For 14 years, a foundation based in the one-stoplight town of Ridgway, on the Western Slope, has been helping rural villagers in eastern Nepal with education, building and employment projects. Now, the dZi Foundation has drawn widespread attention for what it has Himalayan villagers doing with urine.
Human urine has turned out to be the key to more diverse and more abundant vegetable crops in a remote area where subsistence farming has been the norm for generations. More conventional fertilizers have not been an option in communities that are five-day walks from the nearest roads.
So the dZi Foundation teamed up with a Himalayan development organization and started a project that is moving villagers beyond the crude outhouses that long have served the remote farming areas. The foundation persuaded more than 1,000 households in the communities of Sotang and Gudel to replace their "pig toilets." The name comes from the fact that outhouses were built over pig pens so that waste could drop directly to the waiting, hungry pigs. The waste was a big part of the swines' diet — and also a health hazard.
"We can laugh about this, but the sanitation issues were pretty bad," said dZi board chairman Darvin Ayre of Boulder. "Getting rid of the pig toilets was a first step, then we realized we could use urine on crops."
DZi, named after an etched stone bead believed to bestow health on its wearer, switched many villagers to dual-hole toilets that separate solid waste and urine. The urine collects in a tank, and the nitrogen-rich liquid is left to off-gas for a month. It's diluted and dispersed to fields using a drip system.
It is delivered directly to the soil, not put on edible parts of plants that grow on elaborately terraced fields and in new greenhouses that dZi also helped to build.
This new form of fertilizer has allowed farmers to grow new crops such as tomatoes, cauliflower and cabbage that traditionally did not do well or had not been tried there.
"This is a matter of maximizing what they have," said dZi co-founder and president Jim Nowak of the use of urine as well as the many other ways the foundation has been working to revitalize villages from the ground up.
DZi's urine project recently was featured in Scientific American in an article that found use of human urine on farm crops has been spreading slowly worldwide in the past decade. In addition to the Nepalese use of it, urine is
Nepalese residents of remote villages were persuaded to build new outhouses where urine is collected in separate holding tanks. That urine would then be used as fertilizer. (Courtesy of the dZi Foundation)
now collected for agriculture in Burkina Faso and for carp farming in West Bengal. In Sweden, more than 135,000 toilets now divert urine into separate tanks.
Because transporting urine to farm fields can be an unsavory task, researchers in Sweden are looking into the possibility of solidifying the valuable phosphorous in urine or using urine to fortify solid compost.
The acceptance of urine fertilizer also has benefited from new studies on its health risks. The World Health Organization six years ago released four volumes of guidelines for using urine as fertilizer.
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The studies found that urine can be a safe fertilizer. Separating urine at the toilet is important — there's no contamination with fecal material. WHO recommended applying urine only to soil and prioritizing its use on crops that will be cooked.
Further research is needed on whether continuous urine application will affect soils by increasing their alkalinity.
A new challenge for the foundation is a very modern one in an area with few modern amenities, except for some cellphones.
"How do you do a 5-minute video on urine collection and spread it?" Ayre said. "We are looking at ways to spread the technology."
The other works dZi has been doing in remote Himalayan communities in Nepal and India have nothing to do with urine.
The foundation has racked up some impressive numbers helping communities to build 18 schools and to form 98 PTAs. Eleven drinking-water projects have been completed, and 1,730 toilets, both dual-hole and single-pan, have been installed. DZi has spearheaded the building of 13 community centers and nine bridges. About two dozen villagers have been trained in new agriculture techniques.
DZi also is focusing on making more buildings in that area as earthquake-proof as possible.
In all these projects, dZi emphasizes training villagers to build and manage the projects.
"We want an exit strategy in all the communities," said board vice chairman Bill Keller of Sausalito, Calif. "We want these communities to stand on their own."
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 , nlofholm@denverpost.com or twitter.com/nlofholm
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