The house I grew up in was built in about 1879. We didn’t have central heat or air. We had a floor furnace downstairs and trust me, that heat didn’t make it upstairs to the bedrooms. Summers were HOT, winters were COLD, and no way I could live like that now. We had a water well outside and we had a chicken coop. When we tore down the unused coop our garden was there and everything grew like crazy there. It was amazing. I can see how chicken poo could be a GREAT fertilizer. I have never seen such a shade of red as those tomatoes. You never forget home grown ripe tomatoes. Nothing else compares. You waited for your first BLT of the year, eagerly!!!!
Skillcult.com has some interesting historical documents, one of which compared the effects of charcoal vs manure in a spot where the manure had been piled several feet thick due to bad farming practices.
The observation was similar to what you describe, the spot with the manure was extremely fertile . . . for a while. But the loss of fertility could be observed year to year, until it was indistinguishable from the unfertilized soil.
But the part that was fascinating to me was that, on this same farm, there were several old charcoal-making pits where the small bits and fines had been left behind. Those not only showed fertility similar to the manure piles, they also kept their fertility even decades later! (https://skillcult.com/blog/2012/05/18/some-citations-on-biochar-in-europe-and-america-in-the-19th-century , the section titled “The Farmers’ cabinet, and American herd-book, Volume 11 1847”)
I’ve been working on better ways to make use of that information on my own farm. So far I’m only making tiny amounts of charcoal at a time, using crop waste. There isn’t enough firewood on my land to make it with wood. Charcoal has the added benefit of removing odors, so I started mixing it right in with the chicken bedding. We’ll see if it improves the soil as much as that article says it should, but even if all it does is control odors, I think it’s worth the effort. There’s a clear difference in the smell compared to before I started adding charcoal.
(The deodorizing effect also works if the animal eats the charcoal. I have a canister of food-grade charcoal powder that I bought. I mix a little now and then with the chicken feed, but my family has also started mixing a dash of it in with the cats’ food once a day. It’s amazing how much less stinky their litter boxes are when we do that! I’m surprised no company has tried marketing that, it seems like a lot of pet owners would love it if they could get pet treats that make the animal’s poop stink less!)