Latest / Privycast / Ep. 125 Fertilizer (Brown Gold)

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Ep. 125 Fertilizer (Brown Gold) · Privycast

0:01
>> Speaker A: But again, he paid that much for a piece of
0:03
cardboard to the onlooker.
0:06
So value is. Is truly in the
0:09
eye of the beholder. And in the case of
0:12
fertilizer, the value of poop truly was in
0:15
the eye of the beholder because people were buying
0:17
it.
0:22
Welcome back to privy. Privy is
0:25
a podcast about bathrooms
0:28
recorded from my home bathroom.
0:31
I'm your host, hunter Hoover, and I
0:34
love bathrooms. Welcome back, everyone.
0:37
Thank, uh, you all for being here. It's
0:40
that time of year. Um, my nose is
0:43
beginning to get just a bit more itchy. Uh,
0:46
as the spring season kicks,
0:51
there's just pollen. Um, and I think there's also
0:54
some mold allergy that goes on here. I've
0:57
shared before, we're in the Pacific Northwest, specifically
1:00
here in the Willamete valley, and,
1:02
um, there just seems to be. It's just a
1:05
moldy environment. Things are just generally wet.
1:09
About a month and a half ago, I would argue about
1:12
six weeks ago, uh, our friend
1:15
plump Satami Phil told us that we were going to get an
1:17
early spring. And I'm here to say, though,
1:20
we're a big fan of plumps
1:23
at
1:26
think. I think I want my money's back,
1:28
truly. Uh,
1:32
yeah, because, my
1:34
dude, it's just a
1:37
bit. I don't know,
1:40
it's been too rainy and cold for it to not
1:43
still be considered. It is still
1:46
winter, and here we are. But in just
1:49
a couple. By the time this episode comes
1:52
out, you either will have already welcomed in
1:55
spring, or we are just but weeks away
1:57
from spring. Uh,
2:01
and during spring, everybody's kind of got
2:03
spring fever. They've been boarded up, they've been
2:06
closed off. The rabbits are starting to rabbit
2:09
real hard in those spring
2:12
sunshine rays. But the other thing
2:15
that happens as spring rolls around, as I
2:18
shared, there is an allergy
2:20
concern, uh, in the air, it is upon
2:23
us. And one of the things that
2:26
is coupled with that allergy concern
2:30
is it's
2:32
time to begin doing lawn and yard
2:35
work, planting gardens, getting
2:38
things ready. Uh,
2:41
tis the season, if you will.
2:44
And for many, while we might think
2:47
of gardens as the thing by which gets
2:50
overtaken by mint and sometimes strawberries, in our
2:53
case, um, for many, it is a
2:56
time of year where there is a very specific
2:59
bathroom related component that
3:01
begins to come into play.
3:06
Fertilizer. Manure, if you
3:09
will.
3:12
Fertilizer is an amazing thing. We're going to
3:15
learn a lot about fertilizer this week.
3:18
Kids, gather round.
3:19
Uh, it's kind of the
3:22
brown gold of gardening, and today
3:26
it seems pretty intuitive, like,
3:30
you poop. Animals
3:33
poop. And you have to use
3:36
the poop for something, right?
3:38
Waste not, want not that type thing.
3:42
But how did we get to the point where we are
3:45
using this
3:47
poop to the degree in
3:50
which we use it? Uh, and
3:53
what was the journey by which we got to
3:56
the point that we are at? In today's
3:59
modern fertilizing world,
4:07
the history of fertilizer is
4:10
rich and full of nutrients.
4:12
The Egyptians, Romans, and
4:15
Babylonians, and really, these
4:18
early germanic groups are all
4:21
recorded as using minerals
4:24
and or manure.
4:26
Manure to enhance
4:29
the productivity of their farms.
4:32
Now, I must say,
4:35
the cows eat the grass.
4:38
The cows poop onto the
4:40
grass. The grass uses the
4:43
life energy of the poop to grow
4:46
and be better. And here we are.
4:49
The nature of fertilizer seems pretty
4:52
straightforward. And truly, in many ways,
4:55
it is. But
4:58
as we're going to see,
5:02
there's a lot more going on.
5:07
They were doing much more than just
5:10
animal fertilizer. Like, we get it.
