Humanure Composting
[Thanks to T Millions who wrote to us asking for more commentary on vermicomposting, particularly as applied to humanure and local “health security”]
It might be the ultimate kapu. After all, everything from child molestation to necrophilia to bestiality to gang rape is now routine fare in online porn, and anyone who’s genuinely upset by that may commonly be mocked as an old-fashioned “prude”; but most Americans are still deeply shocked/upset by the idea of a composting toilet. In many municipalities you can’t get a permit for one — i.e. it’s illegal to operate one. In other countries however, such as forward-looking Sweden, the popular composting toilet called “Biolet” is being adopted by entire small towns/villages.
The association between flush toilets and Modernity, Sanitation, and Progress (not to mention class and race superiority) is very strong in Gringolandia. The “outhouse” and other non-flushing toilet concepts are a mark of the despised rural life for which urbanites often have a cringeing biophobic contempt (ironically, but perhaps inevitably, coexisting with a saccharine faux-nostalgia expressed in kitsch art); and they are a mark of third world poverty and “primitive” conditions. Flush toilets are right up there with SUVs on the list of “things those goddamn Greenies want to pry from our cold, dead hands” in the fulminations of online anti-environmentalist or cornucopian cranks. It is an outrage — nearly a heresy — to suggest that the flush toilet might not be such a cool idea after all.
Even those whose biophobia can be somewhat separated from their class, race, and national ego-extensions often remain convinced that human waste [I’ll come back to that term later, to challenge it and the assumptions behind it] management is a highly technical problem which can only be solved by expert technomanagerial cadres and heavy technology — i.e. the way we’ve been doing it since the industrial revolution. Any less “scientific” and technocratic approach will, they fear, lead inevitably to outbreaks of cholera and parasitical infestation (conditions observed by Europeans among the poor of their own and other countries and “solved” by the introduction of centralised industrial sanitation). Basically, it’s caca and it’s dirty and we mustn’t touch it, that is a job for the Authorities; don’t try this at home, kids! Highly neurotoxic pesticides are available over the counter, for us to spray freely around our yards (and contaminate other people’s), cleaning supplies that mix into lethal chemical cocktails are readily purchasable without ID or age check, but we can’t be trusted to deal with our own — er — shit.
But what happens when the Authorities, and their centralised services, fail to meet the public’s needs? Many years ago there was a record winter storm in Santa Cruz County where I was living at the time; the power was out long enough that gravity-fed water supplies were exhausted, flooding had muddied and contaminated upstream reservoirs, and there was no rainwater catchment system in place. There was no power to pump cleaned water up to the city reservoir. A fairly big chunk of urban and suburban area was without water pressure for several days, and the most urgent aspect of this mini-crisis was “lack of sanitation” — i.e. flush toilets stopped working and there was no backup system. In a few more days, the city’s unflushed toilets would have presented an offensive smell and a potential sanitation crisis. The official response to this in larger-scale and longer-lasting disasters is to truck in “Portapotties” (basically, chemical outhouses with holding tanks, using various biocides to sterilise and perfumes to mask the smell of mixed sewage); but this again is dependent on clear roads, fuel for trucks, a supply of portapotties to bring in, the chemicals for the tanks, pumpout trucks to empty the tanks, and so on.
Centralised flush toilet systems are fragile, and this is perhaps the first and most obvious potential downside of our utter dependency on them for basic sanitation. In an epoch where we may confidently anticipate more extreme weather events — and where we are already experiencing the erosion of public services and the escalation of deferred maintenance costs in civic infrastructure — disruptions in centralised, fossil-fuel-powered civic water/sewage systems seem pretty much written into our immediate future. US bombing of centralised sewage treatment systems in Iraq greatly increased urban misery and inflicted disease on neighbourhoods with this kind of absolute dependency on a complex infrastructure; earlier, the blockade that visited collective punishment on Iraqis for over a decade prior to the most recent US invasion prohibited the import of chlorine and other chemicals on which the “modern” municipal water treatment regime is based, and this inflicted diseases (particularly in vulnerable children) and death on the civilian population. If all of Iraq had been equipped with composting toilets, the US might have found it harder to kill so many children with such deniability.
But vulnerability to terrorist attack (whether by the US, by other national bad actors, or by domestic insurgents) and to extreme weather is only one of the downsides of the flush toilet concept. At its heart, from 3000 BC on, the idea has been the perennial human wishful thinking of “send it elsewhere” or “sweep it under the rug”. To use fresh water to transport (flush away) human wastes to “somewhere else” implies (a) that you have an abundant supply of fresh water, (b) there is a “somewhere else” to dump them, and (c) that you don’t care about the impact on the “somewhere else,” or your population is small enough that the impact is slight and local biotic systems can absorb it. The subject seems to demand a certain crude bluntness of speech, so I’ll venture to suggest that this attitude may be summed up as “just shit in the river and the hell with anyone downstream” — once the shit has been carried away by the river, it’s not our problem.
In our increasingly crowded world — especially with massive urbanisation creating correspondingly massive concentrations of human wastes — we don’t have a “somewhere else” within easy pumping distance — there is always someone downstream. The enormous volume of human wastes produced by urban areas is such that it overwhelms the sink capacity even of large lakes and near-shore ocean waters; and the impacts on these waters are not minor and have other knock-on effects. Our traditional solution to this, predictably in our biophobic era, is to try to “kill the germs” in the waste stream by various means: this has often meant toxic chemicals, though more recently aeration and settling lagoons and wetlands are becoming popular, less-toxic alternatives. You can see from the Wiki page on sewage treatment how elaborate this process can get and how much infrastructure, how many electric pumps and motors and miles of pipe, are involved even in a semi-”natural” waste treatment process.
Dumping raw sewage into coastal or inland waters is disastrous, mostly due to the hypernutrient nature of the biotically rich waste stream which encourages massive algal blooms and hence anoxic post-bloom “dead zones”. [Here we should note that though raw sewage dumping contributes to these dead zones, the runoff of excess artificial fertilisers and pesticides from industrially-farmed land is currently believed to be the primary cause.] So what municipal waste treatment plants try to do is purify the waste stream — to make it safer to dump into coastal and inland waters. (We are still basically shitting in the river, just trying to do it more cleverly; and it’s a lot more work to “separate out the solids” after the waste stream has been diluted and mixed into runny sludge.). This requires — even without crude chemical biocides — significant energy investment; and in the process of transporting the waste stream to the energy-intensive treatment plant, we use up an enormous amount of a critical resource: fresh, potable water. But rather than go into a lengthy discourse on the dysfunctions and false economies of municipal waste management systems, I’ll recommend the entertaining and interesting Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins — for Anglophones, the Bible of humanure composting and the contrarian voice of record when it comes to the culture of the flush toilet. Jenkins covers the design and function of centralised municipal waste treatment systems, city plumbing, the pressurised water mains needed to supply urban/suburban toilets, etc. — and the huge costs in water wastage, energy consumption, and maintenance overhead needed to keep it all running. He offers solid scientific analysis of the pathogenic potential of human wastes, and a solid explanation of the role of thermophilic composting in rendering humanure wholly benign. The book is available for sale in paper form, and for free online in PDF form.
The fundamental (so to speak) error in the way we have thought about human wastes for a couple of centuries is to think of them as waste at all, i.e. as dross or discard, a substance with no value — or a substance with extreme negative value (dirty, pathogenic, icky). The collection of humanure and urine into centralised processing centres to be biocidally or biotically neutralised and then dumped into bodies of water means that we have interrupted the nutrient cycle, turned what should be a circular energy diagram into a linear one. Instead of returning the excess or byproduct of our metabolic function to the soil that produced the food we ate — as every other living creature on Earth does in a healthy biotic system — we have intervened; we “flush away” our own metabolic byproducts and (in modern times) dump them far, far from the fields which fed us. We thus impoverish the soil (by removing nutrients, minerals, elements which are not replaced), and increase the cost of agriculture by having to replace artificially the missing nutrients, etc. If a herd of antelope grazing on savannah were to club together to have their manure removed by train to the coast and dumped on a beach, it would be no more absurd. As with electric cars, we’re firmly attached to the notion that “emissions elsewhere” somehow solves the problem.
The good news is that much of this elaborate, overcapitalised, centralised, vulnerable infrastructure is not necessary; that the pathogenic potential in humanure, while genuine, doesn’t merit the near-superstitious dread that the biophobic culture has instilled in us; and that it’s quite possible to return human “wastes” — i.e. to stop wasting them — to local soil, without high risk of epidemics, chronic parasitic infestation, etc. The process, not surprisingly, involves composting. And the nutrient cycle can be closed — for those with a bit of garden to call their own — right in your own back yard.
Jenkins is very keen on thermophilic composting, and his Handbook dwells primarily on the construction of thermophilic compost piles for the breakdown of nitrogen-rich humanure mixed with high-carbon dry plant materials (like sawdust, finely crushed dry leaves and grass, etc). This is very do-able and many have succeeded, building very simple “sawdust loo” toilets (you really don’t need an elaborate industrially-fabricated loo like the Biolet, though they do offer convenience and a reassuringly toilet-like look and feel). However if your household is small, or you haven’t the affinity for thermophilic composting that some folks do, another very do-able option is vermicomposting of humanure.
