Why Vermont farmers are using urine on their crops | Hacker News Reader

Why Vermont farmers are using urine on their crops

bbc.com

118 pointsrmason122 comments

I'm always a little surprised at how surprised other people are when they hear this.

I've been peeing on our compost pile for years. We have a lot of carbons in the pile (mostly leaves) so adding the nitrogen helps it all break down faster. On my acre plot I've probably gotten three or four cubic yards of compost a year broken down with the help of pee.

Yes it's amusing when people aren't aware of the benefits. I, too, have been peeing on anticorporate's compost pile for two or three years.

I have been peeing on corporate for years, but I am very discrete about it, lest they find out it is me.

Too late, they already ran a DNA analysis on it and partnered with 23andMe, and because your cousin took a DNA ancestry test after receiving a kit as a present four years ago, corporate now knows it was you.

Jokes aside, part of my reduced reliance on corporations is growing as much of our food as we can ourselves.

What about the vast majority of people who live in the suburbs or cities?

Wouldn't a better solution be regulations so it doesn't matter who is growing the food?

It's not either/or. I also strongly support major changes to agricultural and food policy.

For what it's worth, my property is suburban. It's a post-war subdivision with rather large lots, we just choose to use most of ours productively. Food and timber for us, native plants for the critters, grass be damned. When we commuted, we lived in a denser area with better transit access, but neither my wife nor I have had a commute since before the pandemic.

> I also strongly support major changes to agricultural and food policy

Florida and Illinois, on complete opposite ends of the political spectrum, are the only two states with laws the explicitly prohibit towns and cities from preventing you from using your yard (front, back, side, whatever) as a vegetable garden. They allow for regulations about how big and where your greenhouses/hothouses could be, how much water you use, etc. But nothing that can defacto prohibit you from using your whole yard productively.

This is something that should be nationwide. In most places, growing crops in your front yard is either sort-of-tolerated-until-you-make-someone-mad or not at all allowed.

Sprouting is an excellent and compact way to get some fresh greens into your diet in a small space. No urine required (although I too do dump my urine on my farm hosts' compost). I live in a short school bus with less than 8sqm of space and do my sprouting in a small clear plastic tote. Every day I eat fresh sprouts, usually with something like wild-caught canned mackerel.

> What about the vast majority of people who live in the suburbs or cities?

Suburban houses usually have a garden around them, you can grow vegetables and stuff in/on top of those. Plant some fruit trees/bushes as well and you have a start :)

Cities are more difficult, unless you have access to a balcony/patio/roof. I know in some local neighborhoods, neighbors have gotten together to create little co-cops, and took over small unused plots and grow some stuff together there. Plots like these for example: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Carrer+del+Doctor+Trueta,+...

Sure, none of these will make you 100% independent when it comes to what you eat, but small differences can add up and also spread the knowledge/ambition for more people to do it.

1) I'm sitting on a quarter acre in the suburbs and we're slowly eliminating the lawn in favor of more food garden every year

2) Sure, but growing food is something I can do using only myself and the materials to hand without having to wait for the crippled and backward process of creating new regulations to sort itself out, growing food now helps mitigate the problem now while we push for new regulations and growing food does nothing to get in the way of new regulations and if the push for new regulations fails I still have a garden

One year I'll go this route.

Living in a city I can't really raise anything beyond herbs, however hunting once a year reduces my reliance on factory farming so much.

When I lived on a standard city lot in Minneapolis, I was growing corn (lost most of it to squirrels), tomatoes, carrots, horseradish (can't kill that stuff), squash and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember. And a "natural prairie" section of mostly native grasses and wildflowers.

Just depends on how much land you have and how much of your lawn you want to dig up :-)

nit: discreet

> nit discreet

Or maybe fifticon's pee comes out as quantized packets of a fixed size.

HN's comment section devolving into discussions about quantum-piss, I'm here for it :D

I pee on corporate as well, but I do so continuously instead of discretely. I'm peeing on corporate as I type this!

