Gardeners of the Galaxy friend Wieger Wamelink and his research team at Wageningen University & Research and the B.A.S.E. project investigate how we can create a circular and sustainable agricultural ecosystem for food production… on the Moon or Mars.
They’ve now published results from a study that shows using processed human urine as a fertiliser boosts green bean growth on Martian and lunar regolith simulants.
“The human urine we used in the study was collected from portable toilets at festivals in Amsterdam. You can imagine that there are all kinds of substances in urine that we would not like to use in crop fertiliser,” Wamelink said. “So we used struvite instead, a mineral that is extracted from human urine and consists of magnesium ammonium and phosphate and that is almost 100% pure, so it doesn’t bring along any contaminations, like medicine remains or drugs. It releases the nutrients slowly during the whole growth period.
Since researchers can’t get their hands on real regolith (the lifeless rocky stuff that Mars and the Moon have in place of soil), they have to conduct their experiments with regolith simulants. Simulants, made from Earth rocks, match the real thing as closely as possible, and lack the quantities of ammonium, nitrate and phosphate needed for healthy plant growth.
“We have proven that struvite can be an excellent fertiliser. In this way, we can easily process and apply human urine as fertiliser in the regoliths. It boosts plant growth and can increase bean harvest with several factors on the regolith simulants,” Wamelink said.
As the struvite wasn’t licensed to be used as a fertiliser, the researchers couldn’t eat their harvest of green beans. And as regolith (and regolith simulants) can be
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