One Man's Trash

The foundation of the Malian economy is composed of subsistence agriculture in which peasant farmers feed their families with the fruits of their own labor. Indeed, the manual work involved in millet cultivation could be made faster and easier with better shovels and ploughs – but it is difficult to expand the annual harvest yield very much with a limited allotment of land and water. Here in the epoch of pre-capitalist means of production, there are only so many ways of stimulating the economy. The cost of farming with a tractor, combine or commercial pesticides could not be justified by a crop that is consumed by the people who grow it and hardly sold at market for currency. Hence microcredit or cash grants are of little use to expand millet production, and any new international trade agreements or adjustment of currency exchange rates would be all but irrelevant to the subsistence agricultural economy. What rural millet farmers need to increase their yields is something more organic than capital, something tangible and solid…


To find an apt method to stimulate economic growth, Peace Corps Volunteers are not asked to further the Obama administration’s international trade policy or the interests of American business. Instead, we must return to the first principles of the American Republic and the sustainable agricultural practices of the Founding Fathers.


Though most remember George Washington as the commanding General of the Continental Army and as the first President of the United States, Washington has been overlooked by history for his innovations as an organic farmer and poop management engineer. Paul L. Haworth’s biography George Washington, Farmer states that at his Mount Vernon Vernon estate he “saved manure as if it were already so much gold, and hoped with its use and with judicious rotation of crops” to reap plentiful harvests of tobacco, corn and wheat. Washington also experimented with fertilizers, finding that the fertilizer with the most stimulating effect was a mixture of sheep poop and black mould.

Thomas Jefferson – the author of the Declaration of Independence, the first Secretary of State, second Vice President and third President of the United States – was also deeply interested in organic fertilization. In Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, Edwin Morris Betts explains:

Jefferson used dung in three different stages of decomposition – fresh or long dung, half purified or short dung, and well-rotted dung. He does not state which condition of the dung he found most beneficial for his crops. Jefferson probably used very little manure of any kind on his lands in the early days of farming at Monticello and at his other plantations. The newly cleared land was plentiful and rich and brought fourth abundant crops. He expressed this idea in a letter to George Washington on June 28, 1793. He wrote, “…Manure does not enter into this, a good farm because we can buy an acre of new land cheaper than we can manure an old acre…” But later, after the soil had been robbed of his fertility by successive crops of corn and tobacco, fertilizing his soil became a necessity.

James Madison – co-author of The Federalist Papers, father of the Bill of Rights, Secretary of State and our fourth President – also stood out among the Founding Fathers as the most eloquent student of waste management. On May 12, 1818 he gave an address to the Agricultural Society of Albemarle, Virginia:

Nothing is more certain than that continual cropping without manure deprives the soil of its fertility. It is equally certain that fertility may be preserved or restored by giving to the earth animal or vegetable manure equivalent to the matter taken from it. That restoration to the earth of all that naturally grows on it prevents its impoverishment is sufficiently seen in our forests, where the annual exuviae of the trees and plants replace the fertility of which they deprived the earth... That individual farms do lose their fertility in proportion as crops are taken from them and return of manure neglected is a fact not likely to be questioned. The most logical mode of preserving the richness and of enriching a farm is certainly that of applying a sufficiency of manure and vegetable matter in a decomposed state; in order to procure which too much care cannot be observed in saving every material furnished by the farm. This resource was among the earliest discoveries of man living by agriculture; and a proper use of it has been made a test of good husband in all countries, ancient and modern, where its principle and profits have been studied.

Though Washington, Jefferson and Madison probably only owned slaves descended from the inhabitants of what is now Mali, the Minianka subgroup of the Bambara tribe independently developed similar practices of organic agriculture. One might even contend that the Minianka are more absolutist in their waste management methods – so much, in fact, that they make efficient use of the contents of their own solid waste. Even in fairly densely-populated cities, a common sight in Malian streets is the evacuated contents of emptied pit latrines. When the poop has left the latrine, the Minianka no longer refer to it as bo - "poop" - but as nogo – which has a double meaning; nogo can mean “filth”, for they will refer to something extremely dirty as “nogolen don”, but it can also be translated as a more benign “compost”.


