Human waste can provide 50M tons of fertiliser every year, providing a ready and zero-cost way to boost crop production. But is being wasted on issues around its safe use on foods and farmers’ aversion to using human manure.
Unlike in most of eighteenth-century Europe where streets were paved with human feaces and pit latrines overflowed with excrement, Japan’s cities were much cleaner as human feaces and urine was treasured and collected for use in agriculture.
According to American academic Susan B. Hanley human waste in Japan unlike in the West was seen as a product of great economic value. Referred to as night soil in Japanese and Chinese cities, humanure was picked up at night in boats that delivered farm produce from cities and sent back to farmers in the countryside. The growth of Japan’s population and its limited land that could be used for agriculture, combined with the limited numbers of animals that could be used to produce manure meant that human waste had as much value as fertiliser. The smelly gold was fought over and even laws had to be enacted against stealing it. Japan’s use of night soil was so effective that the practice only stopped in the late 1980s, gathered by special vacuum trucks and delivered to treatment facilities.
Related News: How to properly handle manure for optimum crop yield
Related News: Composter doubles manure ‘ripening’ time
Related News: Fertiliser Crisis: Making compost manure as alternative to store-bought fertilisers
Treating humanure to make safe nutrient-rich fertiliser will help to tackle two major problems plaguing Africa which has the fastest growing population in the world but the lowest rate of fertiliser use; achieving food security and improving access to safely managed sanitation.
According to the Rich Earth Institute, 145 kilograms of wheat can be grown every year with the fertilizer from one adult’s urine. Meanwhile, feces are rich in organic matter that is crucial to improving the soil’s ability to take in rainwater which in turn reduces the effects of droughts whose instances are predicted to keep increasing in frequency and severity. Human excreta-based fertilizers (HEBFs) can reduce the reliance on chemical fertilisers while
improving soil quality as they do not add acidity to the soil which reduces the amount of nutrients a plant can take in.
Despite these benefits, less than 30 per cent of the world’s population is willing to eat food grown with the help of HEBF. The main reasons behind this were the disgust and social stigma people held toward human feaces grown food and understandable health concerns.
While not exactly manure-stealing gangs, two companies in Kenya, the Busia County faecal sludge treatment and transformation plant (FSTP) which has treated 997 tons of human waste into farm compost, and Sanergy which serves 20,000 farmers with high-grade certified Evergrow and Evergrow Gold fertiliser are leading the charge in the use of human poo as nutritious soil food.
Related News: Fertiliser Crisis: Organic gold manure that doubles farmer yields
Related News: Fortified composite manure increases harvest two-fold
Sanergy provides clean toilets to residents in low-income urban slums. These toilets collect 72,000 tons of organic waste each year, which is used to grow Black Soldier Flies which are collected as organic waste and sold as insect protein. The flies’ poo is also composted together with other organic waste to create 8,500 tons of organic fertiliser used by farmers in 40 Kenyan counties.
The Busia feacal plant is run by the Dutch Government’s FINISH Mondial programme and the County’s government collects waste from the county’s households, schools, and hotels before treating it and separating solid and liquid components. The solid waste is then processed into nutrient-rich organic fertiliser.