I’ve been pondering the following and done some searching on the internet but have not found any answers.
So cow manure and horse manure are good fertilizers, but dog poop and cat poop are not. My assumption is because cows and horses eat a diet of vegetation, while dogs and cats eat meats. So with that thought would the manure from a person that is a vegetarian be good manure but from a person that eats at McDonalds would not? Or would it still be bad because of the way our bodies process the food?
Fresh human feces will have too much nitrogen present and will burn plants, just like any fresh manure.
It would not be a good idea to use human feces as fertilizer for the same reasons that you don’t want to handle human feces: the risk of spreading disease. (Well, there’s the ick factor too). If you compost the feces long enough in a well-mixed & constructed compost heap it will heat up to 180 degrees long enough to kill most of the bacteria, but you still have some very tough viral pathogens to worry about.
I’ll stick to grass clippings, sawdust, coffe grounds & horse manure in my compost heap.
Although I put the dog’s feces in the trash, I still copmost it, but in a very round-about way: the dog defecates, which causes the grass to grow faster, which gets cut & put on the compost pile.
Human waste has been used for fertilizer in some places, notably Japan. As a large scale practice, it was stopped post WWII, mostly because of the disease risk.
There are many schemes for recycling municipal sewage, including composting the stuff. Most suffer from scalability, transport or economic problems.
As far as the plants are concerned there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using dog and cat faeces as fertiliser. In terms of plant nutrients the composition would be almost identical. The biggest difference is that manure from grazers contains a lot of indigestible plant parts that produce a lot more bulk.
The reasons for not using carnivore manure I that it’s a potential source of disease. Not only is their a good chance of getting worms, but there are several other diseases like toxoplasmosis that hang around in cat dung.
The actual amount of nitrogen present in manure is fairly low. It also tends to be in insoluble form. Because of this you really would need to dig a lot of very fresh manure from any animal into your soil before it started burning the pants. Simply putting it on the surface won’t produce adverse affects. Human faeces wouldn’t have appreciably more nitrogen than horse manure given a normal diet for both animals. The nitrogen tends to exist mostly as protein, and in a normal diet the protein is digested and very little extra is added in the intestine. What nitrogen exits in the faeces will be whatever is bound up in the plant matrix. By definition this will be indigestible and very slow release.
The fact that hr excretes a recyclable product which may benefit the environment is one of my two favorite things about George W Bush. The other is that he also excretes carbon dioxide, which is good for plants.
FWIW when I was in the navy we were warned about eating fresh vegtables in places like Kenya and the Philippines which are sometimes grown in night soil, AKA human waste.
Hooah! Good God y’all
What is is it good for?
Absolutely nothin
The OP has been answered directly so I can no longer resist the hijack.
Near the middle of the book, he goes on at great length about how the Paris sewers are piping away millions of francs per day of worthwhile fertilizer. In some ways, the man was well ahead of his time.
Since 1913, the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has successfully recycled its “biosolids in sewage sludge” (i.e., Milwaukee’s poop) into the Milorganite, America’s leading organic nitrogen fertilizer.
FWIW I used dirty cat litter in my tomate garden for two summers. The cats were healthy, and we suffered no ill effects, though the in-laws no longer raved about the romas.
The heat is caused by bacterial action. Their digestion of dead plant matter causes so much heat that it actually kills them all.
Yeah, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either, but that is what I’ve read on the subject. That’s the gardener’s answer; maybe a microbiologist will come along and answer it in more detail.
Who would work in a compost pile barefooted, no gloves— or lick anything off their fingers while doing so ?
( think about how parasites are spread — I will let someone else post that ).
If you build a compost pile correctly , you don’t have to touch anything that you put into it. They are left to “work” on their own. When finished you can’t tell a turd from a cucumber.
A couple of problems heygeno. Firstly these things exists quite happily as eggs, cysts and spores that lie dormant and are still infective. Using gloves while working on the compost won’t help one bit unless you also wear gloves and a respirator while working in your garden. No one does that, especially children playing in the garden. This is the reason why you shouldn’t use dog and cat manure in the garden or compost bins.
Even if thiswere’nt the case, unless you have a tumbler setup compost needs to be turned regularly to ensure even decomposition, and this is going to involve forking it over. Lots of stuf getting arborne, as well as the risk of infection from even tiny scratches.
Then you have the problem of ensuring that flies an’t gain acess to the rotten animal faeces. Not easy to do.
The heat generated in compst bins isn’t nearly enough to kill most of these pathogens.
The actual risks from adding dog faeces, dead rat carcasses or almost anything else to a garden or compost pile is fairly minimal. Of course the actual risk from having rotting camel carcasses lying in the street is equally low. This doesn’t mean that either is a good idea.
