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 fertilizer 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 fertilizer," 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.
Read more at theunconventionalgardener.com