CAN HUMAN COMPOSTING SOIL GROW FOOD? THE ANSWER DEPENDS ON THE STATE.

The question follows every human composting story, usually with a shudder. Fourteen states have legalized natural organic reduction, and their laws do not agree on an answer. Maryland and Colorado bar the soil from food crops outright. Washington and New York have no such bar on the books.

First, the process. A body goes into a steel vessel with wood chips, alfalfa and straw, and microbes carry out the work. The vessel heats above 131 degrees Fahrenheit and holds it for days. That sustained heat kills pathogens and parasites and breaks down pharmaceuticals in the tissue, according to Recompose, the Seattle company that opened the first facility in 2020. Washington requires the finished soil to be tested for salmonella. That bacterium stands in for pathogens as a group: counting one common, well-studied organism is practical where hunting every pathogen separately is not, and if the sustained heat left none alive, organisms with less heat tolerance are presumed dead as well. Federal sewage-sludge rules use the same proxy testing.

A few conditions disqualify a body entirely. Recompose lists three: Ebola, prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob, and active tuberculosis. Monitoring falls to hospitals and medical examiners. The prion exclusion marks the limit of the process: prions are misfolded proteins, not living organisms, so the heat that kills bacteria does not reliably destroy them. Radiation treatment does not disqualify a body. The one radiation condition Recompose publishes involves seed implants, a prostate cancer treatment: the seeds must be removed and 30 days must pass before the body is eligible.

So is the soil safe on food? Washington State University composted six donated bodies in 2018 and met the federal pathogen-reduction standard, 131 degrees held for three consecutive days, in every trial, and cut one test pharmaceutical, diazepam, by 95 percent. Recompose's Seattle facility has operated since 2020. In that span no documented case of illness has been traced to human composting soil, and no scientist has testified to a mechanism of harm. Recompose's advisory scientist Lynne Carpenter-Boggs told California's Senate Health Committee in 2021 that the finished material is unrecognizable as human remains and can safely nourish plants and forests. Recompose's own guidance for families lists yards, flower gardens, trees and houseplants. Vegetables do not appear.

The laws go further than the guidance. Colorado, in its 2021 law, made it illegal to sell the soil or use it to grow food for human consumption, the first state to write the ban. Maryland copied both bars in 2024 and extended the food ban to animal consumption, pets included, in Health-General Section 5-514. The same two lines appear in an Illinois bill this year. When Worcester County, Maryland approved a farm application in August, the zoning board repeated the state ban as a condition of its own. Washington and New York did not write food bans at all; their laws treat the soil like cremated remains, usable with the property owner's permission.

Why ban it if the science does not demand one? The record shows precaution and politics, with no laboratory finding behind the ban. The formal opposition when California debated its bill came from the Catholic Church, which argued that transforming remains creates emotional distance from the dead. No public health agency testified that the soil on a food crop would make anyone sick. Legislatures drew the line where the public discomfort already sat, and the ban made the bills easier to pass.

That discomfort is not trivial, and it did not start here. Robert Jones, an 81-year-old tree farmer whose 191-acre property borders the Worcester site, told the zoning board he and his neighbor would be the guinea pigs. Cremation itself climbed from under 4 percent of American deaths in 1960 to 62.8 percent in 2025, per the Cremation Association of North America. Acceptance of a new way to handle the dead takes decades, and human composting laws are all younger than that curve.

“"Is it the same as what we do with cremated ashes, or are we looking at some different set of criteria and guidance?"”

What to watch: California must finish its regulations before licensing begins on January 1, 2027, the first statewide answer to the soil question since the wave of legalization began. Worcester County's lawsuit to revoke its own zoning approval will test whether counties can add restrictions states never wrote.

*Sources: Recompose eligibility and disease FAQs; Recompose state legal pages; Washington State University recomposition pilot study, 2018, published by Recompose; AAAS annual meeting briefing, February 2020; EPA 40 CFR Part 503 Appendix B; CalMatters, August 2021; Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, November 2022; Maryland Health-General Section 5-514; Colorado SB21-006; Worcester County Board of Zoning Appeals minutes and OC Today-Dispatch; Cremation Association of North America*