The plastic bamboo in the foyer grows like crazy.

What if peeing on them helps them though? Employee of the year!

> We have a lot of carbons in the pile (mostly leaves) so adding the nitrogen helps it all break down faster

I know that nitrogen/carbon ratio is being brought a lot in compost discussions, but AFAIK most of the time people bring that up they are actually talking about bringing water, not nitrogen, to their compost.

And regarding this particular comment of yours about “nitrogen helping it break down” I suspect this is another instance of it. Dry leaves aren't a favorable environment for fungi and bacteria to grow, so adding water will definitely speed up the process a lot, while I'm not convinced adding nitrogen would have any effect in that regard.

Peeing on a compost pile is still good because it ads nitrogen to the compost itself, part of which will end up in the plant you give it, but it's probably less effective at it than peeing on the plants directly, because some of it will evaporate over time.

> Dry leaves aren't a favorable environment for fungi and bacteria to grow, so adding water will definitely speed up the process a lot

Nor is an environment without sufficient nitrogen, IIRC, especially since dry leaves are really carbon-rich.

I'm guessing it would be easy for parent to test if it's the water, the nitrogen or both that helps the most. Science your way to an answer, as long as you're logging metrics should be easy enough :)

Since there were a couple of comments asking about water content, yes, we also keep our compost moist through adding water when needed (I also live in a rather moist region of the US). The previous owners of our property "gifted" us an above-ground pool that makes for a lousy swimming spot but a great water collection tank. We rarely have to use municipal water for anything garden-related.

No, nitrogen is very important. The carbon to nitrogen ratios is crucial for optimal composting.[1]

Yes, compost must be moist to decompose. And peeing on the compost adds required moisture and nitrogen.

Don't pee on your plants. It can chemically burn some of them. Not to mention peeing on your lettuce is just gross.

My compost is for dealing with kitchen waste: veggie and fruit scraps, coffee grounds etc. It it so nitrogen rich that I need to add leaves to it regularly to keep the C/N ratio where it needs to be or it goes "sour".

[1] https://compost.css.cornell.edu/chemistry.html

I pee on my compost and I don't see any difference to the speed of composting between a good rain vs a gallon of pee.

Nitrogen is important, but you're misunderstanding the table you link to: unless you're composting saw dust, paper or pure bark, you're not going to need to add nitrogen to have a well-functioning compost.

> Don't pee on your plants. It can chemically burn some of them. Not to mention peeing on your lettuce is just gross.

Come on, I'm obviously not advising peeing on the leaves directly, but you shouldn't water the leaves directly either.

> My compost is for dealing with kitchen waste: veggie and fruit scraps, coffee grounds etc. It it so nitrogen rich that I need to add leaves to it regularly to keep the C/N ratio where it needs to be or it goes "sour".

And this is exactly why I say people obsess with C/N ratio too much when 90% of the issues people face is caused by a poor water/Oxygen ratio instead, compost “going sour” is almost always due lack of oxygen (which is very common when you put stuff that's very moist and you don't shuffle your compost often enough). Adding leaves is indeed a good solution to this problem, but as it's not carbon-related it can be solved by other means (just by oxygenating the compost).

Did not realize this. I will have to try it!

Late at night of course, my compost pile is by the road.

Anyone know if exposing yourself on your own property is considered public indecency? Asking for a friend.

Pee in a cup or jug at home and take it outside.

I tend to relieve myself into a watering can in the privacy of the shed.

Isn't that what pisspans are for? You don't do it out in the open.

If you have a farm, cattle would probably produce much more though.

I believe that there are barn designs that capture urine.

As far as I've seen that's just normal barn design. Cows relieve themselves (both ways) into a gutter that runs behind their stalls, and then when you clean the gutters it all gets spread onto the field.

Or they stand on grating and it falls down there.