5:12
When the animals poop, we got to do something with
5:15
it. And while that is plain and day
5:18
often, like, literally being in the streets, I
5:21
mean, these animals, they would walk through the streets. They would be in the
5:24
common places where people are at.
5:27
And so it's not uncommon
5:29
to have that
5:32
skeet right at home.
5:34
It's something else, and
5:37
it's something that.
5:40
I don't know. It was
5:43
plain as day. I mean, you could be walking around, and the
5:46
livestock are just going to plop a big, sloppy pile right in the
5:49
middle of the walkway. Guess what? So did the
5:52
people. I mean, the people were pooping there, too.
5:56
And so it began to be a, uh,
5:59
matter of, we have got to do something with all of these
6:02
leavings. Ancient people
6:05
used manure as fertilizer, and
6:08
for a long time,
6:11
the term manure meant all
6:13
poops indiscriminately. Human,
6:15
bovine, swine, beast of any
6:18
sort or otherwise, because
6:21
human people would shovel all the poop
6:24
in the street or pots into places
6:27
outside of the camp or
6:30
into fields where it would be
6:32
repurposed as
6:35
skeet.
6:38
Now, so
6:40
far, as long as things have been
6:43
pooping, which I think has been as long
6:46
as things have been eating,
6:49
and as long as people have been planting
6:51
crops, there seems to have been
6:54
fertilizer. It's kind of always
6:57
existed alongside, uh,
7:00
of an agricultural
7:02
community. In
7:05
previous episodes, we've
7:08
discussed ancient sewage systems and how
7:11
people have developed sewage systems
7:13
to help deal with,
7:16
particularly the human waste that
7:18
gathers and is produced by
7:21
people. And, um, in time, humans
7:24
figured out how to deal with their waste, they begin to
7:27
ask questions. How can we still
7:30
use this for agricultural
7:33
purposes? Because what the sewage system does.
7:36
Before the sewage system, the human poop was mixed
7:39
right in with the animal skeet. And after
7:42
sewage, you began to have a
7:45
separation, a delineation, if you will,
7:47
between what we would call nowadays classic
7:50
manure, classic animal skeet, and
7:53
human skeet, which is removed from the equation
7:56
via this new sewage system. And so there
7:59
began to be questions.
8:01
This brown gold, if you will, that
8:04
makes our plants very nice and good.
8:07
It is now being removed via this
8:10
sewage technology. How do
8:13
we go about ensuring that we can
8:15
still use it? They
8:18
began to ask questions, how do we still get
8:21
it into our plants? And there have been a number of
8:24
answers. The ancient Egyptians,
8:26
um, either through sewage
8:29
trough technology or the use of
8:32
moving the poo, which, if I'm
8:35
not mistaken, is by hand or by
8:38
cart. Um, they would divert and
8:41
dump the human waste into rivers, often the
8:43
Nile. Uh, and this would add to the
8:46
fertilization power of the
8:49
soil in that area.
8:52
The greek people who had invented
8:55
even more complex sewer systems,
8:58
uh, had methods by which they would
9:00
divert human, uh, waste
9:03
into specific bodies of water. The biggest example
9:06
of this is in the region of Attica, which
9:09
most prominently contains ancient
9:11
Athens. They collected much of the
9:14
human waste in a large
9:16
reservoir and diverted it into
9:19
the to. I hope I got
9:22
that right, Cephesus river, which would then
9:25
allow them to use it as
9:27
fertilizer in that
9:29
region.
9:32
Because all Rome ever did was really copy
9:35
Greece, even in their deities. I mean, for goodness sakes, the
9:38
stuff that they just slapped a new
9:41
label on, like, that's a lot of what Rome did.
9:44
Sorry, Rome. Um, and,
9:47
guys, you can thank me. You've now thought of the roman empire
9:50
for today, but their methods of
9:52
repurposing
9:55
night soil were similar.
9:58
And this also is good
10:01
time. That is what they called this
10:04
stuff. They called human poop,
10:06
used to be repurposed in the
10:09
morning night soil, seemingly
10:12
because it was so widely repurposed as part
10:15
of the soil. And literally, it is the
10:18
soil you produce during the nighttime.
10:22
Ancient Japan relied heavily
10:25
on human feces for fertilizer.
10:28
It's so valuable that just as
10:31
ancient Rome paid a high price for urine, we talked
10:34
about that in our history of urine episode.
