Quote:
Originally Posted by WallShadow
Uh, Webstral, what is SAMAD, or any enclave of civilization doing with the liquid component of its sewage? Lots of ready-made ammonia waiting for harvesting right there, useable with minimal processing.
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Certainly, research shows that urine can be an effective fertilizer. There are some potential long-term issues with salts, but in the years immediately following the Exchange few are going to be concerned about that. For intensive gardening, where the source of urine and the plants to be fertilized are closely co-located, urine might compete well with ammonia fertilizer. For larger-scale farming, though, gathering and applying urine might be a difficult exercise. Still, it would be interesting to see the results of a concerted effort to gather urine (and urine only) for spraying on fields as a fertilizer. The survivors of the nuclear exchange should be amenable to having their habits changed if anyone is.
Ammonia also has the advantage of being useful as fuel. As the scale of agriculture expands from garden plots to something resembling modern American agriculture, you have to pull the plow and the combines somehow. Modern machinery has the advantage of minimizing labor, provided you can fuel the machines. You can use horses, but they need a portion of the food being grown. Turning electricity into fertilizer and fuel for the farm machines enables a handful of people to do the job relative to the huge numbers of folks involved in subsistence agriculture throughout much of the US in 2000. People freed from the farms can do other jobs, like fight or make things.
So while urine certainly can do the job of fertilizing, it seems to lend itself more to intensive gardening than large-scale agriculture when compared to industrially-produced ammonia. Provided yields are in any way comparable, the practitioners of large-scale agriculture are going to have an edge over the intensive gardeners because the large-scale folks will be able to commit more manpower to doing things beside growing food.