History

While there have been many advances in the field of agriculture, many of the modern techniques grow food that is less nutritious than food grown just 50 years ago. Today’s methods of growing crops use synthetic fertilizers, instead of organic, that deprive our plants of many essential nutrients. Learn more about the history of fish fertilizer.Organic fish fertilizer provides additional nutritional supplements, like the ones we get from vitamins, so your plants will be strong and vibrant. The ancient people of North America knew this secret, and they cultivated many types of fruits and vegetables long before any European influence. In fact, the use of fish fertilizer was traced to as far back as the Roman Empire.Native Americans showed the Pilgrims how to grow corn by planting a fish with each corn plant. The Mayans, Incas and Native Americans of the southwest all used fish to grow crops. Why? It’s not because they lacked our modern technology, it’s because they knew that fish provides many necessary nutrients – nutrients that plants don’t get from fertilizer that contains just nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. How healthy would you be if your diet consisted of just sugar and bread? Like you, plants need a broad spectrum of elements to grow strong and healthy, and fish fertilizer will provide those elements.

Organic Fish Fertilizer in Literature

In the textbook “America: Its People and Values”, by Leonard C. Wood, Ralph H. Gabriel and Edward L. Biller, the authors talk about colonial life. We particularly like this excerpt that explains Squanto’s role in teaching colonists how to plant corn:

“A friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists. He showed them how to plant corn and how to live on the edge of the wilderness… As cultivating maize was unfamiliar to the Pilgrims, they relied on advice from Squanto, who shared with them the secret of proper maize-planting technique – sticking the seed in the little heaps of dirt, accompanied by beans and squash that would later twine themselves up the tall stalks. And he told the Pilgrims to fertilize the soil by burying fish alongside the maize seed, a traditional native technique for producing bountiful harvest. Following this advice, the colonists grew so much maize that it became the centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving.”

Another example can be found in George Mourt’s “A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation at Plymouth in New England”:

“We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas and, according to the manner of Indians, we manured (fertilized) our ground with herrings, or rather shads, which we have in great abundance and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and barley indifferent good.”

Our final favorite example comes from “New England Canaan” by Thomas Morton:

“… set with these fish, every acre putting 1,000 of them and an acre thus dressed will produce and yield so much as 3 acres without fish…”

As you can see, fish fertilizer has been used for many centuries to grow bountiful crops. Try our organic fertilizers to do the same for your vegetables, fruits, lawn or flowers. Indian River Organics’ products, “Are great for everything that grows”!®