10:37
Go check it out. Uh,
10:39
urine for a history lesson, I think, is what it's called.
10:42
Um, merchants in ancient Japan
10:45
would sell their poop and other people's poop, more
10:48
on that in just a second, to farmers to
10:51
use as fertilizer now, what's
10:54
wild here? This
10:56
is the peach on top of the pie right
10:59
here. It was
11:01
believed by people at this time
11:04
that the turds of the rich were
11:06
sold for more money than the turds of
11:09
the lowly.
11:12
Hats off to you, turds of the lowly. You might
11:15
be worth something, but even your turds are worth
11:18
less than the rich. Quote unquote rich people.
11:22
But this was because it was believed
11:25
in some cultures, Japan being one, ah, a
11:27
culture that believes in reincarnation and coming back,
11:30
and two, that those who come back in a
11:33
higher status in life may be closer
11:36
to the divine, uh, goal,
11:40
that the rich were blessed by the gods
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or whatever deity they served.
11:46
In many instances, it was believed then
11:49
that their poop was literally
11:51
richer. Get it in nature.
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Now, what's interesting is while they
11:59
were rich, because there was gold in their pockets,
12:03
it was believed their poop was rich because,
12:05
well, maybe something was in their
12:08
poop. A less spiritual argument
12:11
for this, and one that I can kind of begin to see and we're
12:14
going to look at, was that the rich,
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because of their wealth and status,
12:21
could afford a much healthier diet, and
12:24
as such, produced a much healthier
12:27
pile more on those healthier piles. Later
12:30
in the episode, ancient
12:33
south american cultures also used human poop to
12:36
fertilize. The aztec people were known for
12:39
their chinampas, islands of mud and
12:42
poop, where the real good crops grew. And
12:45
it was said that they could harvest crops, like seven
12:47
times a year off of these poo
12:50
islands. Medieval Europe
12:53
spread poop all over the place as fertilizer, and
12:56
this led to the job of gong
12:58
farmers. But
13:01
as we said, as
13:03
sewage systems and the use of sewage
13:06
systems, specifically in areas where there was
13:09
large gatherings and larger
13:12
concentration of people, the
13:14
repurposing of the poop into
13:16
usable material took more and more
13:19
time and energy to make it
13:22
a usable product. One thing
13:25
was for sure, the sewage and sanitation
13:28
systems were expensive to maintain,
13:31
they were costly to upkeep,
13:34
and they really didn't
13:37
generate as much
13:39
from what they were spending in
13:42
that most of the time, the
13:45
end result of what it generated as usable
13:47
product was nothing. Zero.
13:53
So you have this
13:56
brown gold fertilizer, human
13:58
poop, and other
14:01
excrement that is in high demand.
14:04
It's a resource that is in need to make
14:07
better crops. And whenever you have
14:10
a resource that is in need and people
14:13
willing to buy it or get it in some
14:16
way, there seems to be the potential for
14:18
conflict over that resource.
14:28
When we treat poop like it's gold.
14:31
People are going to fight over it like it
14:34
is gold
14:37
today. There are wars fought over
14:40
oil, natural gas, and other deposits, as
14:43
if they are precious and needed,
14:46
and that they are a necessity, because in
14:49
many ways, they truly kind of are.
14:51
Like,
14:54
we really take our use of oil
14:57
and other natural components for granted.
15:00
I just get in my car and I drive to
15:03
get something. Uh, you don't even think of it half the
15:06
time, but you rely on these things.
15:09
But before cars were running
15:12
on dead dinosaur deposits,
15:15
farms were leeching the goodies from human and
15:18
animal poop.
15:21
As the need for more and more
15:23
of this fecal matter fertilizer
15:26
grew, countries began
15:29
exporting and in some cases,
15:32
importing poop
15:35
to make up for their lack of
15:38
soil and nutrient rich
15:40
soil. And as this began
15:43
to be the case, it drove
15:46
the value of the poop
15:49
higher and higher. As people begin
15:52
to use the turds more frequently
15:55
to make the soil better, it makes the
15:58
cost of the poop
16:00
go up, and the desire to which people
16:04
want it go up. This is basic economics.
16:08
I always talk to people whenever I want to try to
16:11
convey
16:13
economics and
16:15
what makes something valuable. I always use the
16:18
example of Pokemon cards.
