooking breakfast off cow manure for three years straight. The concept is biogas, which is methane produced by bacteria breaking down organic matter in a sealed, oxygen-free container. The process is called anaerobic digestion.
The gas burns the same way propane does. You can run it through a standard burner with a slightly wider orifice to account for the lower pressure. Two cows producing around 80 pounds of manure a day will generate enough biogas to cook two to three meals. Mixing in dried leaves or yard waste with the manure improves the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio inside the drum, which keeps the bacteria productive and boosts gas output. That’s real output from an input that shows up every morning whether you asked for it or not.
The biggest threat is cold weather. Methane production drops hard below 60°F because the bacteria slow down and eventually go dormant. If you’re north of Tennessee, you’ll want to bury the drum below frost line or insulate it heavily with straw bales and a tarp. Some builders run a small coil of the heated digestate back around the drum as a thermal loop to keep core temperature up through January.
Here’s how to make your own biofuel from manure and leaves, step-by-step:
The farmer I visited had his buried about four feet down with a straw-bale collar around the top. He said it slowed in December but never stopped. The whole setup cost him less than a weekend and some plumbing fittings, and he hadn’t bought a propane refill in three years.
13. Manure Tea Will Rescue Your Garden in Days
When a plant goes yellow in the middle of summer and there’s nothing on the shelf to buy, manure tea is the fastest correction you can make with what’s on hand.
Take a shovelful of aged manure (composted, not raw) and drop it into a five-gallon bucket of water. Let it steep for three to five days, stirring it once a day. Strain out the solids and dilute what’s left until it looks like weak tea. That liquid carries soluble nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus right to the root zone in hours instead of the weeks it takes for solid compost to break down in soil.
You can also aerate it by running an aquarium pump and airstone in the bucket during steeping. Aerated compost tea promotes beneficial microbial populations and reduces the risk of anaerobic bacteria that can harm roots. Apply it to the base of the plant, not the leaves, in the early morning or evening when the soil is cool. This is your field hospital for a struggling garden, and the materials are already sitting in your yard.
Of course, now if you don’t want to go through all of this work, you can make fertilizing tea for your plants out of leftovers. We are talking eggshells, banana peels, and a few other ingredients – if you go to this link, you will see the “secret” ingredients and also a full breakdown on how to make manure tea and how to use it.
12. When the Toilet Stops Flushing
As you already know, municipal water pressure depends on electric pumps. When the grid goes down, those pumps stop, and within a few days your toilet is a ceramic bowl full of disease. Cholera and dysentery have killed more people in historical collapses than gunfire, and it’s not close.
The fix is a dedicated composting toilet system, and you want it built and tested before the emergency. The core principle is carbon cover. Every deposit gets buried under a thick layer of dry material like sawdust, wood shavings, or shredded dry leaves.
This does three things:
- It blocks odor.
- It absorbs moisture.
- it creates the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio that drives hot composting.
But remember: human waste compost needs a full 12 months of undisturbed curing in a dedicated bin that’s separate from your garden compost. That duration at thermophilic temperatures (above 130°F in the core of a well-built pile) is what kills the pathogens that make human waste dangerous. You’ll want at least two bins working in rotation so one is always curing while the other receives.
11. Dried Dung Burns When the Firewood Runs Out
The entire American Plains got settled by families who had no firewood within a day’s ride. They did that by burning what is known as…buffalo chips. Settlers in Nebraska and Kansas wrote about it in letters home, usually noting with some surprise that the dried chips burned steady, produced good cooking heat, and didn’t stink.
If you want to make it your own, follow these steps:
- Flatten fresh cow or horse dung into patties about an inch thick
- Set them on a rack or lean them against a fence rail where air circulates, and let them dry for two to three weeks depending on humidity.
- Once they’re light and rigid, they’re ready to burn. They won’t match hardwood for BTUs, but they burn slow and even, which is what you want under a pot.
- Store them in any dry shelter and they’ll last indefinitely.
10. A Hotbed Keeps Greens Growing Through Winter
Fresh horse manure heats to 130°F or higher as it decomposes, and that heat lasts for weeks. Gardeners in France and England used this to grow lettuce and radishes through winter for centuries before electricity existed.