Part of the reason why most Malians just throw their shit into the street is that they simply do not understand the health hazards that this poses to their neighbors. But they also use their collection of months of their phosphorus-rich fecal matter as the foundation of a prime compost pile. As they harvest their various crops, Malians cover their crap with nitrogenous and carbon-rich millet stalks, peanut shells, corn husks, mango pits, and all of the other waste that is produced while farming, cooking and eating their food. And livestock also enjoy rummaging through these compost piles to find all sorts of goodies, so poop eventually gets more distributed among the layers of vegetable matter. Over the course of the eight months or so between the addition of one season's agricultural waste to the compost pile and its recycling into the next season's fertilizer, all of that poop and organic waste should decompose into a rich humus.

Down the street from me, Soongalo Sogoba maintains one of the most impressive compost piles in all of Sanadougou.


Malians harvest millet from October to November, and if they farm cotton they pick it in December. The start planting again when the rainy season begins in June – so depending upon the crop designated to it those fields have been lying fallow for seven to nine months. Cotton robs the nutrients from the soil so thoroughly that the cotton fields are pointedly more austere. Crop rotation with nitrogen-fixing plants like beans and peanuts is seldom practiced, so if these fields are to be useful the next planting season the soils must be rejuvenated with fertilizer. So during April and May they send boys to load their compost onto donkey carts and bring it out to the fields.


Over the next few weeks the farmers will rake their compost through the rows, and once the rains come they will aid the fertilizer’s decomposition and carry its nutrients into the soil.


However, the composting practices prevalent in Mali are not as organic as those at Monticello. Only a few generations ago, very close to 100 percent of all solid waste produced by Minianka farmers was composed of agricultural waste and it all made great fertilizer. But in recent decades as foreign-made industrial goods have begun to penetrate this remote market and household garbage now includes decidedly inorganic plastics and metals, the quality of Malian compost has significantly degraded. To be more precise, Malian compost can now be toxic – roughly correlating to the degree that a particular family participates in the market economy. Here is a close-up of Soongalo’s massive fertilizer collection.


A lot of Malians are concerned about all the plastic bags lying around – only because goats and sheep often think that they are food, try to swallow them and choke to death. So it is common for people to burn their trash in the streets – something that wouldn’t be so bad if trash still consisted entirely of millet stalks and corn husks. But burning plastic releases noxious fumes into the air, exposing the population to toxic heavy metals, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and carcinogenic dioxins. Even with the complete and utter lack of industrialization, air quality is surprisingly bad in market towns like Sanadougou because everyone sells their wares in cheap Chinese-manufactured plastic bags which are inevitably incinerated; the concentrated burning of plastics makes breathing in Malian cities absolutely intolerable. Air quality is at its worst when night falls, because many people think that breathing plastic fumes is only bad when you can see them.


What is even more hazardous is that people can buy cheap Chinese-made batteries for use in flashlights and radios, and these batteries also make their way into their compost piles. Every battery carries a warning “MAY EXPLODE OR LEAK IF CHARGED OR DISPOSED OF IN FIRE” – but of course, no one can read here and even if they could read they can’t read English. Batteries also carry a pictogram of a garbage can with a cross through it and “Pb” – the abbreviation for plumbum; anyone in the developed world should be able to recognize this to mean that they should not throw their batteries in the garbage because they contain lead. But in a society without trash collection where hardly anyone could identify the image of a garbage can, these safety warnings are meaningless hieroglyphics. So Malians burn their batteries with the rest of their trash, they explode, and battery acid containing extremely toxic concentrations of lead, nickel and cadmium seeps into the compost and the soil.

Taken from another angle, one can see how Soongalo’s otherwise awesome compost pile is actually really dangerous because he collects it only a few meters from the well where his family draws all of their drinking water.


Even if this were a purely organic compost pile, a significant amount of that cow, sheep and donkey shit would inevitably make it into Soongalo’s uncovered drinking water supply. And it does. But since he also tries to compost plastic and batteries, Soongalo is also polluting his family's drinking water with toxic concentrations of lead, nickel and cadmium. Thus it should come as a surprise to no one that most of Soongalo’s children have severe neurological disabilities. I’ve tried to politely tried to explain to him why he should move his compost pile somewhere further from his well, but the modern consensus on lead poisoning can be much-too-easily rejected by a man who is convinced that his children are mentally retarded because they have been cursed by an evil sorcerer.