16:21
To the average onlooker, Pokemon cards are but
16:24
pieces of cardboard, and they're right, but they're shiny, and
16:27
some of them have really cool things on them. Uh,
16:30
but too many. Like, you would look at
16:33
a person that pays $5 for ten
16:36
little pieces of cardboard, and you would say, uh,
16:39
you're insane. That's crazy. But
16:42
to the person to which the cards are
16:44
valuable, they know that there are some cards that
16:47
they could open up and it could be worth, quote
16:50
unquote, worth more than $5. And
16:53
that worth is based on, one, the rarity of the
16:56
card. Two, the agreement within the
16:59
community that that card is of value based
17:01
on rarity and often usability. And
17:04
three, the number of the card
17:07
made, thus making
17:10
it more or less difficult to get, and as a
17:12
result, more or less valuable. An example outside
17:15
of Pokemon, but still inside trading cards is magic. The
17:18
gathering just made, uh, the one ring to rule them
17:21
all card and post Malone paid, like, $4 million for it or
17:24
something crazy, because there is but one, it's very rare, and it's
17:27
very good. Um,
17:30
but again, he paid that much for a piece of
17:32
cardboard to the onlooker.
17:35
So value is truly in the
17:38
eye of the beholder. And in the case of
17:41
fertilizer, the value of poop truly was in
17:44
the eye of the beholder because people were buying
17:47
it. Countries
17:49
began to export and import. And as a
17:52
result, as is often the case with these
17:55
type of resources, people began to
17:58
fight over it. They got to fight each other over
18:00
turds. It's wild.
18:05
Now, for our purposes today, we are but
18:08
covering the basics of fertilizer and looking
18:11
maybe a bit to the current developments
18:13
and possible futures of it.
18:16
And, uh, we will return to some of these conflicts in later
18:19
episodes. Follow along if you are ready to join us
18:22
on this bathroom journey at privycast. And right
18:25
now, mid episode, I just want to take a minute
18:28
as you listen to me here,
18:31
mid episode, drop in. Hi, it's me,
18:33
hunter. Um, it's time to get a slurp of this polar
18:36
seltzer. There, I said it for the episode.
18:41
If you. As you continue to listen right now
18:44
in your podcatcher, if your
18:46
podcatcher allows you to leave ratings and reviews, go ahead
18:49
and give the show a five star rating. We'd love the
18:52
five star rating. We give us the one. And for every rating
18:55
and review, we are going to donate a dollar to the wounded warriors
18:58
project and living water international. Um,
19:00
that helps people find the show, and it is our way
19:03
of doing something in behalf
19:06
of saying thank you for leaving a, uh,
19:09
rating and review. Apple
19:11
podcasts, Spotify, and I think the podbean app will let you,
19:14
like favorite or whatever. Um, please do that.
19:17
We would love to hear from you, and it would mean a lot if
19:20
you did that. But
19:24
conflicts and
19:26
struggles over poop
19:29
were on the rise as the need for
19:32
turds increased with the use
19:35
of fertilizer. Conflicts
19:37
include struggles in Japan over who
19:40
is able to use fertilizer
19:42
buildups, literally arguing over
19:45
who is going to use crap.
19:50
The most prominent of these, however,
19:53
was in South America,
19:56
in the Andes, that is
19:59
the Andes mountain region. They used
20:02
guano for the betterment of their crops
20:05
for at least 1500 years.
20:08
And after Europeans found the benefit
20:11
of using poop as fertilizer, those
20:14
european countries started importing it in
20:16
the 18 hundreds for their increasing
20:19
demand due to the industrial revolution.
20:22
Now, again, you
20:25
don't always think of Shaz being listed on
20:28
a country's imports and exports list, but
20:31
alas, it was.
20:34
It begs the question, why not just have
20:37
the Shaz producing creatures produce the
20:40
skeet in your own country so you don't have to
20:43
transport it? Part of that is the
20:45
climate. Um, and the other part is
20:48
the degree to which it is nutrient rich in other parts
20:51
of the world in this century, quote, guano
20:54
was taken in large quantities from Peru and
20:57
Chile, and later also from Namibia
21:00
and other areas to Europe and the United
21:02
States. This is one of the driving
21:05
forces. This demand on the
21:08
guano and turd deposits in South
21:11
America and these central american countries
21:13
were the forces for the war of the Pacific between
21:16
Peru, Chile and Bolivia.
