FOURTEEN STATES LEGALIZED HUMAN COMPOSTING. THE SOIL HAS TO GO SOMEWHERE.

Fourteen states have legalized natural organic reduction, the process that converts a human body into roughly a cubic yard of soil. Families can take some of that soil home. What is left has to go somewhere, and this year two counties hit that question in different ways: Worcester County, Maryland, sued its own zoning board for approving a farm application, and Fresno County, California, ordered a nonprofit to stop spreading the material after nearly a year of deliveries.

Natural organic reduction is legal in Washington, Oregon, Colorado, California, Arizona, Nevada, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Maine, Georgia, and Minnesota, according to trackers maintained by Recompose and Earth Funeral. Washington legalized first, in 2019, and Maryland was ninth in 2024. New Jersey became the fourteenth this September.

Obitley examined what five of those laws say about the soil itself. Washington treats it the same as cremated remains: it may be placed or scattered with the property owner's permission, including in navigable waterways, per Recompose, which opened the first facility there in 2020. Colorado added NOR soil to an existing provision governing disposal of cremated remains, the legislature's own bill summary shows. Oregon's law does the same. California legalized the process in 2022, but licensing does not begin until 2027, and Fresno County officials told The Desert Sun the material cannot be treated as ordinary compost until then. Maryland's Chapter 600 of 2024 bars the soil from food crops and from sale but says nothing about field application, which is how the question reached Worcester County's Board of Zoning Appeals.

One body yields about one cubic yard of soil. Earth Funeral's Elkridge, Maryland facility is permitted for up to 2,000 remains a year, which is up to 2,000 cubic yards a year at capacity, before anything families take home. Worcester's Board of Zoning Appeals discussed application rates of 15 to 30 cubic yards per acre. At those rates one facility at capacity needs roughly 70 to 130 acres of application ground every year, acreage that must be found parcel by parcel.

Worcester County is the approval a county tried to take back. On August 13 the Board of Zoning Appeals voted 4-2 to let Earth Funeral spread soil on a roughly 14-acre farm near Snow Hill, with cover-crop and 50-foot setback conditions. On September 14 the county's own attorneys filed a one-page petition for judicial review to reverse the board. The special exception stands while the case proceeds, attorney Hugh Cropper told OC Today-Dispatch, and he does not expect a courtroom for six to nine months.

Fresno County, California, stopped a running operation. The San Joaquin River Parkway Trust, a nonprofit, bought the 76-acre Sumner Peck Ranch with state grant help, and for nearly a year it took deliveries of NOR soil from Earth Funeral, the same Seattle company as in the Worcester case. The material went onto wildflower fields, not cropland, and every load was tested, Executive Director Sharon Weaver told ABC30. In February the San Joaquin River Conservancy, whose grant helped fund the purchase, ordered the deliveries stopped and gave the trust 30 days to clear the site. Fresno County followed on March 4 with a cease-and-desist order of its own, saying the use violated state law, and the Earth Funeral partnership ended that week.

The objection was not only local. The Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians, a federally recognized tribe based in neighboring Madera County, called the river corridor part of the ancestral homeland of the Yokuts people in a March 5 statement, saying that spreading composted remains there is deeply disrespectful and citing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The Chukchansi are one band of the broader Yokuts people, and the tribe has no ownership stake in the ranch.

Weaver said the trust believed the process was unregulated in California, whose 2022 legalization does not take effect until 2027, and that it relied on Earth Funeral's assurances. The order required whatever remained on site to be removed by spring. No report says where the material went or whether any went back to Earth Funeral.

Cemeteries have faced the same pressure, and the failures were ugly. At Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, four workers dug up remains from about 300 graves to resell the plots; all four were convicted after the 2009 arrests. Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills, California, settled a lawsuit alleging roughly 25 years of making room for new graves by moving old remains; the settlement's total value exceeded $80 million. Both scandals grew from the same arithmetic: more demand than space.

Cremation solved the space problem by shrinking what had to be stored, from a burial plot to an urn, and it rose from below 4 percent of U.S. deaths in 1960 to 62.8 percent in 2025, per the Cremation Association of North America. Natural organic reduction makes the opposite trade. One body becomes a cubic yard of soil that has to go onto ground somebody controls. So far the question has produced two public fights: Worcester's courtroom battle and Fresno's shutdown order. Earth Funeral's tracker counts legalization bills pending in 15 more states.

“"There are bound to be these type of issues cropping up in several states as the state-by-state legalizations of Natural Organic Reduction and Alkaline Hydrolysis continue."”

What to watch: California's licensing rollout, which begins January 1, 2027 and will force the first statewide answer to the bulk-soil question, and the legal grounds Worcester County eventually files, which its one-page petition does not state.

*Sources: Recompose legal status page; Earth Funeral state tracker, updated September 30, 2026; Colorado General Assembly bill summary; The Desert Sun, March 7, 2026; ABC30; GV Wire, March 4, 2026; Funeral Director Daily, October 1, 2026; Cremation Association of North America Industry Statistics; NPR, July 2009; CBS Los Angeles, February 2014; Worcester County Board of Zoning Appeals minutes; OC Today-Dispatch*