The health hazards of improperly disposing extremely-toxic substances are particularly acute when they are thrown away directly adjacent to the wells from which people draw their drinking water. But even if plastic bags are thrown away in trash heaps far from the water supply, if that refuse is eventually used to fertilize the fields then the toxic materials are going to seep into the soils, they will be absorbed by the millet plants and people are still going to consume that lead, nickel and cadmium with their food – albeit maybe in smaller concentrations. You are what you eat – and if you fertilize your food crop with batteries, then your body is going to contain lead, nickel and cadmium and you are probably going to develop anemia, cancer, renal failure and irreversible brain damage.

If there is anything that can be done to improve the quality of the water, air and soil in this country, it is to teach people about the health hazards of pollution and safe waste management practices. When you consider how controversial environmentalism is in the United States, you can only imagine how much more difficult it is to get these concepts across is in a conservative culture like the Miniankas who are generally ignorant of modern science and believe that illness comes from frogs, the wind, whistling at night and voodoo spells. In a society where people are more scared of soap than they are of consuming the fecal matter of those who don’t wash their hands before eating from the communal food bowl, it will long remain an uphill battle to get people concerned about the carcinogens they put into the air and the battery acid they put into their food and water.

Of course, the absolutely most environmentally-sound course of action would be to encourage Malians to reduce or eliminate the inorganic trash they produce by going to market with canvas tote bags and replacing their disposable batteries with rechargeable Energizers –insh’allah this strategy might be feasible over the course of the next few centuries. Though in the meantime, Sanadougou needs to adopt different ways of disposing their organic and inorganic waste.

In some cities and larger towns, Peace Corps Volunteers or NGOs have helped communities to establish trash collection agencies. Such a project often entails creating demand for services where none might exist. But once there exists a critical mass of families who are interested in separating their organic from their inorganic waste, one would have to get them separate containers to contain the latter; in the past PCVs have bought empty steel gasoline barrels and hired blacksmiths to split them in half to serve as trash cans. And then they have to get the village to designate a fallow field isolated from the water supply and dig a massive hole to serve as a landfill. And they would have to dig a separate hole and line it with concrete so that it can contain the toxic chemicals in batteries. And then they have to organize any number of donkey cart owners to serve as trash collectors, come to these people’s homes once a week, take their inorganic waste and dump it in the appropriate pits in the landfill. And this is the kicker: the trash can-owners would have to pay for these services and the donkey cart owners or le Bureau de la Mairie would have to collect payments and manage their funds without any fraud or embezzlement so that this trash collection agency can stay afloat as a profitable business. Even in those few municipalities in Mali where there is a trash collection agency, services are often so irregular that subscribers stop paying their bills and collection stops altogether. But nevertheless, even if the agency functions relatively well, without laws mandating participation there will always be cheap, lazy, ignorant people who won’t spend money on trash collection when they can burn their trash for free.

Most importantly, any effort to improve the sanitation of Malian waste management practices cannot lose sight of the fact that the application of garbage as fertilizer constitutes a crucial part of this country’s agricultural economy – no grassroots campaign to improve the safety of local composting practices can succeed unless it can also promise farmers that these new practices will improve the total yield and quality of their harvest. Even if the health hazards of consuming plastic and battery acid is beyond the comprehension of the intended audience, extension agents like myself have to emphasize that the toxins at hands are harmful to their millet, corn and cotton crops.

So I have been collecting my own compost pile to demonstrate how to make even better quality humus.



The quality and potency of compost increases accordingly with the ratio and concentration of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. I collect nitrogen-rich millet stalks and corn husks like everyone else in town, though the only livestock I have to my name are a dog and a cat so for phosphorus I pay children with milk candies to collect buckets of cow, donkey, sheep and goat manure. I add my rotten vegetables, mango pits, banana peels and orange skins, but I prevent my compost pile from emanating the sour reek of organic fermentation because the ample vegetable matter contains enough carbon for the micro-organisms to finish their job and break down dead matter into usable molecules. And my compost is even richer than that of my neighbors because I add my own urine – which contains 90 percent of excess human potassium. So not only is my compost essentially free of the toxic chemicals which ruin Malian compost, but it contains much more potassium so that my garden crops can utilize the nitrogen and phosphorus to build complex chemicals needed for plant growth and reproduction - and I get to consume the fruits of my labor.

