Have you visited Dancing Rabbit?
I follow them on Instagram and think the place is fascinating.
Catch 22 Composting
- Thread starter jthornton
- Start date
I follow them on Instagram and think the place is fascinating.
Two totally separate thoughts on humanure. Just my thoughts, no citations. When human manure gets into the water system you often have dysentery. Cholera can become an epidemic, like after certain disasters like earthquakes destroy water treatment facilities. Safe water is important.
On the flip side, certain cultures, say in the far east, have been using human manure to help grow their crops for a lot of years. I don't know how long, probably thousand of years.
Those two don't add up, but I'd guess the devil is in the details. I suspect they have developed techniques where it can and does work.
On the flip side, certain cultures, say in the far east, have been using human manure to help grow their crops for a lot of years. I don't know how long, probably thousand of years.
Those two don't add up, but I'd guess the devil is in the details. I suspect they have developed techniques where it can and does work.
The difference may be fresh, uncomposted feces in water has a medium where the bacteria can breed while its also transmitted back to the shoreline in its raw state v composted feces that goes into the ground where it stays and where the presence of the microbial beasties can break it down into it's nutritional components.
I dunno. I'm the farthest thing from a scientist and really only focus on the big strokes rather than the actual process. I just know when we had oleander -- which is highly toxic -- I used to put that in my compost on a regular basis. And my thought is that out in the forest, all manner of animals -- grass-eating and meat-eating -- are doing their business and Mother Nature takes care of it. Plus, I think of the Ganges River which is used for everything we do with water plus a burial ground. It may be that we wouldn't want to use that water for watering our veggies but it still manages to be one of the most densely populated areas on the earth so some combination of Mother Nature doing her best to "right" things again and having active immune systems tuned to the rigors of local life are working.
As for outhouses, I'm old enough to remember them from my Summers in ME and also a few of the summer camps I went to as I grew. Can't say they're what I remember the most fondly, but I guess I got over my distaste for the smell a long time ago. The worst part was having to get up in the middle of the night and walk outside to use it. When I was a kid I was sure something was going to rise up from the gunk and bite me in the naked part where I was hanging over the hole...'
Bottom line,, IF I set up my gardening porta potty again, I'll approach this providing plenty of time for humanure to break down. In the meantime, I'm getting more interested in whether I'll be able to detect what's been composting away in my existing pile.
I dunno. I'm the farthest thing from a scientist and really only focus on the big strokes rather than the actual process. I just know when we had oleander -- which is highly toxic -- I used to put that in my compost on a regular basis. And my thought is that out in the forest, all manner of animals -- grass-eating and meat-eating -- are doing their business and Mother Nature takes care of it. Plus, I think of the Ganges River which is used for everything we do with water plus a burial ground. It may be that we wouldn't want to use that water for watering our veggies but it still manages to be one of the most densely populated areas on the earth so some combination of Mother Nature doing her best to "right" things again and having active immune systems tuned to the rigors of local life are working.
As for outhouses, I'm old enough to remember them from my Summers in ME and also a few of the summer camps I went to as I grew. Can't say they're what I remember the most fondly, but I guess I got over my distaste for the smell a long time ago. The worst part was having to get up in the middle of the night and walk outside to use it. When I was a kid I was sure something was going to rise up from the gunk and bite me in the naked part where I was hanging over the hole...'
Bottom line,, IF I set up my gardening porta potty again, I'll approach this providing plenty of time for humanure to break down. In the meantime, I'm getting more interested in whether I'll be able to detect what's been composting away in my existing pile.
I have! On a fact-finding trip for a potential ecovillage locally. There were things I liked a lot and things I didn't. We recently got our own 501C3 and are slowly making progress towards a workable land base.
@Ridgerunner
The devil IS in the details. The biggest thing is the whole hot compost thing. The science is that the 140*F that many compost piles reach is hot enough to kill cholera, shigella bacteria (the main cause of dysentery), and is WAY higher then the suggested temperature for things like salmonella in chicken litter.
The other thing is holding time. For example cholera breaks down within two weeks at room temperature. And up north where I am where the winters get cold enough to freeze whole compost piles that adds another layer of destruction.