Here I can speak from experience, because after reading Jenkins’ book I corresponded with him and others on his forum and for two years did a living experiment: I used exclusively a sawdust loo in my surburban home. (I guess I can safely confess to this heinous crime now, as I no longer live there and the compost piles are fully mature and wholly inoffensive; I terminated the experiment about 1 year before moving so as to be sure the new owner would not inherit any too-fresh composting humanure.)
Here’s how it worked for me — in a temperate central California climate, in a neighbourhood with very high density, very small back yards.
I used a standard 5 gal white plastic bucket with one of the (several are available) stock plastic “convert a bucket” seats for comfort (those bucket edges really are not meant for sitting!). I used various high-carbon “bedding” material for the bucket. Sawdust where I lived was ironically rather expensive; I used at various times peat moss (from this I desisted quickly after learning how unsustainably and destructively it is “mined” from peat bogs); recycled newsprint “small animal bedding” from a feed/seed store; and (most successfully!) compressed coir bricks (available from garden supply houses and by mail order). The coir bricks are, alas, not local (they come from the coconut industry in the S Hemi), but they are an ideal high-carbon, hydrophilic (they like to soak up water), odour-absorbing medium, and worms seem to like the texture and granularity of bricked coir.
I would put some water in the bottom of a clean bucket and drop a coir brick into it; over an hour or three it would swell up to several times its compressed size and I’d have a “sawdust bank” for use with the toilet, filled with slightly damp, soft, grainy coir (a bit like potting mix in texture). A different bucket would be the working toilet. I’d fill the bottom of the working toilet 2 inches or so deep with nice soft coir. It was now ready for use.
One of the biggest concerns people have about composting loos is the smell. Omigawd, they say (or think — I know I did), that must stink! But the folk memory of stinky outhouses, or stinky bathrooms with inadequate flush toilets, is based on a fundamental “user error”. Urine mixed with excrement stinks badly. Urine allowed to age/ferment stinks badly. But excrement separated from urine and covered with high-carbon “sawdust” or equivalent material, protected from air and bugs, doesn’t smell much at all, and urine separated from excrement and not allowed to ferment doesn’t smell much either. So, how to do the separation?
Well, the fancy purpose-made composting loos have molded features for separating the wee from the poo, but if you’re strictly DIY the options are a bit more crude and limited. I simply peed in a different container. This isn’t always possible (I don’t think I need to spell it out for anyone) but as long as you manage mostly not to pee in the sawdust loo, it should be OK. Urine can be disposed of several ways. Those with big gardens and good privacy from neighbours can simply pee out in the back yard — so long as you don’t pee in the same place every time, you won’t over-nitrogenate any one patch of soil, and your plants will thank you. Those with little privacy and/or small gardens will want to pee indoors into a container which can then be emptied outdoors; I found that a gallon jug and a funnel worked pretty well (this is easier for guys, but women can manage with — for example — the Lady J female urination aid). Here’s an important tip I learned somewhere online: if you’re storing the urine in a jug (capped, of course) for several days, add some sugar to the jug. I am not sure how this works, but it seems to discourage the anaerobic bacteria that cause the sulphurous stench of stale urine, and promote some other kind of bacteria that don’t smell nearly so bad.
I found that as a lone pee-er (working full time, I used “normal” toilets at work and peed at home only on my own time) I filled a gallon jug a week. On Saturday morning early, I would nonchalantly take my gallon jug and pour it in long lines along the flower beds around my yard, giving each plant a modest dose, never pouring it all out in one place (except occasionally down a gopher hole to discourage the little marauders!). There was a brief “urine smell” for a second or so after pouring, but as it sank into the ground the smell vanished instantly. And I have to say, my roses and other yard plantings seemed to do exceptionally well during the experiment!
So that leaves the poo bucket to manage. The routine with the poo bucket was simple; you sit down and relieve your bowels as you would on any flush toilet; when done, wipe and drop the TP in, then instead of flushing, scoop (with a scoop or bare hands) enough “bedding material” (sawdust, potting mix, recycled newsprint pet bedding, coir) to fully cover this most recent deposit (I rather liked thinking of it as a deposit in the nutrient bank for my garden). Fully covering it is important. This is what keeps the flies and bugs away, and keeps the smell down. Properly covered, no whiff of excrement in the bucket should be detectible without the nose being positioned within a foot or so of the rim. If you cover it conscientiously and consistently (just like a cat covering up its own poo), the raw humanure shouldn’t touch the bucket sides or bottom and the bucket stays pretty clean.
There’s a tendency over the course of a few deposits for the accumulating material to form an unstable mound — this presents a risk of fresh deposits slithering down the mound and sticking to the bucket sides, which I found unaesthetic (and annoying to clean up). One way to overcome this is to dump in extra bedding material around the sides to make it all level again. Another is to press down on the mound (yeah, I know, Eeee-yew! — but it’s all covered with nice clean coir or sawdust, or should be) to flatten it a bit, and also add a bit more bedding around the edges to preserve a flat surface.
At the end of the week you have a somewhat heavy bucket full of damp sawdust or coir and humanure. Now what???
Well, out in the back yard I built a contained compost heap or bin. This I made with hardware cloth sufficient to form a cylinder about 3 feet across, which was reinforced with wooden stakes hammered into the ground in a shady spot under a tree and in a fairly private location (as much as anywhere was private in my tiny back yard overlooked by two-storey neighbouring houses). It was right next to a fence line. The bottom of the cylinder I filled in with cut-up yard waste: leaves, twigs, chopped-up small branches, grass clippings, old vegetable plants, whatever — to a height of about 1 foot. This was to ensure drainage and oxygenation at the bottom of the pile. I also built up a “wall” or insulating layer around the edge of the bin on the inside, of more yard waste — long switches from my fruit tree curved and woven together like a sloppy basket, and vines and long, flexible weeds bent to match the curve. This layer was to prevent the migration of any raw humanure to the visible (and smellable) edge of the bin.
I then dumped in my first bucketload, and covered it up with more high-carbon dry materials. I tried various kinds — “found” oak leaves swept up from neighbours’ yards and crushed by tromping on them inside plastic bags, for example — but my favourite turned out to be cocoa hulls from the garden store. Again, not local, but they were a wonderful worm bedding and — this really tickled me — they smell like chocolate! I would then rinse out the bucket and set it in the sun to dry and be sterilised with UV. (The rinse water went onto the top of the pile to damp down the latest layer of bedding.) A second (third if you count the bucket for the coir) bucket would then be brought in to be the new “working loo” for the next week. Each loo bucket spent one week out in the sun, and one week in service.
At first I planned to emulate Jenkins and do thermophilic composting. But I just couldn’t get the thermo reaction going. Maybe 3 foot was too small a diameter, maybe I wasn’t getting the carbon/nitrogen balance right; but I just never got heat. So I did some more reading on composting and decided to try worms. I ordered a pound of red wrigglers (tiger worms or Eisenia fetida) and a pound of nightcrawlers from a vermiculturist, and when they arrived, eagerly dumped them into the bin and covered the whole shebang with a layer of damp bedding.
Days went by. I resisted the temptation to dig into the bin to see how my wrigglers were doing. I dumped the loo each Saturday and hoped that the worms would do their thing. Due to the nature of the bin, I wasn’t keen on digging into it to check 
But I dumped the buckets on one side of the bin, leaving the other side less “fresh”, and after a few weeks I dug into the lower, staler side just to see what was going on in there. I was very happy to see hordes of red wrigglers; the nightcrawlers, however, all absconded (over the next month I found one or two — at night — elsewhere in the yard, and later read that they have a reputation for escaping from worm bins that are not fully enclosed).
The weekly routine went on. After about a year, the first bin was getting kind of full and I built a second one. My plan was to allow the first bin to sit idle for a year (so as to be quite sure of the vermicomposting process and natural, low-temperature composting for reduction of any pathogens), while using the second one. This is a well-known “worm loo” technique — to have two bins, one ageing and one in current use.
So, at the end of year 2, I dug into the original bin. I was delighted by the result. What I found in there was nothing but fluffy, rich topsoil that smelled like the duff from a forest floor. Magic! During the entire experiment, the only moment when there was any offensive odour was the instant of dumping the bucket into the bin; and this smell vanished as soon as fresh cover material was sprinkled on top. My neighbour right across the fence — his back door only about 12 feet from my compost bins — never noticed a thing (I know because I asked him, solicitously, if he was being bothered at all by my compost pile, and he said he hadn’t ever smelled anything and didn’t know I had one).
The beautiful topsoil went onto my garden beds. And I could have kept this up indefinitely; but I was planning to move within a year and felt I should not bequeath to some unknown new owner a half-composted 3-foot-diameter bin of humanure so I suspended the experiment and allowed bin 2 to age away for a year into sweet, inoffensive topsoil; I used it meanwhile for a kitchen compost bin, since the worms are equally happy with any decaying matter.