Liquid Gold

One of my investment banker friends wrote to me musing how a poor country like Mali could escape its current stagnation; “Africa will need to diversify its economy away from commodities and raw materials into manufactured products if it has any hope of prospering”, he said, and when it comes to advancing from a subsistence agriculture economy to industrialization, “the bottom line is capital investment.” My friend saw the problem of African poverty in terms of underperforming GDP, a lack of final goods sold at market for currency to be saved in banks to accumulate with compound interest and re-invested so that capital can regenerate and expand unto itself. His view from Manhattan was fairly typical of anyone who makes their living in the trade of credits and debts, who views economic development in terms of developing a monetary economy and a self-contained industry of finance.

However, here in the muddy village of Sanadougou, most economic activity occurs in village without currency ever changing hands. Here the bulk of the population spends most of their labor planting and harvesting millet and rice and corn for their own family’s consumption. When the farming season is done, men spend the next largest chunk of their time building and rebuilding their own homes and granaries with mud and rocks and sticks that they find out in the fields. Women toil day in and day out drawing water and cooking and cleaning and taking care of their many, many children. Gross Domestic Product is such a grossly inadequate means of measuring economic development in this economy, for the food and housing and family networks which make up the bulk of the people’s tangible wealth are never sold as final goods on any marketplace.

The work done by Malian villagers that does count towards the monetary economy is decidedly secondary to food production, house construction and child rearing. In the relatively fertile Sikasso and the southern portions of Ségou, Koulikoro and Kayes provinces, surplus fields are allocated to farming cotton as a cash crop to be sold to the textile mills. In villages like Sanadougou, farmers produce such an excess of peanuts that they can sell them to urban populations who cook tigadegana. During rainy season women also gather shea nuts to cook a butter which is used to make soap and moisturizing cream. And of course all families raise some combination of cows, sheep, goats, chickens, guinea hens or rabbits for meat – only on holidays or weddings could most people ever justify slaughtering an entire goat, so villagers raise livestock mostly to sell to urban butchers. The money these villagers earn in exchange for these cash crops is what pays for their tea, sugar and gasoline. Altogether, the majority of such basic commerce is not transacted between villagers, for it consists of producing raw materials for the consumption of the urban merchant class or for manufacturing into finished goods by multinational corporations.

The most significant cash business in the traditional village economy which stays in the village for local consumption is the tilling of vegetable gardens. Most families have a small plot in their concession fenced in with sticks where they keep a papaya tree, a banana tree or two, and during rainy and cold seasons they can raise an annual patch of onions, tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, sweet potatoes, yams or manioc. People tend to specialize in one or two crops and sell most of their output from garden season at market, but since tomatoes could never last the 57-kilometer motorcycle ride to the nearest city let alone pay for the cost of the gasoline, perishable produce can only be sold to other villagers. Fruits and vegetables are just about the only cash crops which are consumed in village and therefore insulated from the vicissitudes of global commodity prices and the distortion of First World subsidies. And thus in rural villages the most sustainable economic development takes the form of building gardens and improving their yields. Not only do improved garden yields increase monetary income, but since those yields are consumed in village they increase the population's intake of Vitamin A, Vitamin B, Vitamin C, potassium, phosphorus, etc. An investment in gardens is an investment in economic development and public health.

The World Bank and USAID and NGOs get this quite well. The Western bureaucracies of Third World development love investing in vegetable gardens because not only does it beget economic activity that can be measured by capital-centric indicators like GDP, but building vegetable gardens sounds less like impersonal business and more like good ol’ American humanitarianism.

