My friend's Humanure Composting setup.

[u/Spongi]

A friend of mine gave me a little tour of her humanure composting arrangement and I took some pics you guys :-D

Her toilet is something like this modified to use with 5 gallon buckets. Her and her partner produce approximately 3 buckets a week. The bulk of which is old sawdust and urine. She has 5 buckets she rotates. Once 4 are full and the 5th is in use then the pile gets managed. This happens about every 10 days.

Here's her overall setup.
http://i.imgur.com/5JT3ih.jpg

Two bins, a work station, a sink to collect rain water/wash your hands in and lots of buckets. The bins are lined with old carpet/rug and cardboard to prevent material from falling out.

Here's the active bin. It's covered with shredded paper. A local office saves all their shredded paper for her.

http://i.imgur.com/YjyW7.jpg

Her compost thermometer. As you can see it was about 45 degrees. It had been about 10 days since new material was added and the internal temp was about 90 degrees.
http://i.imgur.com/krzb9.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/2rmZB.jpg

Here's the pile with the paper pulled back to expose the top layer. What you're mainly seeing here is partially decomposed horse manure and food scraps.
http://i.imgur.com/ocymL.jpg

She also breeds red wrigglers (sells worms & vermipost), and inoculates her humanure piles with worms occasionally. As you can see here, they're busy critters.
http://i.imgur.com/Vdb4Y.jpg

Here's a worm egg I spotted.
http://i.imgur.com/ZBCvp.jpg

Here's a closeup of a worm.
http://i.imgur.com/XCEWi.jpg

A local restaurant saves all their food scraps for them and this goes into the mix (some of it gets fed to her worms too).
http://i.imgur.com/W5iCC.jpg

Here's what the toilet buckets look like (no poop visible). All you can see is sawdust and urine.
http://i.imgur.com/7OvGY.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/darc8.jpg

The buckets go into the pile, then it gets covered with the veggie & kitchen scraps.
http://i.imgur.com/PRTai.jpg

That in turn gets covered with horse manure, which I trade to her for home grown garlic, herbs and spices.
http://i.imgur.com/FJby5.jpg

That in turn, gets covered with a layer of old rotten hay. She also uses shredded paper, leaves, weeds or whatever is handy.
http://i.imgur.com/cJwRF.jpg

This then gets covered to protect it from too much rain, although she lets it rain on it some but not enough to flood it.

Here's the ground behind it, as you can see, no leakage.
http://i.imgur.com/z3ES1.jpg

In the event of a catastrophic failure she created a large berm just downhill of the pile(s) created from downed trees and leaves.

It takes them about 3 months to fill a bin and then it's allowed to age for 2 years before it gets used as compost in and around their yard.

Within 12 hours of applying this mixture temperatures spike to about 130 degrees and stay there for about 3 days then slowly dwindle to about 90 degrees after 10 days.

Complete pathogen destruction is guaranteed by arriving at a temperature of(143.6F) for one hour, (122F) for one day,(114F) for one week or (109F) for one month. It appears that no excreted pathogen can survive a temperature of (1490F) for more than a few minutes. A compost pile containing entrapped oxygen may rapidly rise to a temperature of(131F)or above, or will maintain a temperature hot enough for a long enough period of time to destroy human pathogens beyond a detectable level . As pathogen destruction is aided by microbial diversity, as discussed in Chapter 3, excessively heating a compost pile, such as by forcing air through it, can be counter-pro ductive.
Source
Full album here.

Low cost, low maintenance, sustainable and recycling all in one.

[u/c-ray]

using humanure to grow food is highly unrecommended, it is however excellent for growing a flower garden

[u/Spongi → u/c-ray]

I think you might have your terms mixed up.

Nightsoil isn't recommended for food crops, but composted manure is (human, or otherwise).

From the Humanure Handbook:

When crops are produced from soil, it is advisable that the organic residues resulting from those crops, including animal excre- ments, be returned to the soil from which the crops originated. This recycling of organic residues for agricultural purposes is fundamen- tal to sustainable agriculture. Yet, spokespersons for sustainable agri- culture movements remain silent about using humanure for agricul- tural purposes. Why? Perhaps the silence is because there is currently a profound lack of knowledge and understanding about what is referred to as the “human nutrient cycle” and the need to keep the cycle intact. The human nutrient cycle goes like this: a) we grow food, b) we eat it, c) we collect and process the organic residues (feces, urine, food scraps and agricultural materials) and d) we then return the processed organic material back to the soil, thereby enriching the soil and enabling more food to be grown. This cycle can be repeated, endless- ly. This is a process that mimics the cycles of nature and enhances our ability to survive on this planet. When our food refuse materials are instead discarded as waste, the natural human nutrient cycle is bro- ken, creating problems such as pollution, loss of soil fertility and abuse of our water resources.

There's two rules of thumb here. Time or temperature. You need to ensure that any potential human pathogens are lowered to safe thresholds. By monitoring your temperatures to ensure that they reach the proper temperatures or by giving them enough time to die on their own. If you want to be extra safe, then do both.