Dig a pit about three feet deep and the width of an old window frame. Pack two feet of fresh horse manure into the bottom, wet it down, and let it start heating. Once the core is hot (a compost thermometer is worth having), spread six inches of good soil on top and plant cold-hardy greens like spinach, mache, or arugula. Set the window sash over the frame.
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The glass traps solar gain during the day, and the manure provides bottom heat through the night. Vent the sash a crack on sunny afternoons so you don’t cook the seedlings. A well-built hotbed will produce fresh greens from November through March in most northern climates.
When the first charge of manure cools down after six to eight weeks, you can dig it out and repack with fresh material to extend the season further.
09. Compost Heat Will Warm Your Water
Jean Pain was a French forester who heated his home and his water using nothing but composting wood chips and manure through the 1970s and early 80s. His system worked because decomposition in a large enough mass produces sustained heat, and you can capture it with embedded tubing.
Coil several hundred feet of black polyethylene tubing through the core of a large compost pile (you need real mass here, at least four cubic yards) and connect both ends to a storage tank. As the pile heats, water circulating through the coil picks up thermal energy. You’re not getting scalding temperatures. You’re getting 100 to 120°F, which is bathing temperature and warm enough to take the edge off a cold morning.
The pile needs to be built with a good mix of carbon (wood chips, straw) and nitrogen (manure) to sustain heat for months. Turning it kills the temperature, so you build it right once and let it work. This isn’t theoretical. People are running these systems now in Vermont, Oregon, and British Columbia. The main cost is tubing and time.
08. Horse Manure Grows Mushrooms in The Dark
Button mushrooms have been grown on composted horse manure the 1600s. Mushrooms are one of the few calorie and protein sources you can produce in complete darkness, in a space that grows nothing else.
The substrate is horse manure composted for two to three weeks with gypsum and straw, then pasteurized at 140°F for a few hours to kill competing organisms. You spread it in trays, inoculate with spawn (grain colonized by mushroom mycelium), and hold it in a dark room at 55 to 65°F with high humidity. The first flush comes in about three weeks, and a single tray can produce multiple harvests over two months.
Oyster mushrooms are even more forgiving than buttons and will colonize manure-straw mixes with almost no preparation. If you have a root cellar or basement that stays cool and damp, you already have the growing space. The spawn is the one thing you’d need to source or learn to propagate before a long disruption.
07. Worm Beds Turn Droppings Into Castings and Protein
Red wiggler worms eat manure and produce castings, which are the most nutrient-dense natural soil amendment you can make at home. A worm bin under a rabbit hutch is the cleanest example of a closed loop. The droppings fall in, the worms process them, and you harvest the castings for your beds.
So, why red worms?
Red wigglers breed fast in good conditions. The surplus is fishing bait that never runs out, and it’s high-protein feed for chickens when the commercial ration is gone. Worm protein runs around 60% by dry weight, which is higher than soybean meal. A productive bin can yield several pounds of worms per month on top of steady castings output.
That’s why you should add red worms to your compost. It might seem strange, but there’s a reason this works better than other gardening tricks people swear by.
Keep the bin moist, shaded, and between 55 and 80°F. Feed it manure from herbivores only. Cow, horse, rabbit, and goat all work. Avoid poultry manure in worm bins because it’s too hot with nitrogen and will kill the colony if you add too much at once.
06. Dung Ash Makes Soap
Wood ash gets all the attention for lye-making, but dung ash carries potassium carbonate too. Burn dried dung chips to white ash, leach the ash through water (a bucket with holes in the bottom and a layer of straw works as a filter), and boil down the liquid to concentrate the alkali.
That alkali is what turns rendered fat into soap.
STOP THROWING AWAY YOUR WOOD ASH!
Do THIS instead!
05. Aged Compost as Trade Goods
In a long disruption, every garden becomes critical at the same time, and nobody can order fertilizer. Synthetic nitrogen is manufactured from natural gas at industrial plants. When those supply chains break, the only fertility source left is biological, and the people with livestock are the ones who have it.