Unfortunately, the Humanitarian-Industrial Complex understands the value of vegetable gardening only so much as it can be conducted from the confines of their air-conditioned offices in Bamako. If the only tool in in your tool belt is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail - and at times it seems as though the only tool at their disposal is a big wad of capital that can only be spent on high-tech contractors also based out of the capitol city. So they buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware, pile into SUVs and swoop into villages and construct elaborate irrigation pump systems and build long chain-link fences for the Malians to plant gigantic community gardens.
But they never stay long enough to teach the people how to maintain the pumps – or they try as best as they can in French to a community that speaks only Bambara. So the pumps inevitably fall apart and no one can fix them and the “beneficiaries” of this big agricultural development projects can benefit themselves in no perceivable way other than dismantling the LEED-certified, solar-powered irrigation pumps and selling the parts as scrap metal. The professional vegetable gardening consultants designed their entire plan on the premise of a functioning irrigation pump, so they didn’t bother investing in quaint technologies like wells and pulleys, so even manual irrigation of this gigantic community garden is now impossible. With no irrigation system this vast plot becomes agriculturally useless, so the villagers pull up all the fence posts and use them to make fences around their own private gardens that they can water by hand. And thus the financial largesse of taxpayers and well-minded donors is all but wasted in a gargantuan orgy of cadeau give-aways and outright theft which does little more than enrich the most enterprising of bandits, discredits any future development efforts, and saps the motivation for truly impoverished people to do anything more than sit on their butts watching Akon music videos on their iPhones and wait for the next SUV full of white people handing out presents.

What the Humanitarian-Industrial Complex doesn’t seem to grasp is that if there is ever going to be sustainable economic growth on the village level, it has to be done without massive infusions of Western capital; in fact, if an economic development project requires the investment of foreign capital, it is going to end once the money dries up and is therefore almost certainly unsustainable in the long run. One guy with a cousin who works high up in the national bank might somehow be able to land enough cash to buy a tractor, but mechanized farming equipment is still much too expensive to serve any foreseeable benefit to the masses with no savings, no landed property to secure vast sums of credit and no connections to defy the natural laws of capitalism. The only way that truly sustainable economic growth is going to occur on the village level is if Malians adopt methods of augmenting their own gardens’ yields with technologies so cheap that they are practically if not one hundred percent free, simple technologies that they can assemble themselves, technologies that are literally too small to fail.

Often when I am walking through my village’s filthy, disgusting, sewage-filled streets, I think of how "underdevelopment" is just a fancy way of saying that resources aren’t being utilized adequately. But this isn’t South Africa or the Congo; there aren’t any valuable mineral resources underneath Sanadougou’s meager soils and sandstone. There really isn’t much to be employed here besides sand, dirt, mud, crumbly rocks and sunlight. Hell, this economy is suffering because water is scarce…

I also think of the profound dilemmas of sustainable development while I’m micturating, stircumating and taking bucket baths in my nyegen. I wonder what of economic value there could possibly be here that Malians aren’t already capitalizing upon…

After such profound thinking sessions, one of the first things I see when I exit my nyegen is my soak pit – still purposefully unfinished – and one of my four papaya trees. They have become such fixtures of my everyday life that I don’t really give them much thought. But after a while I started to notice something…

Way back in November of 2008 after the late James Brown I's inspirational urination and my digging of Sanadougou’s first ever soak pit, the adjacent papaya tree wasn’t much to sneeze at. It was a wimpy, pathetic looking thing.



But a year later, after 12 months of my peeing and bathing and washing all my urine away into that soak pit, something breathtaking has occurred – that wimpy-looking papaya has blossomed into the most prolific fruit tree in my entire garden!



It is the most magnificent papaya tree in all of Sanadougou!



It is full with more than 30 football-sized fruits!



When I’m toiling away in my garden, the neighbors walk by and marvel at the papaya tree and wonder how it is that I make it bloom so. They assume that I went to the city and bought sacks of “Tubabu fertilizer”, because it is well-known in this country teeming with livestock manure that white people are known to spend exorbitant amounts of money on imported, factory-produced chemicals to fertilize their gardens.

“Well, I water it just the same as the other papaya trees, and I don’t feed it with any more cow poop than the other papayas. The only difference that could explain this one papaya’s great fruits is the fact that it is planted right next to my soak pit, so all of the sewage from my nyegen just happens to flow underground directly towards the papaya’s tap roots. It must be the economical reuse of my own wastewater that is reaping Allah’s blessings upon my garden!”

“Your papayas are dirty!” some neighbors say “Do not eat them!”

Au contraire, my nyegen-fueled fruit is perfectly safe and perfectly delicious! There are few things more rewarding than slurping the flesh of a juicy ripe papaya and knowing that the fruit which I am eating was fertilized with my very own urine.


