As any gardener worth their first $250 tomato can tell you, the problem with composting straight feces is a lack of good nitro-carbon mix. Too much brown, not enough green. Or possibly reverse, since biosolids are heavy on nitrogen, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s a waste management 101 calculation. If nothing else, we should be half-filling those containers with shredded paper waste and a few pounds of earthworms.
Those containers are not composting well, because they’re not getting stirred, but they are cooking and there’s some aerobic action, because if people can smell it, it’s not sealed. (And that’s good, because if they were sealed, and cooking, they’d be exploding any time now.) Containers with a mix, plus worms, would be much more usable after a couple of weeks of transport. That’s essentially what my great-grandfather was doing every winter with 50 cows, their bedding, and a big compost pile. It’s not rocket science. It’s just labor intensive, smelly and risky at this scale, and right now, we’re externalizing this cost onto poor, rural towns that can’t refuse. But food and fiber production should be a relatively closed circle.
Not sure I trust Alabama’s Department of Ag. If they’re like most state ag departments since the 1970s, they’re 85% agribusiness industry captured, meaning most of their recommendations are not in line with agricultural botany, agricultural ecology, or agricultural best practices, and encourage excess product and equipment use (which damages the soil, contributes to erosion and water pollution, and serves to transfer money from farmers to lenders). Skimming the waste use document… yeah. Using manure-based fertilizer is hard - it’s inconsistent and requires the farmer to think, test, observe and calculate more variables. Haber-Bosch fertilizers are easier - simple ratios, applied by tractor. (And we’ve spent the last 80 years encouraging the smartest kids in farm communities to do anything but farm, but that’s an argument for another day.) The other 15% at Ag departments and extension offices try to make their recommendations lowest common denominator.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the pharmaceuticals in composted human waste. Truly, neither farmed trees nor cotton give a damn, and those are the best use for this. They’re an issue, yes, but methane and carbon in places they don’t belong are bigger threats right now. Downstream water is an issue, but most of the down-stream water contamination from agriculture can be fixed by changing our tillage and erosion control patterns. If we take care of the 80%, the 20% becomes controllable.
The reason I go back to my great-grandfather’s records is a) he left 64 years of records and was both an educated farmer - BS in agronomy in early 1930s, got his master’s in the 60s, and toyed with a doctorate on tilling/no-till until the mid 90s - and farm born and bred. He was organic before that was a concept, was far more prosperous than most of his neighbors, didn’t switch to anhydrous until the 70s, when he was beginning to slow down, when he switched to corn/soy/hogs from dairy/silage and tomatoes, green beans and sweet corn for canning. So I spent my early life listening to him talk about the realities of 50 cows on 500 acres, and since his death (at 98) (slowly) transcribing his and my great-grandmother’s records for climate data.