...this had led to a number of accidents, the latest I recall was where the floor collapsed and dozens of cows ended up in the cesspit below. Others involve people falling in and dying from the fumes.

There will be a few things you’ll want to do to minimize nitrogen loss. As soon as it’s out, it going to start turning into ammonia and as a gas, it will escape. (The ammonia itself has useful properties, and it’s why urine has been used for all sorts of processes in history(. Making the ‘outputs’ fairly acidic or basic will help keep the nitrogen from leaving in that way. Add vinegar so that the low pH will reduce the bacterial activity that creates the ammonia. Add wood ash to create a very basic environment (high pH) (you should actually get ammonium as a precipitate). Vinegar should also help reduce smells. You might wanna store it for a bit before depositing. (Unless you’re doing the direct deposit method).

Are you saying to add vinegar to the urine and then wood ash to the urine?

Sorry! Those were the two separate options: either high pH or low pH. Adding vinegar is prob easiest and it’s what Rich Tree does.

I've heard mixed things. Most folks recommend keeping human + pet waste out of compost. It depends on how hot your pile is and how quickly you move it into your garden.

I believe that's referring to feces, not urine.

Most household (cat, dog, and human) feces is full of meat which draws the wrong kind of insects to the pile.

Urine though is okay and, arguably, beneficial to breaking down compost.

The only hard part is figuring out how to wave at your neighbors while fertilizing your compost heap. Do you wave with your off-hand or hot-swap as necessary? Decisions decisions...

The only neighbors in eyeshot of my compost pile are the ducks, and I don't think they really mind.

I think people would be even more surprised to learn how common it is to use processed sewage for fertilizer. Human waste.

In California, 76% of processed sewage goes to farming. 86% in Colorado.

https://investigatemidwest.org/2024/08/07/fertilizer-from-hu...

And its not just the US https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/02/sewage-s...

>Spreading the sludge on farmland is banned in the Netherlands, where incineration is preferred, but allowed in the UK. Dutch water authorities are eyeing the UK as a possible destination for their sewage

In some places in the US the use of sewage sludge to fertilize farm land is turning into a shit show of epic proportions (sorry couldn't resist ;-) due to severe PFAS contamination:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/27/climate/epa-pfas-fertiliz...

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/pfas-in-fertilisers-blam...

I have to say I'm kind of happy were not doing this in the Netherlands, because PFAS are a horrible class of chemicals that are causing all sorts of issues in nature as well as human health (obviously the two are intricately linked). I'm kind of ashamed to hear that the Netherlands are trying to get rid of their sewage in the UK though...

Edit: Upon reading the investigatemidwest.org article I see that it's about the exact same subject, apologies if my reply is perceived as noise.

Favorite part of my morning - like food waste I compost, why would I pay to use water to send back all of my urine nutrients back to my local water municipality?

I feel the same way about our green waste, it's at least 5 full bins a year with the seasonal trimming / garden cleanup, leaf collections and kitchen scraps. I mean we only have a small garden but it still feels like we're donating it to someone else. Same with paper and nowadays plastics / recyclables. I want to say they can have the value of it because they come and collect it regularly, but we pay county taxes for that too.

Zero mention of the problem of hormones (contraception), antibiotics, and a lot of random things coming with human urine. It's very hard to get rid of those, last time I checked the best way was to let it break over YEARS. This is not viable at large scale. (My family used to be farmers)

And note the animal waste from feedlots is quite toxic and yet it's being used at scale without proper processing in some unscrupulous corporate farms. Or they dump it in "swine lagoons".

Eh, uv diods? You lower them in, vibrate and rotate the material, degrade it? Standard processing step

Are those taken up by plants? I think there’s even some debate around the effects of using treated wood for raised vegetable gardens. Last when I looked into it, I think there was some elevated arsenic in plants and the advice was to plant a few inches away from the edges of the bed since the exposure drops off.

