Time for night soil fertiliser

A series of articles appeared in The Island newspaper connected with the use of ammonium sulphate as fertiliser versus the use of compost. I do not contest the efficacy of ammonium sulphate/urea as a successful plant/soil additive.

However, I have my doubts regarding the efficacy of compost as a successful plant/soil additive. This is partly based on my observations and on what I had read.

There is a block of land in the suburbs of Colombo, adjoining a public road. On the other side of the road is a paddy field, subject to floods, which is very regular in this area. Years ago even the road used to get inundated.

The topography of the land is unique, rectangular in shape with the section near the land, flush with the road surface, while the other end is about 10 feet above the surface level of the road.

Since 1980, no synthetic fertiliser, urea, or ammonium sulphate had been applied to this property. There are about six coconut plams near the road, three in the middle of the property and four at the other end.  

The garden sweepings, kitchen refuse, which include ash from the hearth used to boil water, is dumped at the foot of the coconut plants, other than those near the road.  The plants near the road (also close to the paddy field) have a good yield while the rest are a near absolute failure, at most a nut or two a month.

The kitchen refuse is allowed to compost itself in polybags served at the supermarkets. From what I understand the garden sweepings, and the kitchen refuse, forms compost.

This is in contrast to what I observed when I was a child. While schooling, I used to stay at a house near Matara. The houseowner had nearly 20 acres of land which had some coconut palms. At that time, there were no sealed toilets at Matara and Dondra. The toilets had buckets which were emptied daily by the Matara UC and the Dondra TC. They used to auction the toilet collection annually and the coconut land owners used to bid for them.

The land owner had to cut semi-circular ditches about six inches deep, and three feet away from the foot of the tree. The collections in the buckets were dumped in these ditches and covered with lime-calcium carbonate and covered with the excavated soil.

The yield was between 25-50 nuts per tree.

I was in the West Indies attached to a distillery there. The sugar complex had a library, from where I used to borrow books. There was a series of books by Lobsang Rampha, a Tibetian, who used to describe the manner in which the Tibetians handled their plantations – rice crops. He describes how the Tibetians used night soil (human excreta) as fertiliser and the high yield of the crops. Tibet is, I understand, a mountain terrain.

That was beyond me. Later on, I came to understand that use of night soil is very common in the East, and that it is being practised in the villages of our neighbouring countries even today. I also infer that a few decades ago even the inhabitants of Europe and Americas may have resorted to the use of night soil.

With modern technology, we should be able to get a better value for our night soil.

Do not forget that four girls in Nigeria were able to produce electricity using urine as the raw material, using a domestic generator.

It is high time we rediscovered our roots.

S. P. UPALI S.
WICKRAMASINGHE

 Malabe.spupalis@yahoo.com.