The last factor is the bacteria themselves. A compost pile relies on and uses bacteria and fungi to break everything down; it's teeming with microscopic organisms of every kind. And they're all competing for the same resources. For example, the mold that produces penicillin will probably be in your compost pile, and thriving as it feeds on the waste materials, ultimately helping to break it down. Even other bacteria produces anti bacterial agents like tetracycline. Even the very nature of thermophilic bacteria is designed to reduce competition from other bacteria by making it hot enough other bacteria can't live. All these things evolved in nature to kill out one microorganism to make room for the rest. There's just no room in a healthy, teeming, hot compost pile for dangerous bacteria to take hold. There's too much competition.
So if you're managing your compost pile in such a way to prevent and reduce run-off, and you're working on maintaining an active pile, the dangers are relatively minimal. Which isn't to say there aren't any, but a hot pile and a long holding time goes a long way.
All that stuff is also why it's considered good manure management to compost your chicken litter and horse manure too. Animal poop is full of bad bacteria too, much of it zoonotic, but we compost it without blinking an eye and we put it on gardens even with leafy greens in them.
I was unaware of Dancing Rabbit. I'm glad you brought it up, Chocolate Mouse, and I'm reading it by bits to learn about what they're doing.
Care to tell us more about what you saw, what you liked and what you didn't?
Care to tell us more about what you saw, what you liked and what you didn't?
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Most of it is unrelated to compost so I'd rather not go into too much detail. Most of my criticisms surrounded them not working with and giving enough support locally, having subpar urban planning, or misplaced priorities with good intentions but not good results. However their community functions well, has a strong egalitarian government, and is a nice place and I'd think about living there if I didn't not want to leave my state.
On their humanure composting though, I've got a small novel.
Their humanure compost system is mostly great. The system is efficient, works well, is provided by and for the community, it's sanitary and always smells fine. The resulting compost is free for anyone to take at any time and they have a rule about foods with vegetables grown in humanure being disclosed or labeled for peoples comfort. Most of it goes to their farmers and gardens. Almost everyone has their own garden there and it's a valued resource that the community is largely happy to maintain.
My biggest criticism there is most of their people pee outside, usually in their back yards or in the woods. This is to reduce the weight in the buckets and the amount of sawdust used, which makes perfect sense on the surface.
But because of their layout houses are not all facing the same direction so you might be out just walkin' down the road and see some dude behind a tree with his privates out. Which is probably OK for them they're all used to it... Kind of like a nudist colony is used to being nude and that's fine. No judgement for their acceptance of nakedness. But for me, coming in from outside in a major city, I associate rando dudes on the street with their privates out as drunk and harassing women, so that was uncomfortable for me even though these were people just peeing. And the potential of exposing myself to those randos was also uncomfortable.
Additionally I have female-specific urinary health issues and have been instructed to always sit fully centered on a toilet seat when peeing to avoid them. So I couldn't even pee outside safely if I wanted to. Not to mention the risk of soaking your socks as a lady... And the plastic seat on a bucket for camping like described earlier is their most common toilet setup and is often unstable which makes that 'sit fully' thing hard to accomplish even indoors.
So all around I found the system uniquely lacking for women. Which is ironic given their mission of equality. But it's easily remedied by using more stable/semi permanent toilets and changing the buckets more frequently. I was very happy for example with the toilets they had in the public buildings that were stable boxes built into a wall, with real toilet seats and smooth lacquered wood, with a hinged lid that gave you access to the bucket underneath and a nice flip top opening to the sawdust bucket. It was all very clean and professional and they were really just nice bathrooms. No smell, very pretty, easy access to everything, easy to clean and sanitize, almost like a normal bathroom. It's just instead of flushing your shook a couple scoops of sawdust in and then closed the lid. Every one of these public bathrooms had a list of instructions for visitors as well so no awkward questions.
At Kellys Working Well they have a system that fixes all those problems as well because their system has a separation system for liquids and solids. The bathrooms are raised off the ground and liquids drain through layers of carbon into a rock bed that leads to a reed bed like a leech field before draining into a pond. This way the liquids get filtered and feed plants that will rapidly uptake the excess nitrogen and filter and clean it naturally and the rest ends up in a pond growing duckweed and algae to feed ducks and fish. The solids are collected into a large plastic container, layered with sawdust, that is then emptied into compost piles every month instead of 1-2 times a week. The draining system makes it work a little less like a pure compost and a little bit more like a mix between that and a septic system. But in exchange there's a slight odor near the bathroom, much less than the average port a potty or outhouse, but slight. If you're standing within 3 feet of the bathroom you'll notice it. 10 feet on a hot day. Maybe not at all if it just snowed. And because of the size of the solids storage container it can't be handled by hand and needs to be moved with a truck when it's full, necessitating specialized equipment. This is close to the design for most commercial composting toilets on the market, in case people were wondering.
