PUTNEY — Did you know that each year you produce nearly enough fertilizer to grow one year's worth of food? We're all full of a renewing cycle of liquid gold (and you can read a slim volume, by the same name, subtitled The Life and Lure of Using Urine to Grow Plants, by Carol Steinfeld).
There's a great opportunity for community members to recover their long-ago healthy toddler fascination with bodily fluids and immediately benefit the environment at the same time. The Rich Earth Institute, right here in Brattleboro, needs 3,000 gallons of urine by July 15.
Fair Winds Farm in Brattleboro applied 600 gallons of urine from 60 donors last summer to its hayfields with exciting results. We have 130 donors and need 75 more to join us in order to make our goal.
It's easy! The collecting jugs and equipment are provided free, and liquid contributions can be delivered to the office on Fuller Drive (just behind Pine Heights).
Recycling our urine has many advantages: it saves about 4,000 gallons of clean flush water per person per year (also reducing your water bill). It reduces pollution of rivers and estuaries; creates an inexpensive, sustainable fertilizer; and transforms a waste we all produce into a resource we all need.
The Rich Earth Institute is a U.S. Department of Agriculture–funded research project, the first field trial in the United States of using sanitized human urine as fertilizer, a technique that Germany, Sweden, and other European countries have been working with for over a dozen years.
Kim Nace and Abe Noe-Hays are pioneering the field trials in the US.. Those wanting more info can visit RichEarthInstitute.org. To sign up, send an email to info@RichEarthInstitute.org or call 802-579-1857.
I'm a second-year donor participant, along with others from Centre Congregational and Guilford Community Churches, the Brattleboro Women's Chorus, participants in Brattleboro Curbside Composting, and members of the wider Brattleboro and Greenfield-Northampton communities. Please join us!