Discover how human urine could be the eco-friendly answer to sustainable agriculture, as revealed by a groundbreaking study. Explore the resilience of soil bacterial communities and the unique benefits of urine-based fertilizers.
Soil resilience, fertilizing with human urine
A study published today in Applied Soil Ecology, however, suggests that bacteria in soil are no less able to survive human urine than their modern-day analogs are when dosed with synthetic fertilizer. One of the major findings was that even at high doses a months to one-year urine storage may already have low impact on the soil pH and salinity, making this option a plausible agricultural fertilization practice.
Urine fertilization had a relative larger effect on the nitrifying and denitrifying groups, in comparison to synthetic fertilizers; this was demonstrated by its more direct influence—over the supply of N—as illustrated in the soil NO3 pool as well. Because this indicates into more nitrous oxides that could be emitted when urine is used as a ferry of nitrogen—as well as warrants a longer term study.
What I Learned After Pissing Into A Bottle & Fertilizing My Plants with It
Human urine, is 95% water, with the balance made up of amino compounds, organic anions and inorganic salts that are bio-available to plants as nutrients and trace elements. This has the potential to bring a lot of attention to the feasibility of recycling human urine as a fertilizer for crops.
However, until now, we lacked detailed knowledge of the potential changes in soil functions and microbial communities affected by urine. The purpose of the study was to close this knowledge gap by examining how a source-separated and stored human urine fertilization would affect a spinach crop compared with a synthetic fertilizer treatment or an un-fertilized control (water treatment without fertilization) under greenhouse conditions.
After 12 months of storage the researchers observed a vastly diminished microbiome in the urine, but no more than minor populations of pathogenic bacteria that were commonly strain-matched. The inactivation process which caused an increase on the urine pH and free ammonia concentration was deemed enough to render these samples safe for sanitary land spreading excepts as storage also broke down extracellular DNA, so it should be regard as a safer option to agricultural use.
Conclusion
The research shows for the first time that struvite recovered from urine via PHF processes is a safe and economically-viable option to replace synthetic fertilizers when applied with the co-conditioning biochar developed in previous study, demonstrating the value of recycling urine as fertilizer. The researchers showed that soil bacterial communities can be remarkably resilient and that urine-based fertilisers bring unmatched additional benefits-supporting a more sustainable agriculture future. Additional investigations examining the impacts of urine fertilization in the long term are essential for further development of this conclusion.