>I think there’s even some debate around the effects of using treated wood for raised vegetable gardens

It's not a debate or the matter or health or organic wonks. "pressure treated wood" is treated with a compound of arsenic. Arsenic is quite toxic and readily leaches into the ground and your garden. Like you really shouldn't touch pressure treated wood, you should wear gloves and wash your hands after. It is banned in the US for construction of residential things which come into contact with humans and totally banned in several countries.

Leave pressure treated wood away from your food... a few inches planting away from it isn't enough.

> "pressure treated wood" is treated with a compound of arsenic.

It depends--I am assuming you're referring to chromated copper arsenate [0] (CCA), which has been widely phased out in favor of other treatments, like copper azole [1].

I wouldn't go and build a raised garden bed out of copper azole treated wood either, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the leached copper etc. is quite a bit safer than CCA.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromated_copper_arsenate

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_preservation#Copper_azole

CCA is restricted in some residential applications, but it is still very much for sale for industrial and some structural uses. Most pressure treated you will find won't have it any more, but not all.

https://www.menards.com/main/find.html?find=CCA+treated.&ski...

Chromated arsenic treatment was banned in pressure treated wood in 2003. Pressure treatment with less toxic chemicals is not banned.

https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/over...

You can still buy it, you're just not supposed to use CCA treated wood for a list of residential uses.

https://richearthinstitute.org/how-it-works/

There is a treatment section on their website. They list details about pharmaceuticals in their guide as well.

https://richearthinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Ur...

>While there are some pharmaceutical compounds detectable in crop tissue, the levels are extremely small–in the nanogram per gram (or parts per billion) range

I was somewhat skeptical about this given all the headline I've seen about birth control causing hormones to be in the water supply, but it checks out.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20977246/

>This paper reviews the literature regarding various sources of estrogens, in surface, source and drinking water, with an emphasis on the active molecule that comes from OCs. It includes discussion of the various agricultural, industrial, and municipal sources and outlines the contributions of estrogenic chemicals to the estrogenicity of waterways and estimates that the risk of exposure to synthetic estrogens in drinking water on human health is negligible

see also:

PFAS in [sewage sludge] blamed for killing livestock in Texas and wreaking havoc

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43245674

> Zero mention of the problem of hormones

This isn't true.

TFA links to a page that points out hormone uptake wasn't found in plant tissue and that the uptake of drugs like caffeine and tylenol are at tiny fractions of a minimum effective dose.

For caffeine this should be somewhat expected - it's a chemical produced as an insecticide by at least 3 or four completely unrelated families of plants.

I doubt it's a major issue, but some chemicals will build up over time if I recall correctly and should be removed from the cycle altogether, if possible.

But I also like to think (and this is all unscientific gut feeling) that processing it in compost and exposing it to the elements and UV sunlight helps break down everything. Entropy, or my probable misunderstanding thereof.

The headline should specify _human_ urine. Spreading animal urine on crops is of course standard practice everywhere.

I recall visiting an experimental green technology farm in Wales back in about 1997. One of the things they were doing was composting leftover cardboard by peeing on it and waiting for it to breakdown. They also had a nifty water driven lift, and a big display about tidal power. I wish I could remember where exactly that place was.

Probably this place: https://cat.org.uk - Llwyngwern Quarry, Machynlleth, Powys, SY20 9AZ

The NitroVolt concept looks interesting it uses less energy than Haber-Bosch process but it's only for nitrogen not phosphorus.

If you grow anything or even lawn care you know anything with phosphorus is very expensive usually double the cost of just nitrogen.

https://www.nitrovolt.com/

They're not the only ones on that track:

https://tsubame-bhb.co.jp/en/

But I do think the name NitroVolt is a little unfortunate because there is also a much more speculative (TRL 3) methodology in development which dispenses with fuel altogether to perform the reaction:

N2 + 12 OH- >> 2 NO3- + 6 H2O + 10 e-

...effectively producing nitrate directly from nitrogen with electricity. So I clicked expecting to see that, but it's still years to decades away.