Aged compost and rabbit manure were valuable trade goods for most of agricultural history. It was called brown gold before the Haber-Bosch process made cheap nitrogen in 1913. Whoever has the animals and the finished compost sets the price. Stockpiling a few cubic yards of cured compost in a covered bin is storing something with real barter weight that costs you nothing to produce.
04. Dried Dung Smoke Drives Off Mosquitoes
East African herders have burned dried cattle dung in smudge fires for generations to keep mosquitoes and biting flies off livestock and people.
The practice appears independently across pastoralist cultures in South Asia and South America. The smoke is thick, slow-burning, and persistent, which is exactly what you need to hold a perimeter around a sleeping area or animal pen.
Mosquito-borne illness escalates fast when medical care disappears. Malaria, dengue, West Nile, and Zika are all transmitted by species active in the continental US. A smudge pot made from a coffee can packed with dried dung chips, placed upwind of your sleeping area, is a simple and repeatable defense that doesn’t depend on DEET supplies running out.
03. Free Chicken Feed
Black soldier fly (BSF) larvae are roughly 40% protein and 30% fat. Chickens and ducks eat them the way kids eat candy. A BSF bin is a plastic container with drainage holes at the bottom and a ramp at one end. Adult flies lay eggs in the bin, the larvae feed on manure and food scraps, and when they mature, they crawl up the ramp and drop into a collection bucket.
This is the best method to keep your hens laying through a crisis. According to Alex Deacon, the farmer and DIY expert behind the famous 4ft Pocket Farm, commercial layer feed is mostly soybean meal and corn, both of which arrive by truck from somewhere else. BSF larvae replace the protein component with something your property produces on its own. The larvae also reduce your manure volume by about 50%, which means less to manage and less smell.
Click here to read more about Alex Deacon’s unhinged gardening methods!
When it comes to your safety, do not worry, because BSF are not houseflies. These instects don’t bite, they don’t carry disease, and they’re not attracted to your kitchen. They’re a warm-season insect, active from late spring through early fall in most of the US, so you’d harvest and dry surplus larvae for the cold months.
02. Manure Keeps Meat From Spoiling
When you’ve got fresh game or a butchered hog and no refrigeration, you have about 24 hours before that meat starts turning. Dried dung chips solve that problem. They burn low, slow, and smoky, which is exactly what cold-smoking needs.
You can run a simple smokehouse setup with a fire pit, a short trench, and a barrel or plywood box at the other end, and fuel the whole thing from your manure pile without touching your firewood supply. The smoke has a neutral, earthy quality that won’t overpower the meat the way a resinous softwood would.
This is a survival method. But it should be a last-resort smoking method, not your first pick. Right now, if you want to smoke your meat the best way, you use hickory, apple, or cherry wood like the Amish do.
And if you’ve ever tasted Amish smoked bacon or ham, you know it’s on a completely different level from anything you’ll pull out of a store-bought smoker. The wood selection is part of it, but it’s not the real reason their smoked meat tastes the way it does.
They do something during the curing process that most people outside the Amish community don’t know about. I spent a long time trying to figure out what that was, and I eventually found the secrets of the Amish smoking and curing method right here. No manure involved!
01. The Manure Pile That Armed a Revolution
Gunpowder needs potassium nitrate (saltpeter), and during the American Revolution the colonies had almost no natural deposits of it. The Continental Congress issued instructions for farmers to dig the nitrate-rich earth from under old manure piles and barn floors, because decomposing waste concentrates nitrate salts in the soil beneath it over time.
The same extraction happened again during the Civil War, when Confederate niter works pulled saltpeter from barn floors and limestone cave soils across the South.
That same chemistry, where waste becomes something useful because you set up the right conditions, it’s older than this country. And it works on more than manure piles.
I’ve been running a setup in my backyard for about a year now where the fish do the fertilizing and the plants do the filtering, and the whole thing sits in a space smaller than a parking spot. My neighbor thought I was nuts until he saw me pulling tomatoes out of it in January.
The guy who showed me how to build it explains the whole thing here – and honestly, if I’d known how much food you could pull from four feet of space with almost zero daily effort, I would’ve stopped arguing with my garden soil years ago.
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