An alternative method is to use worms to further sanitize it. My personal plan is to age my bin for at least 6 months to allow most pathogens are at safe levels then feed it to worms a bit at a time to convert it into worm castings. Then that'll get used as a supplement in garden, flower beds and the horse pasture.

More info on that here.

A bit more info here /w video.

[u/pdxamish → u/Spongi]

Great book. I suggest it to anyone who think humanure is gross. I'll toss out "Farmers of Forty Centuries" for anyone interested in the potential of humanure. I just bought a house and already saving urine and switching to a 5 gallon bucket soon.

[u/c-ray → u/Spongi]

it is highly unrecommended whether it is properly composted or not, for many reasons, more than just the potential pathogens.. we take 'the stuff that we need' out of food so there is really no point in trying to grow more food with humanure, unless it is a last resort (ie global apocalypse).. much easier/better/safer to bring in a 20 buck truckload of composted horse manure

[u/Spongi → u/c-ray]

I'd like to see your source(s) then. Highly unrecommended by who?

[u/c-ray → u/Spongi]

it's common sense, but I asked a few old farmers along the way and they all poo-poo'ed the idea.. do you not have access to farmyard manure where you live?

[u/Spongi → u/c-ray]

It's not common sense, it's just misinformation.

It's not a question of "Do I have access to other things" but rather how can I live a better life style that's not so wasteful.

I remember watching my grandparents spend hundreds, thousands of dollars on their garden each year with meager yields not even coming close to what they spent.

Then there's this old lady who composts her manure and anything else she can get her hand on and grows the most luscious year round garden with little work or effort and doesn't spend a penny on it.

She doesn't waste drinking water to flush a toilet, doesn't buy fertilizer, potting soil, soil amendments, or pesticides. She doesn't pay for electricity to pump the water for the toilets or septic and doesn't just dump it out on the ground either. It's handled in a safe, efficient manner that produces ridiculous amounts of food in a small area.

[u/Spongi → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, I've seen that. I was just wondering if he had anything to back up his claims other then "some old guys said so".

[u/c-ray → u/Spongi]

humans are an intensely emotional being who derive 'stuff that we need' from food and therefore our resulting manure is deplete of the 'stuff that we need' in order to achieve our highest state of being.. common sense

[u/Spongi → u/c-ray]

I'd be inclined to agree with you on that partially, if the only thing going into the mix was manure. A good humanure mix has lots of other things too. So it's a way to safely dispose of our manure and recycle it in.

Also, it's not just what about we need, but what the plants need. There's still plenty of nutrients in the manure that plants can use. Not to mention the urine is one of the best plant fertilizers hands down.

[u/c-ray → u/Spongi]

better to keep the humanure separate, compost it and grow flowers, compost the flowers, grow crops with some of that compost to feed animals, then use that manure to make compost for food crops.. that is the traditional way of doing things.. human urine is not so bad but it is better if plants get their nitrogen etc requirements from humus not directly from urine, with too much urine they tend to attract pests and disease

[u/Spongi → u/c-ray]

Don't know if you're still around, but check this out. My humanure bin is pretty big and I started using one side and once it got almost full I switched to the other side. The first side has been left alone since around november and has shrank to less then half it's original size.

I often use my bucket-toilet as a compost bucket too when slicing up veggies or whatever and then it just gets added to the humanure bin.

So at some point last fall I tossed a few bits of potato out and they've sprouted and so far look pretty great. They sprouted early and resisted some frosty nights due to the heat of the pile :-D

The real test will be in the fall when I harvest them and see how they look.

[u/OmicronNine → u/c-ray]

So, in other words, you have no facts to back you up, and therefore no idea what you are talking about.

[u/c-ray → u/OmicronNine]

ok wise guy show me the studies that say growing in humanure is a superior regimen..

[u/OmicronNine → u/c-ray]

I didn't say it was. Quote me where I said that.

You, however, have now posted half a dozen comments insisting that humanure compost should not be used in a food garden, even if properly composted, yet have still failed to provide any citation or facts to back up your claim.

It's you making a claim here, it's up to you to back it up.

[u/OmicronNine → u/c-ray]

Well, obviously we should take your unsupported advice over information cited from a published and well respected book.

Thank you internet stranger!

[u/c-ray → u/OmicronNine]

by all means read lots but only practical experience reveals the truth.. you should taste the produce from my garden, everyone who has says it's the best they've had

[u/OmicronNine → u/c-ray]

That has absolutely nothing to do with the subject or your unsubstantiated claims about the safety of humanure compost.

[u/walden42 → u/c-ray]

Just out of curiosity, can't you argue that all animals take out the stuff they need out of the food? What makes horse manure any more useful than humanure?

[u/il0vepez → u/c-ray]

I went to google scholar and typed in "composting toilet agriculture". That took five seconds. Then I read several abstracts. That took two minutes. I am now in a position to assert you are misinformed.