Cows drink diluted urine

In San Fernando - La Union (the Philippines) a farmer who applies ecological sanitation at home adds the urine to the water he gives his cattle. He is giving his carabow and sheeps a cup of urine every two days. The farmer was pleased with the result. The cows became healthier and stronger.

When asked a veterinarian working at the local Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University (DMMMSU) what the reason could be, he explained that cows benefit from additional nutrients, especially proteines. A regular diet of herbivores, mainly grass does hardly contain proteines. These can be supplemented by offering the cows a so-called licking stone, containing salts and minerals. Urine provides similar nutrients.

This is also the reason why European farmers used to add urine to the hay before gving it to cows. The veterinarian suggested that a larger dosis of urine would certainly not harm the animal. To the contrary he expects that the positive results of 'salting' the cattle diet would increase when more urine would be added.

The ISSUE consortium decides to ask the university to do scientific research about this traditional husbandary methods in clode cooperation with local farmers.

WASTE encourages those practitioners and scientist with information about similar or alternative use of urine as food-adds to share the information with us, DMMMSU and farmersaround the world.