If the municipal sewage treatment facility had broken down during my 2 year sawdust-loo experience, it would not have affected me. I did not flush my toilet for almost 2 years, except after cleaning (scale and mildew build up even when you don’t use the thing); a guest occasionally flushed it, but seldom. One interesting side effect of my sawdust-loo adventure was the nagging sense, whenever I used a “normal” flush toilet (at work, at a restaurant, at a friend’s house etc) of waste — that I was wasting fresh water, and wasting fertiliser; I felt a kind of annoyance that this valuable material which so intimately belonged to me was being flushed away where I could get no use out of it and where it might actually do harm (to the local ocean biome, etc). The weekly chore of loo-emptying was not particularly arduous, no more so than the rest of the gardening chores of the weekend.
I installed a composting toilet on my boat — a pricey commercial unit because it is the only one that is ‘Coast Guard Approved’ and hence protects one from harassment by the US Coasties. However it is not worm-based and requires electricity (a fan for dehydrating the humanure/carbon mix) and works best at warmer temperatures than one generally experiences on a boat in BC in the winter. I still have plans to modify it — give it its own individual solar panel to run the fan, and work out some kind of worm processing component — but I have no doubts, after my 2 year experiment in suburbia, that a composting loo is quite sanitary, inoffensive (particularly compared to any holding tank I’ve ever met on a boat!), and simple to manage.
One last note, which I think bears some careful thought, is that the excrement of a healthy person (not parasitised or diseased) does not present a high disease risk — if it did, parents would be dropping dead from handling their babies’ diapers and caca-smeared bums. The prevalence of infectious diseases and parasites associated with “poor sanitation” in scenarios of extreme poverty is not a simple “human shit is making them sick” story. Inadequate clean water for washing hands and bodies is part of the story; contamination of drinking water with excrement is part of the story; and malnutrition is a very big part of the story, often overlooked. Malnourished people are far less able to resist parasitisation and disease; healthy people might shrug off exposure to bacteria that will take down a person with a weakened metabolism (for example, small children can be killed or made seriously ill by “food poisoning” that would only give a healthy adult a bad tummyache). The question of public health in the Third World is far more complex than “they need modern flush toilets” — but that’s a topic for a different day.
Another related topic beyond the scope of this basic how-to primer is the role of pharmaceutical agents in rendering humanure genuinely unsafe to release into the biotic world; not only overuse of antibiotics, but massive doses of hormones, SSRIs, and a panoply of other high-tech meds are present in the urine and excrement of those who ingest them; and these chemicals migrate along with human “wastes” into our water systems. Fungi may be more effective than worms for the breakdown and neutralisation of these dangerous substances — at some point we (FS) will have to do a quick intro to the work of Stamets on “mycoremediation” of hazardous wastes and damaged ecosystems. Vermicomposting may not be adequate to render safe some of the artificial toxins in humanure such as pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals.
A more general topic, also beyond our scope here, is the nature of risk and risk assessment, i.e. what it means when something like a sawdust loo is perceived as insanely risky and dangerous to the body politic, but a nuclear plant is seen as safe and reasonable technology; when riding a bicycle is seen as dangerous and reckless, but driving an SUV is seen as safe and reasonable; when people who routinely eat food that has been sprayed with neurotoxins are convinced that organic produce is “dirty” and dangerous to eat; and so on. More is happening here than an objective assessment of risk: cultural values are being heavily encoded as risk perceptions.
Related keywords to Google for: Black Soldier Fly (Hermetia) Larvae as composting agents for manure management; worm toilet; vermicomposting; composting toilet; redworms; vermiculture; Biolet; Sunmar; waterless toilet; humanure; biogas digester.
Bench:
Thank you for this, De. I would like to start using a composting toilet myself, although it’s not feasible living in an apartment right now, so this is still purely an academic exercise for me. Except for the worms. I’ve been vermicomposting in a couple of plastics tubs for about a year, producing compost that will be used at some point. My plan (or hope, anyway) is have a composting toilet available to me before it becomes a necessity. As you’ve pointed out, it doesn’t take the end of “civilization” — or whatever scenario one imagines to be the consequence of sliding down the back side of peak oil — to make flush toilet inoperable. In the mean time I’ve been doing the “if it’s yellow let it mellow” thing. Although, after reading about your process of separating urine from solids it occurs to me that I could start doing that now. Even though nearly the entire lot on which my apartment building sits is paved over, there are some patches of dirt with a tree or two, and plenty of shrub lines along the alley. There is certainly no shortage of plastic jugs.
Also, you might get a chuckle out of this. Your comment about the nagging feeling when using a “normal” toilet during your experiment reminded me of a conversation on The Oil Drum last year. In a thread about all the systems that will fail in years to come, I brought up flush toilets and humanure and at least one fellow chimed to share some of his experiences. One of the things he said was, “Now whenever I use a flush toilet I feel like a piece of shit.” It still cracks me up, sort of.
Another friendly nudge (I know you and Stan are very busy)… I would love to hear more installments of the Emergency Wormcasting Network.
29 April 2008, 9:27 pmRyan:
Hey Stan,
Great piece. I especially like the practical details, people need to hear this badly, since we waste one of the greatest resources (almost the only one) that we ourselves create. Humanure compost will be part of any sane, sustainable compost.
Anyone who is interested in learning more should take a gander at the culture of Ladakh in far northern India (as well as the culture of China I believe) where humanure composting has been happening for generations. I have seen it, and it works fabulously. The elevation in the region is around 11,000 feet and upward, and it lies in the “rainshadow” (north of the mountains) of the HImalayan range. Almost no precipitation over the course of the year. Over the centuries the inhabitants of this EXEEDINGLY (no exageration here) rugged land (all high mountains and arid desert), have created fields from sand deposits by prudent application of humanure year after year. The composting toilets used in Ladakh are generally flushed with ashes from the cookstove (generally yak dung is burned as a fuel)and a handful or so of dry animal dung. In the spring the toilets are cleaned out onto the fields and spread with hand shovels. I helped with this process once and had the exciting experience of coming across a “live” turd in the middle of the stack. Figured it was the repercussion of someone taking antibiotics, still yellow and stinky, but germ-free I suppose! Anyway compost is part of the solution, and the more composting toilets in use the better as far as I am concerned. Imagine just how nasty it will be when the electric and water utilities just don’t work anymore and no one knows how to cleanly process their fecal resources. I’ve seen places like that too, and unless you got a lot of pigs and hungry mongrels around to clean up the mess, its, well, messy. . .
Let me know if you want to hear about the fabulous “gobar gas” (methane digester) toilets that are sprouting up all over Nepal. Talk about a truly evolved and appropriate technology with visible positive results! happy to share some time but really gotta get to bed now.
Thanks for blog!
Ryan
MODERATOR: Ahem… this was written by DeAnander, not Stan.
29 April 2008, 9:39 pmJuannie:
I started humanure composting after reading Jenkins book in 1999 when we moved into a dwelling without running water or facilities other than an overfull outhouse. We have been practicing such to some degree or another since then, even though we now cohabit with running water and a septic system. I just today finished putting up new bins (eight wood pallets) and finishing a new shitter after the design in Jenkins book.
Two points De.
I haven’t yet monitored the composting temperatures because of lack of an adequate thermometer. This year I purchased an 18″ probe thermometer and have been watching the temperature on a daily basis in a pile that was finished and topped off before spring thaw started. Just within the last week has the center temperature risen above 32 F and has reached a peak, so far, of 51 F. I’ll keep you posted on the temperature profile over the next month or so.
Although I never monitored the temperatures the finished product of previous bins have all turned out looking and smelling like beautiful clean potting soil and have been the basis for some spectacular garden growths.
Jenking recommends leaving the urine in the process and I always have. Not that saving pure urine and diluting 10 to 1 isn’t a fabulous source of readily assimilable nitrogen around the gardens, but it occurs to me the lack thereof in your processes may leave out an important ingredient to attain good thermophillic temperatures. Also, layering both coarse and finer materials like herbaceous weeds (e.g. goldenrod) and mulch hay create a very porous pile allowing good air infiltration which is essential for the heat loving bugs.
Good article De. I’m glad someone is spreading the news. It’s good shit. I also see it as an opportunity for a small commercial venture as times get more difficult for the fecophobes. I may make reference to this over at MoA on an OT.
30 April 2008, 11:15 amDeAnander:
Hi Juannie, nice to see ya here. I did actually follow the Jenkins procedure for the early thermophilic attempt… but when that didn’t seem to be working right and I brought worms into the picture, I started separating urine more carefully — because I was warned that the ammonia content of stale urine is kinda toxic to the worms. As a side effect the separation eliminated any smell concerns with the loo bucket. Really glad to hear that your bins worked great w/o all the technomanagerial fussiness of thermometers and logbooks etc. — would be interesting however (says the geeky side of me) to get some temperature data to compare to Jenkins’ recommendations.
One difference between flush and composting loos of course is that the “deposit” doesn’t fall into a bucket of fresh (potable! aaagh!) clean water for immediate odour masking. So there’s a bit more of a whiff during actual use — depending on the metabolism of the user and what they are eating, etc. But this quickly disappears when the cover material is thrown on top. And as anyone who has ever shared facilities with a corporate/processed-food eater knows, even wasting gallons of fresh water isn’t always enough to prevent a pretty powerful niff.
