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.
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 :-)
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
>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:
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.
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).
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.
...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.
> 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.
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".
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).
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.