I was watching a homesteading show where they were designing a small structure to capture waste from their goats to use it as fertilizer and it got me thinking about what makes some poop safe to grow food and others not so much.
In: Biology
First of all, human waste **isn’t** harmful to use in the same way, and has traditionally been used as fertilizer in many places in history (look up the term “night soil” to learn more).
That said, there are two main reasons why human poop is worse than other poop for fertilizer:
The first is that the poop of animals like goats, cows, and horses is better fertilizer than that of humans because of differences in our diet and digestive system.
Second and probably more importantly, the poop of other animals carries the diseases of other animals – most of which don’t call disease in humans. Human poop on the other hand is chock-full of human disease. So close contact with human poop is a great way to get sick, while the risk is much lower with non-human poop.
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