I found them both to be cleanly and effective with low odor and good end results. I liked the dancing rabbit system more overall, despite my personal and gender-specific issues with it because those are easy to remedy, because it was a lot easier for the average person to implement, required no specialized construction, was easy to produce and manage on a large scale for a community, and was extremely clean with none of the "ew an outhouse" feeling the other one gave me with it having to be raised off the ground and smelling a tiny bit.
On their humanure composting though, I've got a small novel.
Their humanure compost system is mostly great. The system is efficient, works well, is provided by and for the community, it's sanitary and always smells fine. The resulting compost is free for anyone to take at any time and they have a rule about foods with vegetables grown in humanure being disclosed or labeled for peoples comfort. Most of it goes to their farmers and gardens. Almost everyone has their own garden there and it's a valued resource that the community is largely happy to maintain.
My biggest criticism there is most of their people pee outside, usually in their back yards or in the woods. This is to reduce the weight in the buckets and the amount of sawdust used, which makes perfect sense on the surface.
But because of their layout houses are not all facing the same direction so you might be out just walkin' down the road and see some dude behind a tree with his privates out. Which is probably OK for them they're all used to it... Kind of like a nudist colony is used to being nude and that's fine. No judgement for their acceptance of nakedness. But for me, coming in from outside in a major city, I associate rando dudes on the street with their privates out as drunk and harassing women, so that was uncomfortable for me even though these were people just peeing. And the potential of exposing myself to those randos was also uncomfortable.
Additionally I have female-specific urinary health issues and have been instructed to always sit fully centered on a toilet seat when peeing to avoid them. So I couldn't even pee outside safely if I wanted to. Not to mention the risk of soaking your socks as a lady... And the plastic seat on a bucket for camping like described earlier is their most common toilet setup and is often unstable which makes that 'sit fully' thing hard to accomplish even indoors.
So all around I found the system uniquely lacking for women. Which is ironic given their mission of equality. But it's easily remedied by using more stable/semi permanent toilets and changing the buckets more frequently. I was very happy for example with the toilets they had in the public buildings that were stable boxes built into a wall, with real toilet seats and smooth lacquered wood, with a hinged lid that gave you access to the bucket underneath and a nice flip top opening to the sawdust bucket. It was all very clean and professional and they were really just nice bathrooms. No smell, very pretty, easy access to everything, easy to clean and sanitize, almost like a normal bathroom. It's just instead of flushing your shook a couple scoops of sawdust in and then closed the lid. Every one of these public bathrooms had a list of instructions for visitors as well so no awkward questions.
At Kellys Working Well they have a system that fixes all those problems as well because their system has a separation system for liquids and solids. The bathrooms are raised off the ground and liquids drain through layers of carbon into a rock bed that leads to a reed bed like a leech field before draining into a pond. This way the liquids get filtered and feed plants that will rapidly uptake the excess nitrogen and filter and clean it naturally and the rest ends up in a pond growing duckweed and algae to feed ducks and fish. The solids are collected into a large plastic container, layered with sawdust, that is then emptied into compost piles every month instead of 1-2 times a week. The draining system makes it work a little less like a pure compost and a little bit more like a mix between that and a septic system. But in exchange there's a slight odor near the bathroom, much less than the average port a potty or outhouse, but slight. If you're standing within 3 feet of the bathroom you'll notice it. 10 feet on a hot day. Maybe not at all if it just snowed. And because of the size of the solids storage container it can't be handled by hand and needs to be moved with a truck when it's full, necessitating specialized equipment. This is close to the design for most commercial composting toilets on the market, in case people were wondering.
I found them both to be cleanly and effective with low odor and good end results. I liked the dancing rabbit system more overall, despite my personal and gender-specific issues with it because those are easy to remedy, because it was a lot easier for the average person to implement, required no specialized construction, was easy to produce and manage on a large scale for a community, and was extremely clean with none of the "ew an outhouse" feeling the other one gave me with it having to be raised off the ground and smelling a tiny bit.
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Thanks for providing more info.
