That has always intrigued me, too. And if I had been left to my own devices and living alone in my Log Cabin home in Tennessee, I was planning on either a composting toilet or the one that incinerates everything. Both of which could eventually be used in the garden, I’d think!
And, after years in the Army, I would chose YOUR method over digging yet another Latrine in the wild, LOL!
Also, look how many years we used Outhouses? No one thought that was anything but practical and better than a chamber pot!
I’m excited to see how it ‘goes’ for you!
*Ba-Dump-Dump* “Thanks! I’ll be here all week! Try the Veal and don’t forget to tip your Waitress!”
You’ll appreciate this short video. One of my favotires.
‘Sh*t Weekend Farmers Say’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjc0wcOX9pc
P.S. ‘MetroGrow’ which you will see spread/sprayed on farm fields all over the Midwest, is human waste that has been processed. Milorganite (pelleted) is human waste, and makes a great lawn fertilizer - lots of Nitrogen!
So, SOMEONE is doing this on a large scale - why not you on a smaller one? ;)
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!