Any links to the research here?

No healthy lawn needs Nitrogen or Phosphorus! People just think drug addicted monocultres are beautiful, change attitudes and the world will be better off. There are suburban lots using as much fertilizer as an entire field on a farm.

A healthy lawn will have plenty of clover and other plants to fix nitrogen. People call those plants weeds, but they are not and we need to quit killing them. Rabbits peeing on your lawn will add nitrogen as well.

Phosphorus is a mineral and shouldn't be going anywhere. The plants take it in, then they die and it goes right back into the soil. If you have a new house you might need some initial phosphorus treatments because developments often destroy the soil, but after a few years there will be plenty.

Gardens are different. When you remove anything to eat it you take some phosphorus (and other minerals) away. If you are not returning your poop to the soil those minerals are gone. (returning poop if not done right can kill - there is good reason we have modern sanitation systems to remove human waste!) Nitrogen fixers can compete with your food plants and reduce yields by enough that you are often better off removing them from your garden and getting nitrogen otherwise. A lawn is not a garden.

The emphasis on containerization and strictly using green energy makes me skeptical about the underlying technology…

If this “lithium-mediated ammonia synthesis reactor” is really so much more efficient, surely incumbent nitrogen plants would be camping on the sidewalk to be first in line?

Maybe it’s different elsewhere, but here farmers don’t use daily applications of small amounts of pure ammonia, they get an armada of co-op spreaders to deliver and apply dozens-hundreds of tons of dry blend in one big shot and then do nothing for months. There’s a reason production is so concentrated, and it’s not because farmers haven’t realized air is the main ingredient.

From what I can tell, the efficiency comes from logistics and not the cost. Those large plants are cheaper to run, but then you need to get that ammonia from the factory to the field. Ammonia is very toxic (your household Ammonia CONCENTRATE is 99% water! we are talking 100% ammonia here). Your truck drivers need special training to haul it, they cannot drive on some roads (tunnels). Farmers - the least safety conscience group I know of - wear gas masks and protective clothing when they work with it (they will drink roundup on a dare). Everyone in the chain of handling it needs extra safety effort.

This thing is instead a box you put on the farm which means much less handling of it. It also means you can plan to have it on time (fertilizer shipments are sometimes late - when you apply notrogen matters). In short this can be more expensive than traditional processes, but has enough other benefits that people will be willing to pay that difference (after talking to their accountant).

so, we’re observing the same things, but drawing opposite conclusions.

A box on a farm means much MORE handling of it, no? Currently no farmer I’ve met has ever handled pure ammonia, only UAN or nitrate/other dry solids. And like you said, they’d rather not. (although I also don’t know any who would drink glyphosates with how quickly they eat sprayers)

How does a box help with timing? Each farm must either store enough on site for an entire application (which farmers could already do if that was worth the cost) as it’s slowly generated, or they’re constrained by daily output of the box. Late shipments are bad, but a renewable only box running out on a cloudy week? No angry phone call to the coop fixes this.

Spreading the cost to centrally produce and store lots over many farms/industries seems optimal when one needs infrequent but huge quantities of anything.

A box on the farm means a little more handling on the farm, but nobody else has to handle it.

The farmers I know of work with "anhydrous". Urea and other solid forms are used too, but anhydrous is very common.

AFAIK this box isn't available to anyone yet. Farmers are interested, but only if it really helps. If it is less predictable than ordering and hoping it arrives on time (every once in a while you order something for delivery on some date and you don't get it then with nothing you can do even though the date is the date you need it) they don't want it. If it is more predictable because they can turn it on and be assured that there will be what they need on some day (despite clouds - which over a few months is predictable enough) they want it.

(I don't think many farmers have drunk glyphosates, but they would on the right bet and the SDS says it is safe enough to take a sip. Though the other additives might not be safe).

Anhydrous isn't common here, so the only way I've seen it applied is with shanks that cut everything up to inject high rates maybe not even annually.

