Funny how I forgot OUR bunnies AND our chooks when I thought about alternative fertilizer, probably because they are already my go to fertilizers.,
Pelleted chicken poop already seems to be the favorite fertilizer of small scale organic farmers.
Our society doesn't eat much rabbit, but that could change.
Rabbits can be sustained on things that chickens can't, like lawn cuttings, and the poop can be used as is.
Chickens can eat things I wouldn't feed to a rabbit,, literally rotten foods, knowing they can discern good from bad, but it's the way they shred biomass that makes them great at creating fertility.
The folks from Rich Earth pointed out the worst contaminants in municipal sludge don't actually come from humanure, but from industrial and commercial waste.
Essentially, chemical waste is contaminating our clean shit
Even when they spiked urine with pharmaceuticals, the amount taken up by crops was miniscule.
Ideally, we would bring back pail closets and nightmen to collect those honey buckets.
The Rochdale system was an organized enterprise with standardized pails, collection routes, and a dewatering system.
It was hard and dirty work, but so was refuse collection, and we have made that better just in the last 50 years.
The Goux system was similar,it even had adsorbent linings,made in a mold.
Systems like this were used into the 1930s in some places.
They came after the introduction of the flush toilet, in response to the resource demands that the water closet made.
A municipal sized honey bucket brigade would mean more vehicles on the road, but also, no need for black water sewers, and the poop would be free of industrial contaminants.
This could be a very hard sell overall for people used to pooping in clean water, but like a bus, it provides a universal benefit without adding a lot of complication.
It could go wherever the roads go and scale up or down quickly.
Services like this already exist for people who want to compost kitchen waste, but can't or don't want to do so themselves.
For communities addicted to flushing,I think adding twin vermicomposting chambers to conventional sewage could be the best way for most people in existing western homes to capture the nutrients in their humanure.
Each household would have control of their own inputs, which would reduce the likelihood of toxins being introduced.
Doesn't do anything for the water bill,but that's another concern.