[rambling off on a tangent here] It used to be in olden times that physicians and medicine women/men claimed they could tell a lot about a person’s health by a quick sniff at their fresh excrement. This is now of course considered superstitious nonsense by our high-tech medical industry, but it seems to me that if wine connoisseurs can distinguish one vineyard and one year from another with a trained nose and palate, why shouldn’t a highly trained healer be able to detect the olfactory signature of metabolic dysfunctions, toxins, etc. in bodily excreta? I wonder if this might be yet another body of very useful lore and skill that we have deliberately thrown away…
A commercial venture might be the transport of sawdust loo contents to a hub composting facility (vermiculture yard?) for those customers too squeamish or without adequate yard space to deal with their own. Can you imagine the kerfuffle over “health and safety” regs? Sometimes it seems that a complete breakdown of the present bureaucracy is needed just to free us to take basic sensible steps for our own collective survival.
30 April 2008, 12:04 pmBeulah Jetson:
This is timely.
I -just- got done huffing through an article in today’s New York Times about the “FERTILIZER SHORTAGE” fer bloody chrissake, ‘affecting the world food supply’. ha ha haaaa. argh.
Entirely missing things like nematodes, skipping right over the problems of fossil-fuel produced nitrogen to conclude with approval of expanded reproduction of it as ‘the answer’, the viewpoint from which the article is written is so uninformed, limited and skewed. Check it out.
“The Food Chain: Shortages Threaten Farmers’ Key Tool: Fertilizer” …in the ‘World Business’ section, of course! (It’s at the top of my delicious here, & tagged ecosystem:)
http://del.icio.us/dogsoljur
You would do well to bop on over there (to the NYT) and plant an intelligible response.
A couple decades ago I said ‘if I were president’ I’d aim the heavy science funding toward filtration research, particularly soil filtration, as in WAYS to get all the toxic crap we’ve deposited in good soil OUT.
Aside from all the obvious, think of the soil on the bottom of the ocean, the ‘dead zones’ around cities & runoff bays and deltas.
30 April 2008, 1:06 pmxenia:
It’s funny that precisely today in the German magazine “der Spiegel” they published a story about a Chinese peasant woman producing all the energy her household needed through pig excrements. It’s cheap and easy to set up, and according to them, it even protects the environment.
Not a solution for me, as I have no property to my name and nourish a genuine phobia of anything pig-related (even porky pig bothers me!), but many others may like it:
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,550215,00.html
For now, it’s in German only, but there are some pictures, and maybe they’ll translate it into English one of these days.
30 April 2008, 1:31 pmJuannie:
My geek self is keeping daily T records that I will share with you as soon as the T gets above 100 F if it does. I would have thought the thermo-bugs would have been at it by now but still only 51 F. The ambient T got down to about 35 F last night and is predicted to hit 30 tonight so maybe the cooler T has some inhibiting effect. I love playing armature scientist.
Since my incarnation after the corporate/processed-food eater lifetime and having experienced their niff even without the loo, I often wonder how I ever managed to mate back in those days. The more I discover about pre new times the more I believe that the elites have been constantly quashing any information that didn’t ordain adherence to the particular niche’s line of domination propaganda. I still don’t believe in many of wife’s witchy brews but I’m constantly amazed at their efficaciousness whenever I try them. My cynic self says, ‘probably the placebo effect’ but I’m learning to just go with the flow anyway.
The small scale commercial aspect I believe offers new vistas of opportunities and since I’m now dependent of SS I recon’ I’d better figure something alternative out to finance me through my final 20 years or so. I doubt there’ll be much competition with my skipping to the loo.
30 April 2008, 2:00 pmBob H:
I have no idea how typical my experience is, but when some friends moved into some spare space I had, I bought a Biolet. Within about a month of use (two adults, one child, which matched the specs on the Biolet), it started to overflow and spill on the floor, so we had to stop using it. Also, it has a heater and fan running almost continuously to dry out the waste. This turned out to be a costly failure, so buyer beware.
30 April 2008, 6:24 pmJonathan:
Thanks for another great article! To build a vermicomposting toilet has been on my list of projects I have wanted to do - this has made me bump it to the top. I’m thinking of doing an outhouse (we’ve got about an acre so this is a possibility, as I will be able to disguise it from the neighbors) with the toilet and the composter all in one. I’ve heard of one that was made with a mesh catcher where the poo, carbon and worms stay and then their castings fall through the mesh to be cleaned out and used later.
The people I live with now are a bit squeamish, as you say, about the humanure idea (I think they will come around when they see that its works) so I’m working now on using a small pump and reservoir to use used bath water to flush the toliet. We are right now just using a bucket to fill with old bathwater (its a bath not a shower so this is possible) and then pouring it in the toliet, but the flushing ability is not always the greatest and it can be easy to spill the water (I’ve also been taking the top off the tank and pouring it in the tank, which works better). I’m hoping to make it all self-contained and easy to use, but with the ultimate goal of composting to close the loop.
When I did a accounting of how many times a house of three people flush the toilet in a year I was blown away but the volume (don’t remember it off hand) and I figured it to be about $70-80 a year here in Ohio where water is relatively cheap.
Thanks also for the tip on using sugar in the pee bucket, as at least in the morning when the sense of smell is a bit heightened, it can be a bit disagreeable. De, did you dilute it before you poured it on your plants? I’ve heard the 10:1 ratio as well but always felt it to be a bit of a pain to mix that much water, not to mention the water usage, (I work from home so I collect quite a bit) and spread it out on the plants. I’ve just been pouring it straight on to a compost pile.
I’ve been thinking of building a kind of urine only loo that would flush out into a bed of mulch plants, like comfrey and nettles, which I’ve read tolerate a 1:1 ratio, which would then soak up the nutrients to be mulched onto the plant beds later. Not that its a big deal to go pour it on the pile once in awhile, but my tendency to be lazy probably makes me make things more complicated than they need to be.
Plus it would make it more likely for others in the house to participate, as I don’t see them collecting it in jugs.
I saw somewhere that one person’s yearly urine is enough to fertilize a full acre of crops! How’s that for a fertilizer shortage?
Thanks again for the tips! Going to see now where I can find some coir.
30 April 2008, 10:11 pmDeAnander:
Apologies for neglecting another detail. I mentioned that Saturday was also gardening chore day — and in the non-rainy season, this included watering the yard. So the watering was done just after the jug was emptied, thus diluting the pee on the spot. I don’t know why I forgot to mention that in the article, doh! — neuron misfire or something.
In the rainy season, normal precipitation would take care of dilution.
The main thing was not to dump it all in one place, which would be a nutrient concentration too high for a small area even if diluted. But “peeing on the compost pile” is a time-honoured tradition among organic gardeners
30 April 2008, 10:23 pmsam:
Excellent article. I compost but haven’t made the leap to humanuring. We go by the “if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down” philosophy even though a friend told me that allowing urine to get concentrated like that is somehow bad for pipes.
When the fence that got knocked down over the winter goes back up I might seriously consider humanuring. Thanks for sparking the idea for me, De.
1 May 2008, 3:10 pmCharlieLittle:
Hi DeAnander,
Very good article I would like to post a link to on my blog at http://www.BSFLcomposting.com if you don’t mind so you have my email and let me know ASAP please!
My father was a waste water treatment operator and I too am a WW operator in my city. He (my dad) always complained that water was the most inefficient way of treating wastes and you can see what I think about it on my blog. He commonly used the “shed” out back where he had installed a screen basket in the old dunny holes that were built into the shed. That was fed to worms.
I’m currently starting a Black Soldier Fly Larvae colony to consume a portion of our facility wastes that are not included in the treatment process but extruded in a classifier along with the grit. Have also been reading much on the use of BSFL to “ProtaCompost” wastes. Am going to get a BioPod soon as they become available and do some of my own doo composting!
Thanks for the great read!
Charlie
1 May 2008, 3:39 pmDeAnander:
@Charlie, glad you mentioned Hermetia (BSF) larvae. I had the good fortune to have some of these “volunteer” in my compost piles in California — they may have come in as eggs on imported veg or cocoa hulls, not sure. They were scary at first — wow, giant armoured maggots! — but after doing a little research I realised what a blessing they were. Voracious eaters, and unlike red wrigglers they had no fear of acidic citrus peels — in fact they glommed onto citrus peel like it was the flavour of the month — they would gather and stuff the inside of a half peel (from a juiced orange) nearly solid, and eat so enthusiastically you could hear the crunching and wiggling. I joined the BSL forum (a LISTSERV list, maybe defunct now) and learned a bit about them. Amazing insects — so useful and so harmless. I hear they have been used successfully to reduce hog manure and urine (from feedlots, ugh — I have mixed feelings about fixes, even quite green ones, that make CAFO “better”, when I think it should be abolished altogether, but that is a whole other topic) to useful compost. Am told that the larvae once they reach migratory phase are one of the most nutritious, proteiny, fatty feeds for chickens (and I read that if you set up the system right, they will walk up a ramp and fall into the chicken shed all by themselves, very cooperative little devils). I did not have any chickens so I just let them live out their life cycle in the compost. The adult flies are very handsome and afaict completely harmless.
They did not like cooler weather however, and died out on me in the late Fall as temps got down in the 50’s F.
BSFL are an extraordinary resource that more people should know about, especially in the Southern states. Very pleased to discover your blog and of course you are more than welcome to link to this humanure piece, or any other FS content — it’s a free Internet (for the moment, anyway).