So how would farmers familiar with anhydrous use "A box that makes 330lbs of ammonia a day"? Treat an acre a day? Apply a 1/300th rate and do 300 applications a year? Maintain a high-pressure 100,000lb tank of ammonia slowly being drip-filled until they need it all in fall? Buy 50 sea-cans and leave them shut off for 51 weeks a year?

I believe shanks are the only way to apply anhydrous. You need to get it into the soil or it will evaporate and do no good.

Your question paragraph is full of great questions that I don't think anyone has figured out. These things are still very new, farmers are interested because they have the potential to be better than what they are doing now. However it is all potential and how it works in the real world remains to be seen.

If anyone knows people in this project, here is another project that goes hand in hand with this. Please forward them this, I think these could be a fixture in the cities if the farmers are willing to collect the urine. it's the dutch portable urinals. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portable-toilet-Neth... These can be bought from alibaba.

I grew up being taught to urinate on our rhubarb patches.

I did a test with urine comparing it to other fertilizers a few years ago when I grew medical marijuana. Diluted about 1:10 it was pretty great. A little less growth than regular complete fertilizers but still quite good. I was surprised, I thought the sodium would be too high.

Storing urine is about as ghastly as you might imagine and smells almost exactly like a bad truck stop bathroom.

Here's a relevant Cody's Lab video about the process of converting urea to nitrate to make the nitrogen more bioavailable:

https://youtu.be/fhYW0QVS408?si=6sEtuWLEBSFfEk2f

I'm pretty sure most of the crops in the US are regularly sprayed in urine and shit. Many of the immigrant workers used on farms are treated like slaves, locked up when they aren't in the fields or kept in overcrowded housing without basic utilities. These workers aren't getting bathroom breaks.

Even on farms that don't treat their workers so poorly they aren't installing bathrooms in the middle of the fields they truck workers out to, or ferrying them back and forth all day either. Workers couldn't afford take the time to run off to the bathroom even if they had the option. They have quotas to meet and are paid by how much they get done in a day. They're not walking off the job site to use the bathroom. They'll just piss/shit on your veggies and smile to themselves as they think about Americans who don't wash their produce.

Pissing or shitting on plants has positive effects if those people have a proper food, hydration, no drugs

> Many of the immigrant workers used on farms are treated like slaves, locked up when they aren't in the fields or kept in overcrowded housing without basic utilities.

While conditions aren't what most people consider comfortable, this is at best a major exaggeration. No, there aren't portable toilets out there (some farms do have them) - we'd go off to the side of the field, do our business, and get back to work. No one actively relieved themselves on any product. Most of us kept a damp towel around our necks for cleaning and heat relief, so that's what we would use. Every farm I worked on that supplied to grocers or sold independently had a washing/sanitizing system as part of the operation. So while it's not operating room clean, it's pretty damn clean by the time it got to the consumer. Also, all the mistreatment of migrant workers I experienced was only ever by other migrant workers.

Not all workers are treated that way, but many are. If you were working illegally in the US it sounds like you were lucky.

It's been a huge problem in Florida: https://ciw-online.org/slavery/

The same story plays out all over the place.

Here it happened in Georgia: https://apnews.com/article/business-georgia-slavery-forced-l...

Here in Colorado: https://www.denverpost.com/2024/11/01/h2a-visas-workers-traf...

It's not even just limited to farms.

These guys were kept locked up at night and only let out to build luxury condos: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/slavery-towers-feds-sa...

This Texas lady forced them to work for her cleaning company: https://kfor.com/news/texas-woman-convicted-of-forcing-two-u...

This landscaping company in Tennessee did it: https://www.foxnews.com/world/tennessee-landscaping-business...

This lady in Illinois just wanted house slaves: https://www.foxnews.com/us/mexican-migrant-trafficking-woman...

