Bones contain a lot of phosphorus and the minable phosphate resources are dwindling rapidly.
My father and grandfather were mining engineers in the phosphate industry in Central Florida. Dad even consulted in Brazil and Peru to advise them on mining their phosphate. Now most of the known areas with phosphate are gone - turned into part of fertilizer mixes, distributed across fields and lawns, and washed into our waterways.
A couple of centuries ago mummies from Egypt were being ground up and spread on the fields of Europe - before people knew that part of the benefit was the phosphorus in their bones.
In the future phosphate will be very limited - and human bodies more valuable for the phosphorus they contain (among other things).
Phosphate: A Critical Resource Misused and Now Running Low
Phosphate has been essential to feeding the world since the Green Revolution, but its excessive use as a fertilizer has led to widespread pollution and eutrophication. Now, many of the world’s remaining reserves are starting to be depleted.
By Fred Pearce • July 7, 2011
If you wanted to really mess with the world’s food production, a good place to start would be Bou Craa, located in the desert miles from anywhere in the Western Sahara. They don’t grow much here, but Bou Craa is a mine containing one of the world’s largest reserves of phosphate rock. Most of us, most days, will eat some food grown on fields fertilized by phosphate rock from this mine. And there is no substitute.
<SNIP>
A century ago, much of the world’s internationally traded phosphate came from bones (a major English import at one time) and guano, excavated from Pacific islands where birds had been defecating phosphate for millions of years. But bones are not traded much any more, and most of the guano islands are now mined out. The island state of Nauru, for instance, is nothing more than a moonscape after decades of mining it to fertilize the grain fields of Australia.
<SNIP>
Phosphate strip mines are environment wreckers. They produce around 150 million tons of toxic spoil a year. Their massive draglines, huge slurry pipes, and mountainous spoil heaps dominate the landscape for tens of miles in key mining zones, whether in the North African desert or in Florida, a state that still provides three-quarters of American farmers’ phosphate needs.
The world’s largest mine is at Four Corners in an area known as Bone Valley in central Florida. The Four Corners mine covers 58,000 acres, an area five times the size of Manhattan. It is owned by Mosaic, a company recently spun off from agribusiness giant Cargill. Next door is the world’s second-largest mine, South Fort Meade. But South Fort Meade is living on borrowed time — its expansion plans are being opposed by local groups, and unless it can expand, the mine will have to close.
More:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/phosphate_a_critical_resource_misused_and_now_running_out
My grandfather was a mining engineer at a Swift & Company mine in Bone Valley. His name is one of those on the patent for the process to remove the phosphate from the matrix. When Swift had mined all the phosphate around their company town, Agricola, they sold all the buildings in the town and mined where it stood. Now Agricola is not even a ghost mine, it is a name on a road that goes past mined out pits.
= new reply since forum marked as read