1 May 2008, 3:53 pmStan:
I note that Charlie is from Mansfield AR. I have my gene pool spread there from Hot Springs AR to Pawhuska OK. About ten percent of Garland County is some kind of at-least-distant cousin.
1 May 2008, 4:56 pmCharlieLittle:
Cool! Link on my blog is coming. I find the BSF and their larvae fascinating and hope to prove some current unanswered questions about them. Thanks!
1 May 2008, 6:20 pmCharlieLittle:
Yes the BSFL will self harvest or migrate up a ramp of no greater than 40 degrees incline and fall right off into a harvest bucket. This is what the BioPod unit is designed around and they even have an optional toilet lid in references (not sure if it will really be available with BioPods in late May) for separating urine from the solids. That’s what got me in the search where I found your article. They show drawings of it on their PowerPoint Slideshows for use in other countries…
Please check the links on my blog for more info on the BioPod, i think we will be seeing lots more of it in months and years to come.
1 May 2008, 8:07 pmCompost Guy:
Thanks for writing such a phenomenal article! I own Jenkins’ and Steinfeld’s books myself and love them (although I need to finish the Humanure Handbook), but I haven’t been brave enough to start composting my own waste - other than the occasional foray into pee pee gardening (and composting).
I’ve previously read numerous accounts of composting worms doing very well in a composting toilet, so I can’t say I am too surprised to hear how effectively they processed the material you added to your outdoor piles.
On the pathogen front, there has actually been some research to indicate that vermicomposting can effectively eliminate nasties from waste materials - and relatively quickly at that.
Anyway - I really hope you continue writing about your composting adventures
Great stuff!
Bentley
2 May 2008, 12:01 amCharlieLittle:
Where does one get these books?
2 May 2008, 5:09 pmDeAnander:
@charlie, sorry I have lost some context here — which books?
2 May 2008, 9:40 pmpeggy:
Congratulations, De, for bringing up this vitally important topic. I’m glad you did not make effective composting of human waste look easy, because it definitely is not. If one does it wrong, the consequence is unpleasant. But if one can do just this thing right, and keep doing it, then one deserves a special award, imho.
Something that hasn’t been mentioned here, as far as I can see, is the equally important matter of how to cleanse oneself after the act. Big forests are lost in the production of toilet paper. Onecan Google for forests toilet paper and find some approximate quantity of trees lost per roll of toilet paper used, I think. In India, you can simply use water and your left hand to do this job. In fact, you can do it anywhere. Make sure to bring your water with you. A liter will generally do for a poop, though the amount of water you use depends on a number of factors that need not be listed here. But I think you save more in trees than you waste in water if you never use toilet paper at all. To Americans, the absence of toilet paper is unthinkable and savage, but to many rural folks in India, the very thought of toilet paper is laughable.
Another bit of information, to address the gender aspect of this discussion, is the availability of pee funnels, easily manufactured, for women who do not want to take off their trousers when they pee. Pee funnels were, I hear, a big hit at the Burning Man festival a couple of years ago.
2 May 2008, 10:21 pmCharlieLittle:
Sorry…”Jenkins’ and Steinfeld’s books”.
I found Jenkin’s book from your link in the article.
Thanks!
3 May 2008, 4:59 amgreensolutions:
Great article and comments. Keep up the good work, folks. I have done some successful thermophilic humanure composting myself and expect to try out the vermicomposting method soon. A redworm/black soldier fly larvae hybrid pile sounds very intrigueing to me. Getting the larvae to climb up a ramp and into a chicken pen or aquaponics system (fish culture + hydroponic plants) sounds like a permaculture enthusiast’s dream!
I know this is a bit off topic but as an electrical engineer, licensed electrician and permaculture designer, I feel a duty to address the following statement:
“As with electric cars, we’re firmly attached to the notion that “emissions elsewhere” somehow solves the problem.”
Replacing all internal combustion-driven drive systems with battery electric drive systems while otherwise going on with business as usual is definitely an incomplete solution to our transportation challenges. Having said that, battery electric vehicles are worth pursuing as part of our transportation solution because of their multiple advantages over internal combustion vehicles.
Even if we used 100% fossil fuel-derived electricity to charge EV batteries, switching over from internal combustion engines to electric propulsion systems would save tons and tons of energy.
Electric vehicles are far more efficient than combustion vehicles in terms of converting stored energy into motion. According to the EPA, of the energy that comes out an oil well, about 10.7% is actually used to move the average internal combustion vehicle from a to b. The rest is wasted in various ways. In other words the well-to-wheel efficiency (distance traveled per unit energy) is around .28 km/MJ. On the contrary, a battery-electric vehicle such as the Tesla Roadster (currently in production) is 2.18 km/MJ. That’s about 7.8 times more efficient than the average internal combustion vehicle. I could go on and on but this is definitely off topic. There’s a ton of information and misinformation for everyone to find on the web.
Happy composting!!
4 May 2008, 7:43 pmCharlieLittle:
I finished reading Jenkin’s Humanure Handbook. It’s probably the single most best book I have ever read and can relate and agree with everything given my experience as a Waste Water Operator. It’s true, even with a brand new state of the art WW facility in our small city, the technology is no more sound than a man on the sun. All it does is transform an unwanted substance into another unwanted substance that is of no use other than changing back to something useful by feeding to earthworms. It wastes resources like water and electricity and it stinks no matter how much air we try to pump into it. The end result is sludge that will go to the landfill unless I can get enough worms going to convert it. Black Soldier Fly Larvae won’t even eat treated sewer sludge!
I have expressed my personal feelings about modern WW treatment on my blog among other things. It may end up I lose my job but I really don’t care, especially now after reading Jenkin’s book I feel as though I’m going to a despised place but not from the every day person’s point of view, more so from the view of those like Jenkins and you folks who I am coming more to respect every day I research into sustainability. Please don’t blame the WW operators. We only can do the best we can with available technology. We are trying to be water quality technicians…
One thing I can say about our new facility is we no longer use chlorine in disinfection but rather UV bulbs in the effluent trough. The effluent fecal coliform colonies from our old facility numbered in the hundreds even after chlorine. With the UV system, our last sample showed only 1 colony and the water is so clear and clean smelling one could almost feel good about drinking it.
I will personally try the sawdust toilet and feel good about it but at the same time I have to learn about BSFL and if they will reduce Humanure while fresh and also eliminate pathogens. A worthy project.
5 May 2008, 5:56 amRhisiart Gwilym:
Thanks De! I want to endorse what you say, from my own closely-parallel experience, and just add a few useful (I hope!) points:
Dry or dryish soil is a good ’soak-up’ material, if you can’t get sawdust or coir. I’ve used the sort of ‘instant peat’ made over the last thirty years by a nearby stand of Cypressus trees, and it’s excellent material, both for this purpose, and to go into my raised beds as one foundation material for the terra preta soil there.
Any sort of composting bin which has some degree of opening at its bottom directly to the soil beneath will fill itself spontaneously with worms, I find, over time.
Lawrence Hills (of blessed memory) who founded the gardeners’ backyard research charity the Henry Doubleday Research Association here in Britain used to say that a modest addition of ‘household liquid activator’ (pee) was useful to get a compost stack roaring away well in its conversion work. But the bulk of mine goes straight onto my raised beds, thinly spread.
Another important element in a good permaculture gardening set up is Russian Comfrey (the super-plant! Google it!) which takes any amount of raw pee and converts it into high nitrate green matter that can be cut up to ten times a year (over a hundred tons an acre with savvy management) to feed both animals and plants. If you can, get the ‘Bocking 14′ strain developed by Lawrence and the HDRA members: reliable high content of a range of excellent constituents for this purpose.
Finally, slightly aside of the main topic, but relevant, try googling Emilia Hazelip’s ‘Fundamental Principle’ (NPI!) on the ‘Fukuoka Farming’ website. Emilia’s take on Masanobu’s epoch-changing pioneer work is that a living — as she says: “wild” — soil community uses the growing green plants on its surface as ’sky antennae’ which use photosynthesis to draw down from the sky literally 95% of everything that goes into making the physical bodies of the plants. Add a ground cover element of leguminous plants — I use white clover as a perennial cover, never tilled — to fix atmospheric nitrogen as useful nitrates, through their associated root-dwelling nitro-fixing bacteria, and the percentage of nutrients for the soil drawn down from the sky goes up to 97.5%. The other 2.5 comes to the community from the deep-mining of subsoil minerals by Comfrey roots (up to four feet down) and from the thin scatter of completed humanure compost that you can sprinkle onto the surface without digging in of any kind (the worms will do that for you).
So long as you make sure to leave all parts of your food plants, particularly the root system, in situ in the soil right where they grew, apart from the food part that you harvest, to rot back into the soil, this sky-harvesting enriches your soil steadily, even as you crop it for your food, without need of any other soil-food inputs, except, perhaps, according to your local circumstances, some initial remediation such as wood-ash, or phosphate (soil testing tells you what). With this perspective, Emilia for three decades, and Masanobu for even longer, have maintained crop productivity at higher than orthodox best-practice levels with — as their mantra says — ‘No fertiliser, no tillage, no pesticides, no herbicides’.
6 May 2008, 3:05 amStan:
I am reading that comfrey (as well as nettles and carrots) also draws parasitic wasps to the garden as a form of organic pest control. Where might one find reasonably priced seed?