21:19
This war has also been known as the
21:22
nitrate war, a reference to the, uh,
21:25
nitrates that are in fertilizers or the
21:28
salt Peter war.
21:30
It's people in conflict over
21:33
Fertilizer and who has claims. And we are going to talk
21:36
about this war one day, um, but not
21:38
today. Stay tuned,
21:41
stay tuned. But others are willing
21:44
to pay for it and some are willing to fight
21:47
to control it. It is a precedent
21:50
for people treating and
21:52
viewing poop and
21:55
fertilizer as if it is gold,
21:58
brown gold, if you will.
22:01
And as it was stated, in some cases we are
22:04
even differentiating between good poop of the
22:07
rich and in some parts of the world
22:10
with the bad poop of the lowly in different parts
22:13
of the world. Now, I'm sure out
22:16
there, I haven't been able to find this as of yet, but I'm
22:18
confident that if there are people willing to pay
22:22
more money for quote unquote better
22:24
poop that came out of the butthole of a rich
22:27
person, then there has to have been
22:30
someone flapping their chaz in a
22:33
pot, slapping the emperor's new product label on
22:35
it and selling it for quadruple the price.
22:38
Come get your fresh laid Emperor
22:41
Chaz. It's fresh.
22:44
He did have corn last night.
22:47
Come and get it.
22:52
Uh, have you ever heard of essential oils?
22:54
Hoove rant here in the middle of the episode. Essential
22:57
oils. Now, I'm not saying
23:00
essential oils don't do anything. I'm not
23:03
saying that. Okay, so all the
23:06
essential oils moms, um, I'm, um, yet to
23:09
find a real big essential oils dad. If you're
23:12
listening to this and you either know
23:15
or are an essential oils dad,
23:18
email me, privycast@gmail.com,
23:21
I don't believe you exist,
23:24
but I believe
23:27
they do something. Okay? So calm down,
23:29
simmer down. But I think we are
23:32
seeing a real selling the prince's
23:35
soil thing going on here.
23:39
The way you know is if a person can't
23:42
really tell you how it helps or how
23:45
it's different, like, how is
23:48
the commoner's turd different from the
23:50
prince's? Other than I said, I got it out of the
23:53
prince's house. How
23:56
is turmeric supposed to help
23:59
me?
24:01
It reduces inflammation, maybe.
24:05
I don't get it. How do we know?
24:09
How do we know the emperor's new soil was really
24:12
his. Is someone out here
24:14
testing it? Does the king's skeet
24:17
smell different than peasant skeet? Like, that
24:20
seems like a perfect way to set up a real
24:23
sweet scam.
24:27
Ah. Uh, and, um, uh, maybe
24:30
that's what's going on with essential oils. I don't know.
24:33
It's hard to tell. But the notion
24:38
that poop is kind of like gold, even
24:41
human, may actually have some
24:44
science to it.
24:51
Fertilizer or poop, as brown
24:54
gold may be. On
24:58
a study presented by the American Chemical
25:01
Society, a thing that I suppose
25:03
exists. Again, I have no proof this could be a made up
25:06
institution. I have no idea. I feel like there's
25:09
an institution for everything. If you just say
25:12
the blank blank society or the blank blank
25:14
association or the blank blank
25:17
conglomerate, it probably exists.
25:23
But this society presented research
25:26
back in 2015 showing
25:29
that there was gold, silver, and other
25:32
valuable metals, precious metals, found in what
25:34
they call biosolids.
25:37
It's what the ancients called night soil, and it's what we
25:40
here on privy like to call flipping poop.
25:43
You know what I'm saying? Why do we got to have all
25:46
biosolids? Uh, it's poop.
25:49
The study was led by US Geological
25:52
survey and was designed to set out
25:55
to figure out better ways to extract,
25:58
quote unquote, foreign particles
26:01
from poop. Now, these foreign particles, it was
26:03
always known that they existed because
26:06
they had studied poop. Science is all about
26:09
studying some poop, by the way. And you might ask
26:12
yourself, well, why are they so worried about getting
26:15
these little bits, pieces of
26:18
extras, out of the poop, like? Well, it turns
26:21
out, as folks back in the day
26:24
thought maybe the king's
26:26
skeet actually was
26:29
better. They were onto something
26:32
the whole time. The food we
26:35
eat, if you didn't know, it,
26:38
gets processed by our tum
26:40
tums and then expelled, usually through
26:43
our boring holio, wet
26:46
through our peepee hole. And when do you have
26:49
a rumbly tumbly goes reverso through the pie hole?
