Colorado-based group helping Nepal produce more crops with human urine

Himalayan villagers plant marigolds in their noses to mask the odor of urine in collection tanks. (Photos courtesy of the dZi Foundation)

For 14 years, a foundation based in the one-stoplight town of Ridgway, on the Western Slope, has been helping rural villagers in eastern Nepal with education, building and employment projects. Now, the dZi Foundation has drawn widespread attention for what it has Himalayan villagers doing with urine.

Human urine has turned out to be the key to more diverse and more abundant vegetable crops in a remote area where subsistence farming has been the norm for generations. More conventional fertilizers have not been an option in communities that are five-day walks from the nearest roads.

So the dZi Foundation teamed up with a Himalayan development organization and started a project that is moving villagers beyond the crude outhouses that long have served the remote farming areas. The foundation persuaded more than 1,000 households in the communities of Sotang and Gudel to replace their "pig toilets." The name comes from the fact that outhouses were built over pig pens so that waste could drop directly to the waiting, hungry pigs. The waste was a big part of the swines' diet — and also a health hazard.

"We can laugh about this, but the sanitation issues were pretty bad," said dZi board chairman Darvin Ayre of Boulder. "Getting rid of the pig toilets was a first step, then we realized we could use urine on crops."

DZi, named after an etched stone bead believed to bestow health on its wearer, switched many villagers to dual-hole toilets that separate solid waste and urine. The urine collects in a tank, and the nitrogen-rich liquid is left to off-gas for a month. It's diluted and dispersed to fields using a drip system.

It is delivered directly to the soil, not put on edible parts of plants that grow on elaborately terraced fields and in new greenhouses that dZi also helped to build.

This new form of fertilizer has allowed farmers to grow new crops such as tomatoes, cauliflower and cabbage that traditionally did not do well or had not been tried there.

"This is a matter of maximizing what they have," said dZi co-founder and president Jim Nowak of the use of urine as well as the many other ways the foundation has been working to revitalize villages from the ground up.

DZi's urine project recently was featured in Scientific American in an article that found use of human urine on farm crops has been spreading slowly worldwide in the past decade. In addition to the Nepalese use of it, urine is

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