Last fall, I broadcast crimson clover all over the beds. It grew through the winter. This spring it raised up two feet and burst out with flowers. Now the color is leaving, the soil is nitrogenated, and as I clear the beds (the roots are shallow, so they pull up easy), the pounds and pounds of clover are added to the compost heap.
6 May 2008, 5:05 amLegume Sam:
Have you checked Peaceful Valley or Johnny’s Not cheap enough?
6 May 2008, 9:40 amLegume Sam:
Btw, once you’ve got comfrey settled in, it won’t go away; it’s a tough species…
6 May 2008, 10:25 amDeAnander:
I left my dead garden plants in the ground to rot, the last couple of years of my backyard gardening venture. I just clipped the dead stems off close to the ground and added them to the compost heap, and let the dead roots rot in place (except for one set which seemed to have become diseased, which made me worry about leaving potentially infected root mass in that bed/container). it was less work, and it worked great.
how we in the “enlightened” West got into this destructive and back-breaking plough agriculture thing, beats me. there must be an historical reason for doing things the hard way…
6 May 2008, 12:57 pmaudrey:
You might be able to do a seed or plant exchange for comfrey. If you search gardenweb for it you might find someone with the seeds, or if you’ve been saving seeds so you have something to exchange you can make your own post saying you’re looking for some. I didn’t comb through all the hits, but one of the first that came up took me here, just as an example: http://members.gardenweb.com/members/exch/ediblegardengoddess where you can see this person will send you 6 comfrey root divisions if in return you can send them something off their wishlist.
You could also post it in the wants section of craigslist - costs nothing to make the post. I’ve swapped a few plants and seeds through CL, and where the people were local it was particularly nice - I still get emails occasionally from horseradishguy, letting me know he found some purple string beans stashed away if I want any, and when my amaranth seeds get here (from another exchange), he’s interested in trying a few of those if I don’t mind.
6 May 2008, 6:21 pmRhisiart Gwilym:
Comfrey rarely sets seed, and is best grown from root slips, with a green growth node at the top. They are indeed tough survivors, and have proved nightmarish for cultivators wanting to get rid of them (though why anyone should want to I can’t think, they’re so harmless and useful). Chopping or plowing them just means lots more root slips coming back, like the broom fragments in The Sorceror’s Apprentice.
What I did was just buy a couple of ‘Bocking 14′ babes in small pots and plant them out, leave for a year, then dig and divide the — by then — big root stocks and replant. The second or third year you can start your multi-cuts-per-year regime, and use the fodder for the multitude of prime uses detailed in the specialist websites.
Properly managed, the practice of leaving all parts of your food plants to die back where they are, apart from the actual harvest portion, never seems to cause trouble. In effect, you’re still composting, but you don’t have to run a bin/stack, and pull-and-carry the material to it. Perhaps Fukuoka’s most famous dictum is: “What can I NOT do, what steps can I leave out, and still get a good crop?” His high-yield grain growing just before he retired, using his ‘do [almost] nothing’ method was a matured, beautifully-effective application of the idea.
The compostable material just composts in situ, and the worms do their stuff right there in the beds, without needing any sort of management. Once again, this method comes from watching what nature does, and just following that.
This year, I’ve just broadcast promiscuously-mixed vegetable seeds onto my latest new beds, followed by half an inch of wild-meadow dried hay mulch, that I can cut and collect free from neglected land (’owned’ by a transnational quarrying outfit based in Mexico) nearby my place. After the food plants germinated and just started to appear through the ‘nurse’ mulch, I broadcast white clover seeds, which are now appearing as tiny sprouted seeds appearing thick as a green mat at the feet of my growing food vegetables, the clover seedlings actually growing on the damp, open mulch as it breaks down into plant food. MUCH better than tillage cultivation, and MUCH less to do! So far no weeding of any description, and no soil-disturbing hoeing scheduled at any time, of course.
As Ruth Stout used to insist, I’ll be scattering more mulch onto the beds as they seem to need it, but probably not to her smothering thickness, as the clover suppresses most unwanted volunteers. The constant, slow, very thin trickle of kitchen compost, mulch, pee, charcoal powder (for terra preta making), humanure and poultry droppings is just to keep the soil community stuffed with food. And whatever you put on is soon taken down by the constant churning action of the worms.
6 May 2008, 6:55 pmStan:
You started it, Rhisiart. I’m having a devil of a time finding anything that gives the how-to instruction for terra preta. Obviously, one can’t just bury crushed charcoal briquets with their plants. Or can you?
7 May 2008, 5:04 amJonathan:
Stan, got my comfrey from this place: http://www.horizonherbs.com/product.asp?specific=917 its doing very well.
7 May 2008, 4:01 pmhoward:
The objection i have heard to just letting stuff compost in place goes (if memory serves) as follows:
–pests and diseases specific to a particular crop will build up in the soil over multiple seasons of the same thing in the same place. For example, squash borer eggs/larvae will survive in dormancy for a year or two in the soil. So if you eradicate the squash plant material after one year from a particular plot and then wait for three years before planting sqaush there again, you will greatly reduce the risk of having squash borers again.
So is this just a [rural] legend? Anybody with practical experience on this? I have just been blindly following the conventional wisdom just cited.
I can envision the permaculture resopnse to this, which would probably be something along the lines of “If you intercrop and companion plant, this stuff shouldn’t build up anyway because your whole system will be in balance.”
BTW, the hay-mulching thing mentioned by Rhisiart totally works for us. In the parts of our planting where we do it religiously, it pretty much eliminates the need for weeding.
8 May 2008, 10:32 amCharles:
I have much respect for Feral Scholars working diligently to develop genuinely sustainable horticulture as an alternative to megaagriculture based on the doubly terminal fossil fuel based economy of the last 140 years or so.
But with due respect, I was waiting to meet a friend, passed the my old elementary school, saw some old small garden plots, thought how nice the feeling of nostalgia is that they give - My Grandmother used to sing to me “oats , peas , beans and barley grow, oats, peas, beasn and barley grow, oats, peas , beans and barley grow, neither you nor I,nor any one else know how oats , peas , beans or barley grow- and then I thought, but even gardening requires knowledge to “contol” mildly, a tiny little bit of nature.
So, on the philosophical-psychological-gender analysis, how is it that “agriculture” has a “conquest of nature ” meme, or psyche or cultural idea inherently underlying it, that is so qualitatively different than the thinking underlying horticulture ?
I’ll suggest an answer that gets back to class analysis inflecting gender analysis. When horticulture was invented in the Neo-Lithic 12,000 years ago or so, it may very well have been especially by women. Afterall, in the hunting /gathering division of labor it is women who do a lotof the gathering of plants to eat, and men who hunt ( I doubt it was exclusively one or the other;men probably gathered a lot too; and women probably knew how to hunt around the campsite for smaller game, bugs, other animals; all this is controlling a bit of nature , by the way). Anyway, “agriculture” is distinct from horticulture by its scale and the amount of labor. It arises with exploited classes being dominated and put to work on a scale that produces surpluses to support exploiting classes. There is some evidence somewhere I forgot where I read it that these first slaves were women , by the way. Domestication of animals occurs at this same point. Animal _husbandry_ thus being doubly meaningful. We can even think that the analogy of dominating animals (conquering nature) may have been brought over in the act of dominating humans.
My point is that the analysis “conquest” mentality of agriculture as opposed to the “cooperative” mentality of horticulture is understood best by retaining the thinking of class analysis from the classics on this.
By the way, Marshall Sahlins sent me some new stuff he wrote, and it contains some good stuff on the logic of kinbased societies in contrast with Western Civilization, the nature/culture binary opposition that Sahlins and Levi-Strauss expound much. These societies treat “nature” as an extension of their kinship structure. The criticality of kinship in preclass society is a central Sahlins thesis.
Will forward some of it.
10 May 2008, 4:46 pmRhisiart Gwilym:
Authoritative knowledge about ‘terra preta do indios’ is still pretty thin. We know there are these phenomenal deposits of thick, black soil scattered widely in the otherwise rather poor laterite soils of the Amazon Basin.
Archaelogical and soil-science evidence both suggest that they seem to have been generated by Native American forest agriculturalists at various times up to several thousand years ago, apparently using a benign, nondestructive swiddening (slash and burn)) shifting-garden horticulture.
And we know that terra preta seems to have some extraordinary qualities: excellent, sustained fertility; a weird apparent capacity to regenerate itself if quarried; and perhaps most urgently important for our time, it seems to have the capacity to combine spectacularly-enhanced food production at the subsistence, peasant-agriculture level with very long term sequestration of carbon, as chemically non-reactive charcoal, in the soil.
This sequestered carbon is drawn out of the atmospheric portion of the carbon cycle, by char-burning of any woody feedstock, at low temperature and restricted air input. Apparently, short burn time also optimizes the fertility-enhancement function of the char in the soil. It seems that quick, low-temperature charring helps by leaving a suite of partial-combustion products within the pores of the carbonized wood. The ancient lotech methods of charcoal burning will do it, but I have to say that I like the look of Danny Day’s ‘Eprida’ farmscale multi-use system: nitrate-enhanced char for persistent soil enrichment, biodiesel which is net carbon-negative, EVEN AFTER IT’S BURNED; and other useful products besides.