I did realize something interesting when there and it speaks to my previous point: most of the abuse was amongst the workers themselves. A lot of times a farmer/producer will hire "a guy" to do a job, one that acts as a contractor. Almost all the time they were migrants. Most times they were legal, but sometimes not. It was up to them to do the actual resourcing - the farmer/producer has no time for that. It would be that contracted resource doing most of the maltreatment/underpaying/mismanagement, and they would almost always treat the entire group badly. I was lucky in that I was there as a family member to the farmer just trying to make summer cash.

You're never going to not have some population of people with influence and resources attempt to take advantage of people without those things - that is a story that's as old as time. But statistically these that you have listed are all one-offs - that doesn't mean that we shouldn't care - but it does mean that the tone of your first post is very much over-stated.

This isn't even remotely true. Portable bathrooms are required in produce fields during cultivation and harvest, with hand wash stations and this is inspected. Food safety is a big concern at this point and that goes right down the field level (there could be room for improvements).

https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/dosh_publications/Field-Sanitati...

https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19...

Also you present below one off cases of human trafficking (some not even in agriculture) but these are rare cases and is not "Many" or "Most" by any stretch of imagination for immigrant farm labors.

That's not to say it's a great easy life nor a way to get fabulously wealthy or anything.

Source: I worked in produce with immigrant laborers on 4 different farms.

Pecunia non olet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet

Transmissible prion diseases might become an issue. Prions do not compost and they are very difficult to inactivate (denaturing the misfolded protein is the only way)

My grand parents garden always smelled like waste because they fertized from the septic tank. Juicy tomatoes though.

I've been playing Kingdom Come 1 & 2 and I'm 99% confident that all the houses there smell like that. Open compost / waste heaps everywhere, some with a plank or stool to uh. make stool on.

same climes, different times

>A Salpetersjudare collected urine soaked earth to assist with the production of saltpeter.

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Sweden_Occupation:_Salt...

Urine and poop have been known as great fertilizers for longer than recorded history. However be careful about trying this for yourself. These are both toxic wastes and if not handled correctly can kill you. Urine isn't too bad in amounts you are likely to deal with in a garden. Poop provides are lot more benefit than Urine in the garden - but tiny amounts not handled correct can kill.

I do not know all the factors in play. If you are considering this instead of commercial fertilizer for your garden then you need to do real research (not youtube research - read real academic papers)

I'm curious how poop is so deadly.

Bacteria, parasites and other nasty things live in it.

I'm being vague because if you need a more detailed answer you really need to break open academic papers and spend years reading them, not try to figure things our from a discussion forum. (I only need the discussion forum version so I don't know more than the above)

You know how there’s periodically a recall of green onions or lettuce due to e.coli contamination? That is because farms in the desert irrigate the plants with water contaminated with cow or pig feces.

[warning - skip reading this comment if you don't want to be reminded how raw produce may get to your tabletop]

see https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/New-focus-on-field-s...

If there are humans picking the crops, and if their hygiene is lax, then there might be some contamination via a human vector.

"I know a guy" who went to tour a lettuce farm at harvest. He had to wear special booties, gloves, and a hair net. The farmers proudly showed how the lettuce was picked and immediately (no wash step!) wrapped in plastic so that no contamination could happen. Then he looked up and say birds flying overhead and as bird do pooping in mid flight.

Wash your lettuce.

i don't think you can store lettuce after washing. it would get soggy. you can rinse it. like rain. but that's about it. so this is not surprising.

Human urine - yes good source of nitrates, although it will kill plants if undiluted (too much of a good thing...) . Human poop NO! it should NEVER be used as fertilizer. Typical human diet makes it pretty worthless as fertilizer, and pathogens make it a really dumb thing to do. Poop from grazing animals isn't the same stuff as human poop, which is where i think people get mixed up.

This is highly misinformed. There are strict processing requirements, but it is safe and legally permitted in many specific contexts. This page lists some of the processing techniques and statutory requirements:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composting_toilet