eli5 why does manure make good fertiliser if excrement is meant to be the bad parts and chemicals that the body cant use
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Why can’t human excrement be used. My uncle used to shit on his melon plants and they grew huge. No one bought them though. Because he shat on them. But if it was cow shit people would probably buy them.
Well, there’s a couple things to keep in mind
1) Everything is a chemical; Nothing is inherently bad to everything… Well, mostly. But not much.
2) It’s stuff that ***your body in particular*** can’t use ***in the here and now.***
3) Digestion transforms what’s taken in
Your carrot isn’t made of fertilizer. The carrot took that fertilizer when it was alive, broke down the chemicals inside of it into simpler pieces, and used them for different things.
Animal poop (yours, the dogs, a cows, etc) is basically a mix of dead cells, stuff you couldn’t digest yourself, etc. **You** poop it out because you can’t use that.
The bacteria and fungi in the environment (as well as the bacteria in your poop) **can** eat that stuff, so they eat it, and then poop out simpler building blocks; things like phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium.
The plants then eat those things, break them down, and use them. Plant ‘poop’ is mostly just oxygen. And then we breath that in, use it, poop out the left overs, yadda yadda yadda, the cycle repeats.
It isn’t the bad part it’s just the incompletely processes part. Also the fact that it has already been partially processed means it doesn’t take as long to break down and therefore the nutrients get into the soil quicker.
But also to your point one of the problems North Korea has is that the people are starving so they use human feces to fertilize but don’t heat it first. This passes down the parasites the “donor” has thereby spreading the parasites even further.
This is one of the beauties of how we’ve all evolved. Plants eat things animals don’t need and produce things animals do need, and vice versa. (Highly simplified, but more or less)
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