Meet the 'Peecyclers' who see a better — and personal — way to fertilize fields

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — When Kate Lucy saw a poster in town inviting people to learn about something known as peecycling, she was mystified.

"Why would someone pee in a jug and save it?" she wondered. "It sounds like such a wacky idea."

She had to work the evening of the information session, so she sent her husband, Jon Sellers, to assuage her curiosity. He came home with a jug and funnel.

Human urine, Sellers learned that night seven years ago, is full of the same nutrients that plants need to flourish. It has a lot more, in fact, than Number Two, with almost none of the pathogens. Farmers typically apply those nutrients — nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium — to crops in the form of chemical fertilizers. But that comes with a high environmental cost from fossil fuels and mining.

The local nonprofit group that ran the session, the Rich Earth Institute, was working on a more sustainable approach: Plants feed us; we feed them.

Efforts like these are increasingly urgent, experts say. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has worsened a worldwide fertilizer shortage that is driving farmers to desperation and threatening food supplies. Scientists also warn that feeding a growing global population in a world of climate change will only become more difficult.

Now, more than 1,000 gallons of donated urine later, Lucy and her husband are part of a global movement that seeks to address a slew of challenges — including food security, water scarcity and inadequate sanitation — by not wasting our waste.

Now Lucy feels a pang of regret when she uses a regular toilet.

"We make this amazing fertilizer with our bodies, and then we flush it away with gallons of another precious resource," Lucy said. "That's really wild to think about."

Toilets, in fact, are by far the largest source of water use inside homes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Wiser management could save vast amounts of water, an urgent need as climate change worsens drought in places like the American West.

It could also help with another profound problem: Inadequate sanitation systems — including leaky septic tanks and aging wastewater infrastructure — overload rivers, lakes and coastal waters with nutrients from urine. Runoff from chemical fertilizer makes it worse. The result is algal blooms that trigger mass die-offs of animals and other plants.

In one dramatic example, manatees in the Indian River Lagoon in Florida are starving to death after sewage-fueled algal blooms destroyed the sea grass they depend on.

Beyond the practical benefits of turning urine into fertilizer, some are also drawn to a transformative idea behind the endeavor.

Chemical fertilizer is far from sustainable. The commercial production of ammonia, which is mainly used for fertilizer, uses fossil fuels in two ways: first, as the source of hydrogen, which is needed for the chemical process that converts nitrogen from the air into ammonia, and second as fuel to generate the intense heat required. By one estimate, ammonia manufacturing contributes 1 to 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Phosphorus, another key nutrient, is mined from rock, with an ever-dwindling supply.

Across the Atlantic, in rural Niger, another study of urine fertilization was designed to address a more local problem: How could female farmers increase poor crop yields? Often relegated to the fields farthest from town, the women struggled to find or transport enough animal manure to replenish their soils. Chemical fertilizer was far too expensive.

A team including Aminou Ali, director of the Federation of Maradi Farmers' Unions in south-central Niger, guessed that the comparatively fertile fields closer to people's homes were getting a boost from people relieving themselves outside. They consulted with medical doctors and religious leaders about whether it would be OK to try fertilizing with urine and got a green light.

"So we said, 'Let us test that hypothesis,'" Ali recalled.

"The results we got were very fantastic," Ali said.

The next year, about 100 more women were fertilizing with it, then 1,000. His team's research ultimately found that urine, either with animal manure or alone, increased yields of pearl millet, the staple crop, by about 30%.

To pasteurize the pee, it stays in the jug for at least two months before the farmer applies it, plant by plant. The urine is used at full strength if the ground is wet, or, if it is dry, diluted at a 1-1 ratio with water so the nutrients do not burn the crops. Scarves or masks are encouraged, to help with the smell.

So far, the research on harvesting and packaging the nutrients in urine is not advanced enough to solve the current fertilizer crisis. Collecting urine at scale would, for example, require transformative changes to plumbing infrastructure.

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Every spring, in the surrounding hills, a truck with a license plate reading "P4Farms" delivers the pasteurized goods.

"We see very strong results from the urine," said Noah Hoskins, who applies it to hay fields at the Bunker Farm in Dummerston, where he raises cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys.

He said he wished the Rich Earth Institute had more pee to give.

"We're in a moment where chemical fertilizer has more than doubled in price and is really representing a part of our system that is way out of our control," Hoskins said.

One of the biggest problems, though, is that it does not make environmental or economic sense to truck urine, which is mostly water, from cities to distant farmlands.