Human urine is high in Nitrogen and has long been used in the garden especially for runner beans here in the UK.
For runner beans a trench would be dig and the gardener would collect his urine and pour it in the trench or just go ahead and piss directly into it.
The dairy farmer would also have an unlimited source of manure which contains Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium.
He had all the nutes he needed right at his feet, no surprise he got good results and that name "Peeweed" is so apt
Here is an article which describe the benefits of urine as a fertilizer.
Gee Whiz: Human Urine Is Shown to Be an Effective Agricultural Fertilizer
Researchers say our liquid waste not only promotes plant growth as well as industrial mineral fertilizers, but also would save energy used on sewage treatment
July 23, 2010 |By Mara Grunbaum
FLICKR/John.E.RobertsonThe beets Surendra Pradhan and Helvi Heinonen-Tanski grew were perfectly lovely:
round and hefty; with their skin a rich burgundy; their flavor sweet and faintly earthy, like the dirt from which they
came. Unless someone told you, you'd never know the beets were fertilized with human urine.
Pradhan and Heinonen-Tanski, environmental scientists at the University of Kuopio in Finland, grew the beets as an
experiment in sustainable fertilization. They nourished the root vegetables with a combination of urine and wood ash,
which they found worked as well as traditional mineral fertilizer.
"It is totally possible to use human urine as a fertilizer instead of industrial fertilizer," says Heinonen-Tanski, whose
research group has also used urine to cultivatecucumbers, cabbage and tomatoes. Recycling urine as fertilizer could
not only make agriculture and wastewater treatment more sustainable in industrialized countries, the researchers
say, but also bolster food production and improve sanitation in developing countries.
Urine is chock full of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, which are the nutrients plants need to thrive—and the
main ingredients in common mineral fertilizers. There is, of course, a steady supply of this man-made plant food: an
adult on a typical Western diet urinates about 500 liters a year, enough to fill three standard bathtubs. And despite
the gross-out potential, urine is practically sterile when it leaves the body, Heinonen-Tanski pointed out. Unlike
feces, which can carry bacteria like salmonella and E. coli, urine poses no health risks—astronauts on the
International Space Station even drink the stuff—after it's purified.
The nutrients in urine are also in just the right form for plants to drink them up, says Håkan Jönsson, a researcher at
the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala who was not involved in the beet study but has
researched urine recycling for over 15 years. Food gives us nutrients like nitrogen as parts of complex organic
molecules, but our digestive system strips them down into the basic mineral form that plants need—so "we have
done half of the job," Jönsson says.
A small but dedicated contingent of organic gardeners in the U.S. and Europe alreadyfertilize with urine at home,
and researchers in Scandinavia have run pilot projects to recycle locally collected urine on small farms. But urine
recycling may never become a part of large-scale farming in industrialized countries, because implementing it would
mean drastically remodeling sewage systems in order to collect and transport liquid waste.
It would also mean swapping regular flush toilets for separating toilets, where a divided bowl and independent set of
pipes separate urine from everything else. This detail is a roadblock, Jönsson says, because many people don't
want a toilet that looks strange. "Acceptance is a big problem for this kind of system," he adds.
For the recent experiment with beets, the urine was obtained from specialized toilets in private homes. Heinonen-
Tanski's group planted four plots of beets and treated one with mineral fertilizer, one with urine and wood ash, one
solely with urine, and one with no fertilizer, as a control.
After 84 days, about 280 beets were harvested. The beetroots from the urine- and urine/ash–fertilized plants were
found to be 10 percent and 27 percent larger by mass, respectively, than those grown in mineral fertilizer. By
subjecting some of the beets to chemical analysis, the researchers determined that all of them had comparable
nutrient contents—and according to a blind taste-testing panel, their beety taste was indistinguishable. The results
were published in the February 10 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Effective fertilization is not the only benefit of recycling urine, Heinonen-Tanski suggested in a review paper in the
January 2010 issue of Sustainability. The separating toilets that collect urine use less water than flush toilets, she
wrote, and the simplified waste stream requires less energy in sewage treatment.
"Agricultural and health organizations should encourage people to use human urine as a fertilizer," Heinonen-Tanski
concluded in the paper, especially in areas where wastewater treatment is unavailable or ineffective.
Though Jönsson is skeptical that micturition farming will ever happen on a large scale, his own family does practice
urine fertilization: He and his wife use what they collect from their separating toilet to nourish their garden at home in
Sweden. The urine that one person produces can fertilize about one square meter of soil a day, Jönsson said—but
there's been less to go around since his three children left home.
"It's enough for the vegetables and the flowers," he said, "but I can only fertilize very lightly on the lawn. Otherwise I
run out of urine."
This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
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