Human beings could be key in using one of their most common waste to help crops
Sunset in a cornfield in Germany
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There are nutrients from nitrogen-based fertilizers that are more and more common in harvests from all over the world, since they are very effective and their cost is quite low. However, as you can imagine, they have their negative sideby contributing to one of the great evils that plague our planet: climate change. That is why they are looking for alternative solutions and it seems that we have found one, to say the least interesting.
Nutrients for crops whose origin is human
Fertilizers that take the environment into account, those that are ecological, are beginning to have relevance in the agricultural sector. Now, thanks to a article published in the scientific journal Applied Soil Ecologywe can discover that our urine can be synthesized to become a new type of fertilizer.
one of the great advantages of this fertilizer, which uses part of the non-water components of our urine, is that even with residues stored for a year, these have no hardly any impact on bacteria that accumulate on the ground and nor do they produce significant changes in the acidity or salinity of the soil..
The study, carried out by researchers from the University of Birmingham and the Institut Agro Montpellier, calls for the need for a largest number of researchers to know the long term effect of urine in the fertilization of crops. Manon Rumeau, co-author of the study, stated in the EurekAlert news repository what:
Our research highlights the potential of recycling human urine to improve ecological sustainability, reducing wastewater pollution and decreasing dependence on synthetic fertilizers. Stored urine can be safely applied to a plant-soil system without negatively impacting the soil microbiome.
It is important to know that only 5% of urine has components such as urea or creatinine, organic anions and inorganic salts, which can be source of bionutrients. During the experiments carried out in the research, synthetic fertilizers and two different doses of processed urine were used on spinach crops.
The urinewhich had been stored previously during 12 months, increased their pH values and it was demonstrated free of ammonia concentrationssomething essential to deactivate pathogenic bacteria and to break extracellular DNA. The high concentration of salt in that urine, however, had little effect on the bacteria in the soil.
Without a doubt, the use of processed urinealthough we still do not have many studies on its long-term effects on crops, it is a interesting alternative to synthetic fertilizers. In fact, one of its great advantages is that it could be a sustainable system, especially for the water conservation.
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