Using manure for fertilizer in the future – it won’t be easy
Animals produce 44 times more manure than humans in the U.S.
Preface. At John Jeavons Biointensive workshop back in 2003, I learned that phosphorous is limited and mostly being lost to oceans and other waterways after exiting sewage treatment plants. He said it can be dangerous to use human manure without proper handling, and wasn’t going to cover this at the workshop, but to keep it in mind for the future.
Modern fertilizers made with the Nobel-prizing winning method of using natural gas as feedstock and energy source can increase crop production up to 5 times, but at a tremendous cost of poor soil health and pollution (see Peak soil). Fossil fuels will inevitably decline some day, and force us back to organic agriculture and using crop wastes, animal and human manure again.
Below are excerpts from three sources.
The first is about North Korea. Despite tremendous efforts to use all manure, this country is a barren, destroyed landscape that can grow little food, which McKenna describes here: Inside North Korea’s Environmental Collapse.
The second section describes what it was like to live over a century ago when human and animal manure was routinely collected.
The third Below is a NewScientist book review of The Wastewater Gardener: Preserving the planet, one flush at a time by Mark Nelson.
Park, Y. 2015. In order to live: A North Korean girl’s journey to freedom. Penguin.
“One of the big problems in North Korea was a fertilizer shortage. When the economy collapsed in the 1990s, the Soviet Union stopped sending fertilizer to us and our own factories stopped producing it. Whatever was donated from other countries couldn’t get to the farms because the transportation system had also broken down. this led to crop failures that made the famine even worse.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
