[QUOTE=Mangetout]
I would imagine that grinding them up to a powder would be far more efficient than burying whole - I use fish, blood and bone meal on my vegetable garden - if I just buried whole dead animals and fish, some patches would be too putrid for anything to grow, plus I think more of the nutrients would tend to be lost by soaking away downwards that way. Finely ground dead people could be applied quite lightly to the top few inches of soil - and they’d go quite a long way.
But the lipids are not so good for that - so I think you’d have to render the corpses first - use the fats to provide or contribute to fuel for rendering the next batch, also to run the machinery that dessicates and pulverises the remains.
[/QUOTE]
Darling, might I suggest you take a gander at The Humanure Handbook?
It explains, in exhaustive detail, why we usually don’t use raw material for fertilizer, and how proper composting renders just about anything suitable for putting on crops.
Plus it’s a great read.
Anyway, the obvious answer to this question is to take the corpses and subject them to a well-managed composting process. Voila! Fertilizer.
From a practical standpoint, I love the idea of using the fertilizer for biodiesel crops. That eliminates a lot of the concerns about squickiness and disease. The process could be expanded so that it can process any and all animals, such as roadkill deer, euthanized animals, or all those damn Canada geese that poop all over everything. Hey, a girl can dream, right?