Out of all seriousness, the use of human urine as fertilizer is a wonderfully efficient and absolutely cheap means of increasing the yields of most garden crops. Many individuals might have religious scruples about fertilizing food for human consumption with human waste, many more might be repelled by the “yuck” factor because it almost sounds like humans are directly consuming their own sewage and all of the pathogens associated with it. But that’s not the case – only intermediary plants are consuming the valuable nutrients which urine contains, so these nutrients are simply being recycled. When you think about it, there really isn’t any substantive difference between using human waste and the waste of other animals as fertilizer – there are minor variations in the chemical content of the excreta of different species and especially depending on their own food consumption, but excess nitrogen passed through homo sapiens is no different than that passed through a cow or a sheep.

The most significant matter to consider when choosing between fertilizers is the N-P-K ratio: the relative proportions between nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium contained in the mixture. The reason why chicken manure is such a more productive fertilizer than the manure of other farm animals is because chickens don’t separate solid and liquid waste through a urethra and rectum – birds dispose of it all at once in one N-P-K-rich smattering with one multipurpose cloacae. Compared to human feces, human liquid waste is remarkably richer in all three nutrients – especially nitrogen. In different proportions, the urine of all mammals is more nutrient rich than their feces. The only reason why animals feces are used exclusively for traditional fertilizer and not animal urine is that it is very easy to send a boy out with a bucket to collect cow poop days after the cows have grazed over a particular field – though to collect livestock urine would either require training those same cattle to pee in a bucket, or for that boy to wait underneath the bovine nether-regions in anticipation of those valuable showers of gold.

We humans, however, have over millions of years of evolution developed the ability to control our bodily functions with behaviors conducive to avoiding disease and enhancing food supplies. Not just agriculture but also sanitation is one of the hallmarks of an advanced civilization. The Bambara people have on their own initiative pieced together mud and sticks for the basic nyegen technology which contains fecal matter underground and disposes of liquid waste out into the village streets. My introduction of more sanitary concrete platforms and soak pits is a significant improvement of their pre-existing technology in so far as further reducing human exposure to dangerous pathogens; however, unless everyone in Sanadougou plants their gardens directly adjacent to their soak pits, even this sanitary infrastructure is a tremendous waste of valuable nutrients which could be used to improve the yields of their fruits and vegetables.

The next step in improving Minianka society's waste management practices is to promote an appropriate technology which renders human urine into a usable, portable fertilizer that can easily be transported to the nearest garden. Merely walking out to the cabbage patch and taking a whiz doesn’t suffice because undiluted urine is so acidic that it is harmful to most plants, and moreover, peeing all over cabbage significantly reduces its desirability to potential customers at market.

I invested 4,500 CFA (~$9) worth of plastic and rubber sold in Sanadougou’s weekly market and made a simple contraption which changes the whole equation. I took a 20-liter plastic gasoline drum and spent a week cleaning and treating it extensively so that it is so antiseptic that I could store drinking water inside it. I filled the drum with 4 liters of water and marked off the water line so that I could know when it was 1/5 full. Then I took a plastic funnel and fastened it to the drum’s opening with sliced-up motorcycle tire inner tubes. With this, I could now pee into this plastic drum and store it with ease.

However, my urine storage tank was still incomplete. What makes urine fertilizer so effective is its rich nitrogen content, but if urine is exposed to the air then most of the nitrogen will escape in gaseous form. So I took five sturdy plastic bags, placed them inside one another and filled the inner-most bag with water so that they would seal the opening of the funnel.



Now when I have to go #1, I just simply aim for this funnel instead of the ground-level aperture of my nyegen. It is no extra hassle – if anything, it’s more convenient because there is less of a risk of splash-back for those of us men with superb aim. Though do not think that urine fertilizer is a technology limited to those endowed with dexterous urine-aiming devices – numerous phallicly-challenged Peace Corps Volunteers have overcome their disadvantage by peeing into a cup and then pouring the contents down into their urine storage tank up to the 4-liter mark.

Then I fill the urine storage tank almost all the way to the 20-liter mark in order to fully dilute the urine so that its pH is acceptable to the plants in my garden. It is important to let this mixture sit for a good length of time so that the urine and water are evenly distributed. And then I use the nyegen like normal for the next three days until application.