As to the issue of conveniently collecting female pee, there was a discussion of it a few years ago on an LA sustainability blog and people had a number of adaptations that made it possible and less insecure than sitting on a contractors' tub -- tho I don't find that difficult or tenuous. My point is, tho we don't have an equally convenient "delivery" system it's entirely possible to do it conveniently enough if the intent is there.
When I was fully set up for using my garden as a bathroom I had a small pop-up tent sort of thing that I situated in a private spot in my back garden. Unfortunately, I didn't think about the sun breaking down the nylon fabric. I should have taken it down when the weather got bad but I didn't and I had to pitch it.
As to the issue of conveniently collecting female pee, there was a discussion of it a few years ago on an LA sustainability blog and people had a number of adaptations that made it possible and less insecure than sitting on a contractors' tub -- tho I don't find that difficult or tenuous. My point is, tho we don't have an equally convenient "delivery" system it's entirely possible to do it conveniently enough if the intent is there.
When I was fully set up for using my garden as a bathroom I had a small pop-up tent sort of thing that I situated in a private spot in my back garden. Unfortunately, I didn't think about the sun breaking down the nylon fabric. I should have taken it down when the weather got bad but I didn't and I had to pitch it.
I think just a solid construction instead of a thin plastic seat screwed right onto the bucket is all you need. And then you need to change the buckets more often to account for the additional water weight.
A pop up tent works fine, but these bathrooms were in proper rooms, so there's really no good excuse for not just building it into the house but for some reason they didn't. But they could have.
All around it was a positive experience and with just the adaption of solid seating and more frequent bucket changes I'd gladly adapt it into my everyday life, circumstances permitting. It's a really simple fix and that's why I like their system more than the separation system.
A pop up tent works fine, but these bathrooms were in proper rooms, so there's really no good excuse for not just building it into the house but for some reason they didn't. But they could have.
All around it was a positive experience and with just the adaption of solid seating and more frequent bucket changes I'd gladly adapt it into my everyday life, circumstances permitting. It's a really simple fix and that's why I like their system more than the separation system.
Someone was surprised that I just started my garden. I was laid up after knee surgery and I've only begun being mobile and reasonably flexible again so this has been my first opportunity. Also the weather out here is such that it will stay warm into October. Of course, warmth aside, the days are already getting shorter and that will have its effect.
There may or there may not be enough time to get much produce out of my plantings. That I'll just have to see. But pepper plants will overwinter and keep going for 2-3 years. So will the woody herbs. And if I had put in an eggplant chances are good it would come back in the Spring. Chives and onions will seed themselves liberally -- I think I've got onions that I didn't plant starting to come up through all the soil the I've been actively working for the last few weeks.
_____
Sifted out 20 more gallons of compost this morning. Then I potted up a well-established oregano plant. I'll see if it revives and keep it in its 6" pot to offer at the next month's produce exchange since I have 2 more thriving sections of the same original plant. I transplanted them to one of the raised beds several weeks ago and they're going gangbusters. I also pulled up a very old, very woody sage. It came with a root mass the size of a football and I shoehorned it into a void in front of a raised bed that's only about 5" wide. I hope it comes back but I won't waste any tears if it doesn't. Mostly, I wanted the spot those 2 were in for a second planting of corn and now that patch is free and ready to get planted on Sunday. Mission accomplished!
There may or there may not be enough time to get much produce out of my plantings. That I'll just have to see. But pepper plants will overwinter and keep going for 2-3 years. So will the woody herbs. And if I had put in an eggplant chances are good it would come back in the Spring. Chives and onions will seed themselves liberally -- I think I've got onions that I didn't plant starting to come up through all the soil the I've been actively working for the last few weeks.
_____
Sifted out 20 more gallons of compost this morning. Then I potted up a well-established oregano plant. I'll see if it revives and keep it in its 6" pot to offer at the next month's produce exchange since I have 2 more thriving sections of the same original plant. I transplanted them to one of the raised beds several weeks ago and they're going gangbusters. I also pulled up a very old, very woody sage. It came with a root mass the size of a football and I shoehorned it into a void in front of a raised bed that's only about 5" wide. I hope it comes back but I won't waste any tears if it doesn't. Mostly, I wanted the spot those 2 were in for a second planting of corn and now that patch is free and ready to get planted on Sunday. Mission accomplished!
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I just saw this and wonder if it would be of interest. Could Restoring Soil Help Halt Climate Change? Of course it would take the ag industry to adopt better methods but we can be a start I guess.
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