A Large-Scale Experiment Used Human Pee to Fertilize Crops

These days, peeing on your food plants may be considered a gross and wacky gardening hack, despite the practice having been proven beneficial for thousands of years.

But our modern squeamishness has meant gardeners and farmers alike must resort to expensive fertilizers to provide their crops with the much-needed nutrients found free in our pee.

Yet some of the farmers most in need of these additional nutrients often don't have access to fertilizers. Many farmers, like those in remote regions of the Republic of Niger, are facing depleting soil nutrients on top of harsher weather conditions and are struggling to produce crops.

So a team led by National Institute of Agricultural Research of Niger researcher Hannatou Moussa looked into resurrecting this ancient practice, which is being used in parts of Asia, of using pee as fertilizer, with some modern twists of course, like sanitizing it to keep everyone safe.

A group of Niger women volunteered to help Moussa and colleagues test the urine fertilizer on their farms. In these harsh lands of sub-Saharan Africa, women contribute a higher share of labor for food production than men, but they do not have control of the land or resources, nor easy access to information.

These women often end up with the most nutrient-poor fields on which to grow a regional staple grain – pearl millet (Cenchrus americanus).

First, the women named the fertilizing product Oga, which translates to 'the boss' in the Igbo language. This was to help smooth over the social, religious and cultural barriers to open discussions on the use of human urine.

The volunteers were then divided into two groups – the first continued using their traditional farming methods, while the second applied Oga, with and without animal manure, to their experimental plots after receiving training on how to safely use it.

Making industrial fertilizer usually involves intensive mining of ores containing phosphorus and potassium. Burning natural gas at high temperatures sequesters the much-needed nitrogen from the air we breathe – in one of the most CO₂-intensive chemical making reactions. Among many other things, plants use all three of these elements for photosynthesis.

Yet our urine is packed full of phosphorus, potassium and nitrogen already in an easy-to-access form.

What's more, compared to our poop, pee is relatively sterile when it leaves our bodies thanks to the ammonia in it. Just passively storing canisters in temperatures between 22 to 24 °C (71 to 75 °F) for 2 to 3 months is enough to destroy remaining pathogens that can withstand long periods within the acidic liquid.

So the women were trained in this sanitization process and how to dilute the resulting Oga for use. For the first few years they applied the Oga in combination with organic manure, and when that was successful they were game enough to try Oga alone.

Across three years (2014 to 2016) and 681 trials, those who used Oga experienced an average 30 percent increase in pearl millet yield

https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-tested-large-scale-use-of-human-pee-as-fertilizer-and-here-s-what-happened

SIDEBAR

The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers said consumers expect inflation to rise at a 5.3% annualized rate as of the end of June.

That’s a very modest improvement over the 5.4% expectation earlier this month. In that same report, the consumer sentiment number came in at 50, which is a new all time low, vs last month’s reading of 58. This series goes back to the 1950s, and it does tend to be a predictor of where things are going next, so this new all time low is very bearish.

Some people are still trying to pretend that the prospect of a U.S. recession is still an open question. Jerome Powell is one for obvious reasons – he’s not a legitimate observer of actual economic conditions, but the chief salesman for Wall Street banks and their dodgy products. So, he cannot be trusted…

à>Three-fold dynamic is driving stock prices lower...

1. Rampant inflation higher than 8%, year over year

2. Impending interest-rate hikes and deleveraging of the Fed's balance sheet

3. A collapse in price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios – particularly for the megacap and speculative growth stocks that led the bull market to all-time highs

The P/E ratio for the S&P 500 Index has already fallen a lot from its peak. But the thing is... it can drop even further if growth hits a wall.

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USEFUL RESOURCES

One rumor we’re hearing from Washington D.C. sources is talk about granting citizenship to illegal aliens flooding across the southern border with a Presidential Executive Order shortly before the mid-term election in November. That would allow illegals to vote, and that sort of outright cheating could touch off violence. Biden’s been flying them in and dropping them off in the middle of the night, why are they doing that? It is to change the election. . . . I am concerned you would be talking about civil unrest going into 2023 that is going to be significant. You have already divided the country between blue and red to begin with. They have misrepresented the abortion thing. Now, with the aliens, how much more are we going to take of this?”

Also…gas prices are high because of Traitor Joe.

“They need to get gas prices to $10 a gallon so people will drive less, and that way they can get their electric cars. This is the insanity of what is going on in Washington.”

Bank of America Issues Chilling Forecast - Prepare Now

Bad news about America’s economy continues to flow during Joe Biden’s term as president.

On Friday, the Bank of America said America’s Gross Domestic Product is not expected to grow during the April-June quarter of 2022, according to Breitbart.

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