I'm currently reading a reprint of a 110 year old book about how China and Japan have kept their farms fertile for 4000 years.
The basics are lots of elbow grease, and continuous application of river silt and (aged?) animal and human sewage.
It occurs to me that this book predates both industrialization (factory effluent) and the last cholera outbreaks. Which makes me wonder what sort of sweeping agricultural practice changes came in subsequent decades.
Would appreciate a title if you run across it again and remember this request.
The term of art in the West is "anthroponics". A related subreddit [1] seems to currently focus upon using human urine in agriculture (with some really fascinating results of using watermelon seeds to sterilize the urine). Human feces given to black soldier flies and feeding their larvae to chickens and tilapia as a high-protein supplement might be more workable and timely than turning then feces into compost, and if scalable it could add a lot of new capacity to developed world sewer systems.
The basics are lots of elbow grease, and continuous application of river silt and (aged?) animal and human sewage.
It occurs to me that this book predates both industrialization (factory effluent) and the last cholera outbreaks. Which makes me wonder what sort of sweeping agricultural practice changes came in subsequent decades.