There’s a good deal of intelligent investigation work going on into terra preta, both enthusiastic amateur, and university professional. But the subject still remains somewhat mysterious, for now.
For what it’s worth, I’ll sketch out my practical approach.
I’m doing permaculture development on small plots of ground, using 2-foot-high raised beds (salvaged truck tyres) as part of my plan. The underlying soil here is a heavy clay, and much battered by a long period of orthodox agribiz monocropping. Within the raised beds, the deliberately-created soil is strikingly different. It has nine main inputs at the time of forming the bed:
1) The thirty-year-old peat-like forest-floor litter from under the thick grove of Cypressus trees (a rich deep-brown soil in its own right)
2) The more general forest-floor litter, with a heavy admixture of dead leaves, from the deciduous woods which enclose the evergreen stand.
3) ‘Wild-meadow’ hay mulch material, with many herbs and coarse ‘weed’ plants, which I scythe from the neglected open green spaces between the woodlands. (Most of this terrain is nominally owned by a transnational cement company whose chieftains clearly don’t care at all about this land and its local people, so long as they hold on to the mineral-extraction rights. But their indifference is my continuing opportunity for guerrilla gardening) Ruth Stout’s famous rule of thumb is that any vegetable material which will rot down fairly quickly is suitable for making her mulch supplies, and in practise I find that that works well: no need to be picky. And that includes the usual worries about incorporating ‘weed’ seeds into your beds. In the event, no-till growing, with perennial nitro-fixing ground cover such as white clover, and continuing mulching around favoured food plants tends to negate these supposed problems. Hand pulling out of unwanted volunteer plants (I refuse to demonise them as ‘weeds’) turns out to be a very minimal now-and-then thing, rather than the constant hoe-and-pull struggle familiar to bare-earth gardeners pretty well throughout the summer half of the year.
Another main soil ingredient when making the beds is compost from my bins, which take the humanure, plus all the kitchen vegetable waste stream. The compost includes 4) the brown solids, 5) a measure of the amber nectar (though not all of it), 6) sawdust, 7) wood ash, as well as
the kitchen-veg material.
9) Into these composting bins goes also my steady production-stream of char, from my cook/heat Winiarski-rocket woodstove: small nodules of char, down to coarse dust. Current thinking amongst the terra preta re-pioneers is that up to ten percent by volume of the soil can be carbon as charcoal (apart from its other compounded forms in the soil) with great benefit to enhanced food productivity.
The benefits to the climate crisis of billions of grow-your-own gardeners re-sequestering this volume of atmospheric carbon is pretty obvious. With enough people pursuing their own immediate best interest in food security for selves and families, by doing terra preta gardening, it’s possible theoretically to make a significant reduction quite quickly in the ppm level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, just by showing people the immediate benefits of making terra preta soil.
My experience so far (not extensive yet) is that the raised beds are much more productive than the surrounding base soil, and I haven’t yet impounded into the soil as much char as I could. That process continues.
PS: About rotation to avoid build-up in your soil of ‘pests’ (again, the idea that any living cohabitee in your vicinity might be seen as an enemy which must be fought is a perspective to which permaculturists tend not to subscribe; everything can be a beneficial fellow-traveller, rightly seen, and rightly integrated into the permaculture plan!):
I think that fighting ‘pests’ seems to be a necessary practise if you’re doing tillage growing methods, and if you’re growing plants as row-crops, with different species separated into different beds.
No-till methods, with promiscuous companion broadcasting of seeds under a thin ‘nurse’ mulch seems to dodge the ‘pest buildup’ problem. What seems to happen is this: If you eschew the hyper-tidiness neurosis which seems to afflict bare-soil row-croppers compulsively, and just let everything live cheek-by-jowl with everthing else, the intricate natural balances of multitudes of species living at close quarters and interacting constantly with each other simply prevents any single species — the so-called ‘pest’ — from getting out of balance.
Obviously, I don’t use any kind of herbicide or pesticide, even the so-called natural ones, as ’surgical-strike’ accuracy of targetting isn’t possible. You always murder lots of potential helpers at the same time. And total eradication of any species is a chimaera anyway. What we really need is to keep everything in balance, and accept that a certain low-level attrition of some part of our food harvest is just the way it is, and none the worse for that, considering all the benefits of this approach. Small price to pay. And of course, letting your non-human neighours in the garden find their own way of coexistence means a phenomenal reduction of the chores that you lay on yourself. Never forget Masanobu’s ‘do-nothing’ rule: what chore can I leave out, without losing too much of my crop? This lazy gardener loves that genius insight!
12 May 2008, 2:57 amStan:
“hyper-tidiness neurosis”
That’s a keeper. (:
12 May 2008, 6:13 amDeAnander:
@Rhisiart, thank you very much, a very thought provoking text.
Your notes on hyper-tidiness and futile, drudgery-enhancing attempts to optimise crop returns by eliminating “pests”, make me think of the behavioural psych (I think that’s the discipline that invented it) concept of “satisficing” vs “optimisation”. An Optimiser tries to make the absolutely best/most productive/most advantageous choice in any situation; if shopping for a commercial product, s/he spends hours researching and drives all over town comparing prices to get the best deal. A Satisficer decides what s/he wants, and looking at an available model decides whether it is “good enough” and whether s/he is willing to pay the asking price; it’s a simple yes/no decision and doesn’t involve driving all over town or spending hours doing research.
Optimisation — as any compiler-writer knows — can become self-defeating when the optimisation algorithm becomes so expensive that it slows down compilation (i.e. gets in the way of getting the real job done, by diverting too much time and resource to the ancillary problem of optimisation). Optimisation is an obsessive-compulsive behaviour pattern and can lead to decision paralysis, and I think this ties in with recent research on stress and reduced levels of happiness experienced by consumers confronting Too Much Choice in megastores (not to mention 200 channels of “entertainment” tv).
Agriculture is being killed by tunnel-vision optimisation: trying to squeeze the last pound of “product” out of the soil, trying to withhold the least bite of nourishment from competitors (”pests”); capitalism with its be-all-end-all of Profit, encourages tunnel-vision optimisation. The horrendous imposed costs of the optimisation algorithm — the monocrops, the heavy tillage, irrigation, biotic vandalism, etc. — are only masked by Cheap Oil which substitutes for the backbreaking human labour needed to do regimented monocrop plantation ag — the labour and energy cost of the optimisation obsession.
Satisficing also means understanding “enough” as well as “good enough”, and capitalism with its cult of compound interest can never have “enough” because infinite growth is needed to keep the Ponzi scheme afloat. So there’s a nexus — this is a notion from the halfbakery here, so I’m not ready to defend it in depth — between capitalism and the money/usury complex, and the obsessive behaviour of optimisation, and the “optimisation trap” that condemns regimented monocrop farmers either to backbreaking serf labour, or to fossil fuel dependency.
Satisficing — growing “enough” to feed people — undermines the entire model.
Which is why sustainable food politics are so dangerous to the current PTB, and why the big ag business is so in bed with the military (as in the attempted Monsanto/Syngenta conquest of Iraq, and attempts to remarket the “green revolution” in its new biotech guise as the Solution to our peak oil and climate problems)…
OK enough rambling, I have facespace stuff to do
12 May 2008, 11:59 amjack:
This is a rich website indeed, my hat’s off to you.
13 May 2008, 9:45 pmComposting toilet tech is one of my special interests. I’ve deisgned, built, installed a number in the past twenty years. We’ve been using my favorite, the one here at home, for about 8 years with only one “incident”.
A few thoughts:
Ours is a 2 chamber, “vietnamese” type; mouldering, not thermophilic. Each chamber is about one cubic yard. Key to this is you never have to handle poop once it goes in; because it sits long enough to change into compost while you fill up the second chamber. We use sawdust, but the magic ingredient is microbe-rich SOIL, added every 2-3 weeks. Key to smell control is the vent stack, 8-10 diameter. For a client, throw in a fan (NOT inline), venturi-style, maybe hooked into the light switch.
We have a urine trough which mixes with wash water and goes to the garden.
I too love soldier flies: one drawback, they can unnerve guests when they have hatched and are trying to fly out of there, whilst guest is using the toilet.
I’ve installed two different manufactured plastic compost toilets, about a thousand bucks each. One, a Sun-Mar (reputable, Canadian) went into a client’s cabin I built 10 years ago. It failed regularly with overuse, like at parties. Ditto with the other one. Now that I know better, its amazing how poorly they are designed.
A 2 bucket system can be a handy for emergency urban situations. The active bucket starts with several inches of duff/sawdust; deposit “gift”, cover, etc. The other one contains, duff, dirt, etc. Of course you’ll have to go out and bury the contents every now and again but it can spare you the immediate need for a plumber.
Rhisiart Gwilym:
Jack’s description reminded me of my friend Eric Maddern’s two-room, four-chamber ‘loo-with-a-view’, at Cae Mabon (google that; there are pictures) in Gwynedd, Cymru Gogledd, here. (’North Wales’ in English) This handles hundreds of visitors — literally — every year, and has never had any bad service.
