Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World by Joel Salatin

Author:Joel Salatin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: HEA010000
ISBN: 9781455505685
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2011-10-09T21:00:00+00:00

2. Give 100 percent tax credits for rerouting plumbing to take gray water into flush toilets. That would save billions of gallons of water a day. The answer is not low-flush toilets that have to be double flushed many times. In Australia, they have an ingenious system with two different buttons: one for No. 1, and one for No. 2. They dispense different amounts of water for the two different uses. For sure, every new structure should use gray water to flush toilets. Any building inspector or health department official who balks at reusing gray water in flush toilets should be fired. Get it done, folks.

3. No recreational water from public sources. Period. If you want to water your flowers, you have to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t require piping potable water from a municipal reservoir. I’ve learned recently that all the golf courses around Phoenix now use second-use water. Wonderful. That’s a step in the right direction. Now if they’d put some cows on those courses to graze them instead of mechanically mowing them, they’d really be on to something. Homeowners can put cisterns in their basements to catch gray water and take it out to the flowers. Cisterns under the roof downspouts in many cases can gravity-feed water out to the vegetation surrounding the house. I hate to say lawn because ideally the majority of the landscape surrounding a house would be edible. Water dispensed to raised beds growing vegetables is far more valuable than water dispensed to turf grass. Look, somewhere, somehow, people need to appreciate how precious water is before we don’t have enough to drink.

4. Alternative toilets. The number one user of potable water, after lawn irrigation, is the flush toilet. Think about that. More than drinking. More than washing cars. More than showers. More than laundry. I don’t care whether we go with methane toilets, composting toilets, moldering toilets, chamber pots, Johnny houses, or a combination of these. But our culture’s fixation on flushing everything away just ain’t normal. There is no away. It always goes someplace. The fact is that if you Google “Humanure” you’ll find a host of possibilities.

Recently I was at a farm conference center and the men’s urine went down a pipe into a barrel. Each day, the urine went into a spray rig hooked to an all-terrain vehicle. As a foliar pasture fertilizer, the urine went right onto the grass just like the urine out of a cow. Beautiful. Red wigglers in large vented garbage bins handled the rest of the goodies. The bins were wheeled under the toilets. No odor. Perfectly safe. Worms completely sanitize the excrement. This could be done in airports, resorts, restaurants. We haven’t begun to tap the amazing benefits of worms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.