26:52
That's science. There's three options,
26:54
three ways out. What goes in
26:57
must come out. And it turns out,
27:00
sometimes what goes in
27:03
is not food.
27:06
They have found that some hygiene
27:09
products, shampoos, and some processed
27:12
food items have trace minerals in
27:15
them that we cannot digest. Now, they're not going to hurt
27:18
you unless you ask the red food
27:21
diautism people.
27:24
These metals, they're fine,
27:30
but some of these include gold,
27:32
silver, copper, and other precious
27:35
metals.
27:38
Uh, it's one of those. Good night.
27:41
We are kind of like the catalytic
27:44
converters of the human. Our poop
27:47
is to us as a
27:49
catalytic converter is to
27:52
our church bus, because people are
27:55
willing to root around in my poop scoot to figure
27:58
out where the precious metals are. And some nair duel
28:01
in our community has defoe cut off the catalytic
28:04
converter at least three times in the last year and a
28:06
half to get the precious metals inside
28:09
our poop. Poop is the catalytic converter. Um,
28:12
yeah. But at waste
28:15
treatment plants, they have begun to treat the
28:18
poop to remove these metals and precious
28:21
metals, thus making the poop
28:24
more poopy and better. For plant
28:26
growing.
28:28
Fertilizer, science has come a long
28:31
way.
28:34
I don't know much about fertilizer, but the next time I buy a bag
28:37
of fertilizer, I want to just look on the
28:40
bag and say, the poopiest poop you
28:43
can poop.
28:45
That's been such a slam dunk, Dr. Seuss. Like
28:48
little kids, everybody poops. Book the poopiest poop you can
28:51
poop. Now,
28:55
you might be thinking, what do they do
28:58
with, like, for the long time, like these
29:00
precious metals? What do they do with these metals?
29:03
For the longest time, they've just simply tossed them out.
29:06
But as every midwestern dad finding
29:09
change on the ground in Joe Byron's absolute wasteland of
29:12
an economy, every penny counts.
29:15
It turns out every nugget of turd, gold,
29:18
adds up. A separate study
29:21
done around the same time estimated that people,
29:25
just collective people, I guess, could
29:28
produce somewhere around $13
29:30
million of precious metals
29:32
through the refuse of their
29:35
poop. Your turds
29:38
could be a literal gold mine, but
29:41
you would have to mine it, and you would have to get
29:44
enough to matter, which, as it turns
29:47
out, isn't really feasible.
29:49
That $13 million a year,
29:52
it should be said, is for a 1 million
29:55
person city. And that is an estimate.
29:58
But using this
30:00
math@science.org. Where they came up with
30:02
this $13 million per 1 million people, we would
30:05
say then that one person would produce about
30:08
$13 worth of precious
30:11
metals in their poop a year. It's
30:14
about enough to cover a streaming subscription for one month.
30:17
Actually, no, it's not. See Joe Biden's failing
30:19
economy one more time. Across a
30:22
lifetime of 70 years, you're looking at less
30:25
than $1,000.
30:29
And, you know, things are
30:32
kind of, for lack of better way of saying it,
30:34
crap. When you turn to your
30:37
turds to help make ends meet, like,
30:40
you know that money's rough
30:43
when they're doing science to figure out
30:46
if the precious metals in our turds could be worth
30:49
harvesting. Turns out it would
30:52
only be beneficial at a large scale, maybe at one of these
30:55
sanitation plants where there's already much
30:58
collection of these for runoff anyway.
31:01
The gold, ironically
31:05
being the part that is not helpful to fertilizer,
31:08
when fertilizer and human poop
31:11
has so often been considered brown gold.
31:19
So we have to take parts of
31:22
the poop out of poop to make the poop good for
31:24
plants. How did we get here? Like, how did
31:27
we figure out that that was the thing?
31:30
European scientists and chemists began as
31:33
early as the 17 hundreds,
31:36
exploring fertilizer technology to help
31:39
improve crops.
