Holy Shit, This Is Normal?

I’m in the early stages of opening a very small flower farm on my one-acre property in town. It’s not big. It’s just me, some beds, a greenhouse, seeds, and a lot of care. That’s actually how I ended up thinking about this at all.

I’ve been vegan for a while now, but I still think of myself as vegan curious. I keep stumbling into places where animals show up in systems I assumed were neutral. I recently wrote about things like sugar, gelatin, wine, beer, even McDonald’s fries. Things that look harmless until you look closer.

This one surprised me more. Maybe because this one really hit home.

If you garden or farm, you already know this: everything starts with soil. Soil is the base. It’s the foundation. You can have the best seeds in the world, but if the soil is wrong, nothing works. So when you care about growing good food or beautiful flowers, you start caring about soil in a serious way.

For me, this isn’t theoretical. A lot of what I grow is what I eat. Tomatoes, onions, garlic, peppers, greens, and beans. We grow most of our dried beans. This is the base of my diet. The base of my body. And all of it comes out of the soil. There’s a layering here I don’t think I had really sat with before.

I recently got excited about a seed-starting soil recipe from someone who is genuinely incredible at what she does. One of the best teachers out there. I couldn’t wait to try it. I watched the demo. Three sets of plants, all started at the same time. Plain mix. Mix plus fertilizer. Mix plus the full recipe.

The difference was shocking. Inches of growth. Stronger stems. Healthier plants. You couldn’t argue with the results.

Then the ingredients came up.

Bone meal. Kelp meal. Blood meal.

And I just stopped.

I don’t think I had ever really thought about what bone meal or blood meal actually are. Not concretely. So I looked it up. Blood meal is made by collecting blood from slaughterhouses, cooking it, drying it, and grinding it into a powder. That’s the process.

And once I understood that, I couldn’t un-understand it.

If you’re vegan, leather is obvious. Everyone knows where it comes from. If you need it, you buy it secondhand or you don’t buy it at all. That’s one of those well-established lines.

But seed-starting soil? You walk into a garden store, grab a bag that says “seed starting mix,” and don’t think twice. Why would you? It’s soil. It’s for plants. It feels neutral.

Except it isn’t.

You can be vegan, grow your own food, do everything “right,” and still be feeding animals to your plants without ever realizing it. That realization completely floored me.

I want to be very clear about something. This isn’t a bash. This isn’t an accusation. These products are everywhere. This is mainstream gardening and farming. This is how people have been taught. Most people never question it because there’s no reason to think you should.

And I also want to be clear that not all animal-related inputs feel the same to me.

There’s a difference between nutrients cycling through living systems and nutrients that only exist because animals were killed and processed. That distinction matters to me.

Bone meal and blood meal don’t come from animals living their lives. They come directly from slaughterhouses. That’s not a moral judgment. That’s just how they’re made.

Some people will say, at least everything is being used. I understand that argument. But for me, it assumes the killing is inevitable and necessary. And that’s the part I’m no longer comfortable accepting without question.

What keeps sticking with me is this: we know plants grow well in soil built from organic matter, time, microbes, and care. We see it every year. We work our beds gently. We broad fork to improve water and air movement. The worms show up. The soil structure improves. Things grow.

That process makes sense to me. It feels grounded. It feels sufficient.

So somewhere along the way, someone decided that wasn’t enough.

Somewhere, the idea crept in that to grow tomatoes and flowers and onions and beans, things humans have grown for an unfathomably long time, we needed to industrialize animal remains and import them as a standard input. That this was an improvement. That this was necessary.

I keep asking myself why.

We’re not trying to grow something unnatural. We’re not forcing an artificial system to keep something alive that otherwise couldn’t survive. We’re growing food. We’re growing flowers. The same things people have always grown, long before blood meal was bagged and branded.

The fact that this thinking is so ingrained is part of what unsettles me. It’s just accepted. It’s just what you do if you want “good” results. And once something becomes that normalized, we stop questioning whether it actually makes sense.

It doesn’t feel aligned to me. Not with how soil works. Not with how plants work. Not with how I want to grow things.

So my little farm isn’t going to use bone meal, blood meal, fish emulsion, or animal-derived fertilizers. Not because I’m trying to be perfect. Not because I think everyone should do what I do. Just because now that I see it, I can’t unsee it.

Veganism keeps doing this to me. It keeps leading me further upstream. First food. Then ingredients. Then systems. Now soil.

I’m still learning. I’m still curious. But I know this much: soil is the beginning of everything. And I want that beginning to feel aligned with the life I’m trying to live.