As with Jack’s designs, each twin-chamber room has a seat in use, and the other seat hole closed by a screwed-down blanking lid, with the chamber’s contents slowly cooking. When the second chamber is full enough to seal, and it’s time to empty the first after its sealed cook-time, what comes out of the shovelling doors at the back of the building is indeed wholly inoffensive dark-brown compost in a just nicely moist condition. (Each of the four chambers has a narrow passive venting chimney pipe to the roof)
I’ve actually helped to empty the chambers, and then taken the compost to the food garden that I ran for Eric for a while. It’s probably advisable to feed leaf vegetables indirectly with this soil-food, by giving it to your comfrey stand, and then using the cut comfrey foliage as direct mulch, or for making comfrey and nettle liquid feed. But peas and beans, for example, and other vegetables whose food parts grow well above the ground and will get no likely contact with the compost can be fed direct. This is just an extra health precaution. Eric also puts a lot of his emptyings around the base of the fruit trees.
The Cae Mabon loos also have an innovation which has proved to work well, and which means that there’s no need to try to separate the liquids from the solids. Whether you stand to pee like a man (and a couple of women I’ve known, believe it or not) or sit like a woman, the liquid is caught and diverted away from the compost chamber and out through a side-drain to a comfrey stand just below the loo building. This is done by a device universally known at Cae Mabon as the ‘pisstrickle’! Bit difficult to describe without drawings, but essentially its two vertically-hung stainless steel sheets set in the chamber just below the seat hole, which between them create a narrowish slot through which sitters dump to the compost pile, but which catch the flow of liquid onto their surfaces. These then curve away under, and then curve up into channels which conduct the liquid away sideways to the drainpipe. Imagine a vertical profile of the sheet with a hook at the bottom (the channel) and a v-on-its-side above. Two of these v+hook-profiled sheets face each other fore and aft, the points of the v’s making the narrowish slot — the dumping space — between them just below your butt as you sit. Best I can describe it. In practice this device works beautifully. The compost never gets soaked and foul smelling, and the liquid is conducted away to the comfrey.
14 May 2008, 3:49 amhoward:
Rhisiart,
Perhaps I didn’t catch this and you already mentioned it somewhere in your posts above — what’s the ph of your heavy-clay soil? The heavy-clay soil in my area (central Texas) tends to be very basic (calcium content for example is off the charts) and I think this is a concern for char-amending the soil, as that might tend to raise the ph even further. But it sounds like your experience is working out, which is why I ask.
Another technique that enriches soil and sequesters carbon and that we are trying is something described in different permaculture texts as “hugel kultur” (”hill growing” I guess in German) — you basically would skip the burning and just bury brush and timber as the basis of your raised beds and then let it rot underground over many years, which would provide both a sponge for moisture regulation and a slow release of carbon and organic nutrients into the soil. It would be a lot longer process than putting charcoal into the soil, because more time would be required to break the material down, but it wouldn’t raise ph (might even eventually lower it).
I’d be interested to hear thoughts on this as compared to the biochar method you describe.
14 May 2008, 5:48 pmRhisiart Gwilym:
Siwmae (Hiya) Howard,
I haven’t actually done any soil testing on the base clay soil here, only on the upper six inches of the fill in my raised beds (ph was just nicely on the cusp, according to the colour of my litmus paper test strips). I assume that any clay two feet below will have less effect on the plants than the contents of the tyre-stack beds, and will in any case be altered by the trickle-down from the specially-concocted soil inside them.
I remembered after posting the previous items that I have indeed put some coarse stuff into the base of the tyre-stacks, straight onto the underlying turf of the ground here. I also had a special ‘three-year bin’ that I added at one end of the row of compost bins that we have at Cae Mabon, into which went all the woody plants, thin twiggy branches trimmed from the many trees there, and any rotting logs that we well along in the process and already soft. This is a useful resource, it seems to me, and shouldn’t be neglected, but will take longer to finish than the other bins, with their softer green waste.
What I did when filling my beds here was to lay coarse stuff from the local woods nearby into the bottoms. This included a good deal of thin-ish dead wood, which just happened to be gathered up along with the broadleaf forest-floor litter that was one of the main components. Plenty of coarse, dry woody plants in the ‘wild meadow’ mulch scythings also went into the lower layers. Also, I forgot to include in the list the cardboard. I have a local source, a neighbour’s farm-shop, where they have a big flow of wasted cardboard boxes, which I get free for the carrying. A good deal of this was crumpled up or torn roughly, then thrown into the bottom of the beds when filling was just starting. So I suppose you could say that they have their slow-release-plus-drainage layer next to the clay.
This year, following the experience of a poster to one of the gardening websites, a man in — I seem to remember — Kentucky or somewhere nearby, I used sheet mulch made from flattened out cardboard boxes, straight onto the turf. No digging! Wonderful. Then I barrowed in more of that peaty-seeming duff from under the Cypressus trees, and made mounds straight on top of the cardboard, and planted a seed potato in each mound. Just a bit of mouse attack so far, but fifty-two plants already growing strongly.
My US instructor, follow Ruth Stout’s ideas, has done several seasons this way, and as the plants emerge and start to reach up, he piles hay-type mulches around each one, to suppress competition, and to give the tuber branches a clean, lightly moist medium in which to grow. As the plant pushes up higher through its collar of mulch, he adds more layers. The result is like one of those potatoes in a barrel methods, using a compost fill: Several storeys, so to speak, of tuber branches, with lots of potatoes at each level, and all beautifully clean and unscabby, because they’ve grown exclusively within this bed of hay/straw/herbs, gently rotting down into soil food over the season. But I also plan to do some liquid feeding of my sturdy-looking youngsters with comfrey/nettle tea. Just setting up the tub now: feed in cut comfrey and nettles at the top. Add cold water. Leave to stew, Tap out the brown super-liquid at the bottom and water on. But be careful. Experiment with diluting it, to make it go further and to soften its potent clout a little. Ace stuff. Plants love it.
15 May 2008, 3:31 amPhilip Small:
My friend Jim asked the TP list today:
15 May 2008, 9:43 amAnyone have any experience with putting charcoal in a composting toilet
(how much, etc.)? My wife and I use such a toilet. I reason that it
would break down the material faster, give off less smell and (since I
use the end product on trees and scrubs) it would sequester CO2.
howard:
Rhisiart,
Thanks for the details — it sounds like we are a couple of years behind you in experimenting with specifics of locale, climate, and soil. I forgot to mention that we have also used the cardboard sheet mulching technique. And your comments on ph make sense to me — if we are building raised beds then we needn’t worry so much about original soil composition.
Could I also ask you & others what season is good to plant comfrey? Where we are, you sometimes have to do things in February that others do in April. Our official average last frost date is April 8, but many years we don’t get any frost after February. So, basically, can comfrey be planted when it is already pretty warm?
We are just now trying the potatoes-in-a-barrel technique, but your method sounds more natural. The liquid feeding method is what we call around here “compost tea” (uses a burlap sack full of compost suspended in water). In that regard, I also recently read somewhere of a Japanese method that I would like to try — it has you planting your beds around a large central compost pile. Instead of watering your plants directly, you put all the water into the compost pile and it then leaks out and feeds the surrounding plants
15 May 2008, 10:14 amRhisiart Gwilym:
I’m in Britain, and these days we seem to go from a long Autumn to a long, sometimes chilly, sometimes warm Spring, with not much Winter at all in between. The comfrey is already growing in January/February, and really taking off by April. We do get frosts, erratically, right through into March, sometimes Apri. But — you know — in this Gulf Stream island, 4 degrees below (Celsius) is counted a hard frost. And a frost that persists all night, all day, and through into the next night is now pretty unusual. So our conditions are just not as savage as some of the Continental-Climate places. We’re on the same latitude as Labrador, amazingly, but the difference between our Winter and their’s couldn’t be more stark.
Comfrey, amongst its many hardinesses and tolerances, doesn’t seem to be too phased by an occasional frost hit. Some of its early leaves may be blasted, but so long as the root is OK, it will come back. Believe me: this is a very tough, tenacious plant! I’d guess that so long as you have a piece of root in the ground with a green growing tip at its top, you can just leave it lightly covered with nurse mulch, to protect from hard frost, and let it take care of itself. It will start growing as soon as things are minimally warm enough. People’s chief issue with comfrey is how to get rid of it when they don’t want it…..
I have put charcoal in my humanure bucket during the Winter, because I tend to empty my woodash/charcoal from my stove straight into the bucket. It’s all going to the same place in the end: the composting bin, and then into the soil. But for smell control and fly discouragement sawdust or fairly dry soil seem best. Do remember though that one way or another you will need to keep almost all liquid out of the manure bucket, otherwise it will overwhelm the semi-dry processes which keep everything sweet, and the smell then gets bad. I don’t know about the different processes in detail, but I know that rule of thumb from experience. I have three containers in my john: the sit-on bucket, with comfortable seat, a gallon can to take the separate fluid stream, and a bucket, with scoop, full of soil/sawdust/woodash/char (varying mixes). Fortunately, my parner and I have this semi-detached arrangement: I live on my boats, she has her house — with orthodox flushing john — seven miles away. I’ve never had to make arrangements for resident females. The only thing I know that’s a foolproof separator in that case is the set-up at Cae Mabon, as described in the earlier post above.
15 May 2008, 8:04 pm