The use of human urine as fertilizer is much less of a health risk than using untreated human feces, which can transmit giardia, dysentery, hookworm, roundworm, etc. if applied directly to garden crops and is therefore quite dangerous to the gardener and as well as those who consume their fruits or vegetable. Pure urine, on the other hand, is so acidic that bacteria cannot live very long in it; it is so sterile that in extreme situations where freshwater is inaccessible humans should drink their own urine. The only disease that one should really worry about transmitting via urine fertilizer is schistosomiasis, and for this reason after reaching the 4-liter mark I let my liquid gold sit for at least two if not three days before application. The logic behind this is that schistosomiasis is a disease transmitted by infected persons urinating in bodies of water where other people are bathing or swimming; if an infected person were to directly apply their urine fertilizer in, say, an extra-large banana furrow, the schistosomiasis cercariae could penetrate the skin of another gardener working in that banana furrow later that day. But if the water-borne parasites do not find another carrier within 48 hours of their initial urination into a body of water, they die. If I wait until the third day until applying, urine fertilizer is perfectly safe.

There must be a structured means of applying urine fertilizer as well. It must be applied directly to the soil as close to the roots as possible so as to avoid potential contamination of the edible fruits and vegetables, and so the acidic urine does not damage the plant itself. Directly after application, each recipient plant should be irrigated extensively to ensure that the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium percolate down into the soil. One should apply only modest amounts fairly evenly amongst all plants, and to alternate fertilization with many non-fertilized irrigations so as not to overload the soil.

This practice is good for most garden crops; I use it for my papayas, guavas, oranges, lemons, bananas, zucchini and butternut squash – all of which have grown tremendously since I began this practice. Urine fertilizer is especially effective on crops which respond to nitrogen levels such as lettuce and cabbage – though with vegetables which are usually eaten raw in salad one must be particularly careful to not splash any diluted pee on the plant itself. There are only a few crops that should not be applied with urine fertilizer, most obviously nitrogen-fixing plants like beans and peanuts, and also rice because paddies are usually flooded with water and those cultivating it would have to wade through potentially schistosomiasis-carrying urine.

The end result is that gardens fertilized with diluted urine can see dramatic multiplications in output. Finnish agricultural chemists found that tomatoes fed with urine fertilizer saw 4.2 times as much yield as the control samples, and calculated that the urine produced by one average adult in one year contains enough nutrients to increase a cabbage crop by 160 cabbages (141 pounds) more than a cabbage crop fertilized with standard commercial fertilizer. And the intensity of urine fertilization has profound effects as well; all of my papaya trees are fertilized with urine – but the one directly adjacent to my soak pit has such a reliable daily stream of nutrients that it has borne 6 times as many fruit (and much larger fruit) than those that have been only mildly fertilized.

The potential of urine fertilizer to jump-start Mali’s gardens and its stagnant village economy is enormous. If a small gardener here were to multiply their tomato yield 4-fold or their papaya yield 6-fold, if they grow an additional 160 heads of cabbage (141 pounds) in one gardening season, they could augment their family’s nutritional intake accordingly. And if they can’t consume an extra 160 heads of cabbage, well, let’s just say that that’s more cabbage than what is sold in Sanadougou’s market over the course of an entire year. Even if just a handful of gardeners in my village were to take urine fertilization to their own plots, it could significantly expand their yields, increase these farmers’ incomes, maybe even lower the price of fruits and vegetables to such an extent that they could become a more regular addition to Malians’ carbohydrate-based diet and improve the health of this entire malnourished society. And the practice of urine fertilization doesn’t require anyone to take out any loans, it doesn’t require some NGO to swoop in and build some overly complicated contraption – all that it requires is the purchase of $9 worth of plastic and rubber, the construction of a nifty little urine storage tank, and for gardeners to pee in it.

If that's not sustainable development on the organic village level, I don't know what is.

Chickenshit on the Chesapeake

Here is an interesting story explaining the problems in maintaining the ideal supply of chicken poop. Though chicken poop is among the world's greatest known organic fertilizers, no one really likes to transport poop across long distances, so without a vibrant local agricultural sector to consume all of this chicken poop it becomes a rather noxious form of water pollution.