31:42
Now, while not all of these ventures involved
31:44
poop, many of them involved
31:47
researching what could be added to the soil
31:50
or the already produced night
31:52
soil, uh, if you will.
31:55
Johann Meyer found that including
31:57
gypsum was a beneficial
32:00
additive to the soil. Justice
32:03
von Liebeg
32:05
tried to save, uh, the region M money
32:08
by developing a simulated poop based
32:11
fertilizer by treating phosphate of
32:14
lime with sulfuric acid. Now,
32:17
while this was much cheaper to do than to
32:20
transport the poop in from out of country,
32:23
or get the poop from in country to where
32:26
you needed it in the soil in country, it
32:28
turns out that this simulated process was
32:31
unable to produced a soil that was
32:34
unable to be absorbed by plants like
32:37
good old turd ferts. That's turd
32:39
fertilizers. John Bennett
32:42
laws did experiments researching different
32:45
manures effect on plants in the early 18
32:48
hundreds. He began
32:50
in these endeavors to treat the
32:53
manure and other phosphates with
32:55
sulfuric acid to produce simulated
32:58
fertilizer. It was cheaper, it was cleaner,
33:01
and it started the modern day fertilizer
33:04
industry. They
33:07
found that nitrogen deposits of which poop
33:10
is rich in were good for plants. With the work of
33:13
John Baptiste busingalt,
33:16
Kristen Berkeland and Sam Ide
33:19
developed the first synthetic fertilizer in the
33:22
early 19 hundreds by combining different
33:24
atmospheric nitrogen with
33:27
nitric acid in, uh, a
33:30
process called the berkeleyn eyed process. I
33:33
know we really workshopped the name on that one. You see,
33:36
it's the two gentlemen's last name. That's how they did
33:38
it. However, to do this,
33:41
they had to build huge factories in Norway
33:44
to produce the stuff. And the process turned
33:47
out to be pretty inefficient compared to just
33:50
using the very abundant supply of crap
33:53
floating around.
33:56
This process led to the development of the haber
33:59
process, which essentially added methane to
34:02
the mix and made the previous a little more
34:04
sustainable. Finally, also in
34:07
the early 19 hundreds, Wilhelm
34:09
Ostwalt came up with the ostwalt
34:12
process to produce nitric acid. And it became
34:15
the most common way to develop fertilizer
34:17
globally in that it uses the Haber process to
34:20
get the raw material and works from there.
34:24
In time, different materials and
34:27
different refining processes are added to make better and
34:30
better fertilizer, resulting in healthier and richer
34:33
crops, producing more and more money, richer and
34:36
richer people, which, in the case that we learned in Japan,
34:39
produces better and better fertilizer.
34:41
Now it's a whole industry. And I
34:44
gotta say, the more natural you eat,
34:47
the more valuable your poop could
34:50
be to the fertilizer industry. So all our
34:53
green, organic people, good job. Now
34:56
my human body turns the taco bell
34:59
that I ate, all that processed goodies into literal
35:02
gold. But like you tell
35:04
me, it's an industry.
35:07
An industry built in many ways,
35:10
like this process of brown
35:13
gold,
35:18
it's built on.
35:24
This brings us to the end of another episode of
35:27
Privy. Thank you all so much for being here. As we said
35:30
in the middle of the show, leave us a rating and review. We're not going to
35:33
Belabor that here. Just, uh, a reminder.
35:36
We give a little kickback to the wounded warriors and
35:39
living water as a reminder to keep pooping in the free world.
35:42
That free world was not always free, and we're looking for
35:45
cleaner water for all.
35:48
Send us an email, privycast@gmail.com. Follow us
35:51
on social media. We're at Privycast. You can find me Hunter
35:54
at owlet seven on social media. We'd love to
35:56
see you out there. Interact with us. Say what's
35:59
up? Uh, thank you to Kevin and
36:02
Pottington for the use of their music this week. Thanks
36:05
to, um, whoever the heck we
36:07
got for transition music. Who knows? It's a grab bag.
36:11
Links in the doodly do for that. Links in the Doodley do for all
36:13
these articles that were, for instance, this episode. This has
36:16
been another episode of Privy. Thank you so much for joining
36:19
us. Own your stank. Breathe more,
36:22
push less. And now,
36:24
as always, don't forget to flush.