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.
Wouldn't a better solution be regulations so it doesn't matter who is growing the food?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Just depends on how much land you have and how much of your lawn you want to dig up :-)
Or maybe fifticon's pee comes out as quantized packets of a fixed size.
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
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.
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.
If you have a farm, cattle would probably produce much more though.
...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.
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.
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 :)
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".
> 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).
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...