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Tuesday 6 May 2014

Fox pee to urine management



This is a patch of dead grass on our lawn. I've included a ten shilling piece in the pic to give an idea of size. Around the patch is a border of lush grass growing like crazy, although that doesn't show up very well.

Fox urine? Well experience teaches that dog urine can do much the same to grass, but this seems super strong to me. Even our Old English Sheepdog didn't blast the grass to this degree.

However, the lush surrounding growth set me thinking - surely we could do more with urine. At one time human urine was collected and used as a mordant to prepare cloth for dyeing, but its most obvious use is as a fertilizer.

Wikipedia has lots of interesting snippets on urine, including this one on urine management.

"Urine management" is a relatively new way to view closing the cycle of agricultural nutrient flows and reducing sewage treatment costs and ecological consequences such as eutrophication resulting from the influx of nutrient rich effluent into aquatic or marine ecosystems. Proponents of urine as a natural source of agricultural fertilizer claim the risks to be negligible or acceptable. Their views seem to be backed by research showing there are more environmental problems when it is treated and disposed of compared with when it is used as a resource.

Governments tend to take the piss, but the day may come when they make a virtue of it.

4 comments:

Demetrius said...

Go with the flow?

A K Haart said...

Demetrius - I have to these days.

Sam Vega said...

Urine management? Most of the managers where I work are piss-awful.

A K Haart said...

Sam - so no piss-up in your brewery?