I kind of did my own take on “humanure”. I’ve had enough experience with food poisoning to make me paranoid about waste contamination. I know the books on humanure all say that composting for the recommended time kills off any pathogens, but I could see too many ways for that to fail.
Plus, my farm just doesn’t have any good spots to do the composting. The downside of being on a steep hillside.
My solution was kind of a cross between humanure and an incinerating toilet. Everything goes into a heavy-duty steel bucket, not a plastic one. I chose to use more absorbent materials like peat moss and/or coconut coir rather than wood shavings, because separating out the urine just isn’t going to happen.
Originally, the idea was to set the full bucket on a rocket stove (built just for burning these buckets), and use a lid with small vent holes to restrict airflow while still allowing pressure to escape. The result would be a bucket of charcoal, which could then be inoculated to use as biochar. Biochar does amazing things for the soil! But my land doesn’t have a lot of firewood, so I’d been looking for ways to make the char from things other than wood. Using “waste” seemed like a way to use one problem to solve another, since any pathogens would get killed off in the charring process.
What actually happened is, because I’m only out at my farm a few times per week, the bucket ends up taking most of the summer to fill. I haven’t gotten the rocket stove built yet, so when the first bucket was filled, I just put a non-ventilated lid on it and set it aside, thinking I’d get around to burning it soon. “Soon” has yet to happen, but it turned out to be unnecessary. The following spring when I was maneuvering one of the tractors out, I accidentally bumped that bucket and knocked the lid loose. It turned out that the contents of that bucket had broken down so completely, that there was just a thin layer of dirt left at the bottom of an otherwise-empty bucket.
I’m pretty sure if I was there full-time, the results of this experiment would be different. But so far, I’ve been able to just keep rotating buckets partway through the year, without actually emptying either of them. The contents break down to the point where, after 3 years of use, the layer on the bottom is only about 2 inches deep.
That was probably WAY more detail than you really wanted, but there it is. My “humanure” system!
Thanks for the interesting response. Yeah, I’m also going to be awhile filling the bucket. I figure I’ll dump it once it’s about half full, sooner if it seems to be turning nasty. It’s only been two days, but so far, so good. I watched a Youtube video of an off-grid family that simply put the lid on their full buckets and stacked them outside until spring. Then they dumped all of them — two or three dozen — at once! There was no odor at all and the content was scarcely recognizable. I’m pleasantly surprised myself that there’s no smell at all. I’m using pine shavings from Tractor Supply for cover material. I’m out in the desert on a well, so it’s nice to be able to save quite a bit of water.