Food Crop Fertilizer Features (Gulp!) Human Urine

Sept. 9, 2009— -- It's the ultimate in recycling. Take some wood ashes from the fireplace, add a little of your own urine and spread it around your tomato plants. You may get a blockbuster crop.

Scientists in Finland have found that wood ash and human urine perform just as well as more expensive mineral fertilizers, at least for some crops, while doing less damage to the environment. The combination is rich in nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium and magnesium. The researchers raised a healthy crop of tomatoes in a carefully controlled series of laboratory experiments.

Other research has shown that human urine is an effective substitute for synthetic fertilizers, at least for cucumbers, corn, cabbage, wheat and tomatoes. Ash has also been shown to be useful in agriculture.

But the Fins say they are the first ones to combine urine with wood ash, and plants treated with that substitute performed four times as well as unfertilized plants and left the soil less acidic. The scientists insist it's safe and doesn't pose "any microbial or chemical risks."

But what do tomatoes raised on human urine taste like? Just like ordinary tomatoes, according to a panel of 20 daring folks who concluded they couldn't tell any difference.

The finding could be a boon to third world countries by drastically reducing the cost of fertilizer, and the lead scientist reported via e-mail that people in poor countries may be more likely to build toilets now because they could reuse their urine.

"Our study demonstrated that the construction of a toilet is not an expenditure, but it is an investment to get fertilizer," Surendra Prahan of the University of Kuopio in Finland said. The study was published in the current issue of the American Chemical Society's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

But why human urine? Well, because there is so much of it, and it's easy to collect.

"It is available or formed in every household, even in houses with poor people," Prahan said. A similar result could result from using cattle urine, but that's a lot more difficult to collect. And, of course, chicken urine is out of the question.