[HN Gopher] Pigeon Towers: A Low-Tech Alternative to Synthetic F...
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Pigeon Towers: A Low-Tech Alternative to Synthetic Fertilizers
(2016)
Author : hacsky
Score : 90 points
Date : 2022-06-26 16:47 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.notechmagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.notechmagazine.com)
| jdadj wrote:
| If you have 10,001 pigeons residing in a pigeon tower with 10,000
| holes, will there exist a hole with more than one pigeon?
| worldsayshi wrote:
| >Provide water and shelter, and they will come
|
| I find this hard to believe. There has to be a lot more to
| attracting the pigeons?
|
| Reminds me of a recent trend, at least in Sweden - Bee hotels.
| Small bird house like things that are said to attract bees.
| Everyone started selling them for a while. I bought a few of them
| to friends. But I don't think they got used.
|
| Putting up a structure and expecting it to just work seems a bit
| optimistic. Is there more to the secret sauce?
| 13of40 wrote:
| If they're the ones I'm thinking about, with the pieces of
| bamboo, holes drilled in wooden blocks, etc. I've seen those in
| Germany, Switzerland, and the US. Can confirm that they work in
| Western Washington, but they're for solitary "digger bees", not
| your standard honey bee.
| akmittal wrote:
| We tend to think mankind is becoming smarter and effective. But
| in reality we just started caring about profits in just near
| future.
| whirlwin wrote:
| When started reading your post, I was certain the end would be
| different:
|
| - "We tend to think mankind is becoming smarter and effective.
| But in reality we just rely on birds' shit."
| HillBates wrote:
| [deleted]
| guerby wrote:
| Lots of pigeon towers in the countryside in France, nice pictures
| here:
|
| http://www.alaingillodes.fr/patrimoine/pigeonnier/tarn.htm
| leobg wrote:
| Do you know if they were used for the same purpose?
| oliwarner wrote:
| > First, unlike chickens or ducks, wild pigeons are extremely
| low-maintenance
|
| Until there are 5000 of them on the crop you've just sown. I've
| shot crop protection before. A large flock can destroy a crop in
| a few hours.
|
| This whole thing relies on your crop not being the crop they want
| to eat.
| wayne wrote:
| I learned from the book "How to Hide an Empire" that an initial
| motivation for US imperialism in the Caribbean was to harvest
| bird droppings for fertilizer, even to the point of conflicts
| with Britain and Venezuela:
| https://www.vox.com/2014/7/31/5951731/bird-shit-imperialism
|
| There was a 1856 law that encouraged US citizens to claim land
| for the country if there was bird poo on it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act
|
| This law is how the US originally got possession of Midway, which
| became very well-known during WWII (I always wondered how the US
| got it originally): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_Atoll
| dividuum wrote:
| Odd that at the same time the Passenger Pidgeon[1] was hunted
| to extinction.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon
| wefarrell wrote:
| Peru and Chile fought a war over seabird guano:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
| goldenkey wrote:
| Guano deposits..is that the same root as iguana?
| pirate787 wrote:
| I always though the guano was desired for saltpeter, which is
| used to make gunpowder. It doesn't seem economical to transport
| as fertilizer.
| comicjk wrote:
| I thought so too, but Wiki says fertilizer was in fact the
| main usage. I suppose you get many extra units of grain per
| unit of added guano.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano
|
| "As a manure, guano is a highly effective fertilizer . . .
| Guano was also, to a lesser extent, sought for the production
| of gunpowder and other explosive materials. The 19th-century
| guano trade played a pivotal role in the development of
| modern input-intensive farming."
| jhgb wrote:
| You need only nitrogen for explosives, but nitrogen,
| phosphorus, and potassium for fertilizer. Therefore guano
| (which contains all three) is overkill for explosives but
| great as a fertilizer, while synthetic nitrogen compounds are
| insufficient as a "complete" fertilizer and have to be
| supplemented with the two other elements from other sources.
| Jistern wrote:
| Well argued!
| pfdietz wrote:
| Pigeons don't fix nitrogen, so how is this an alternative to
| synthetic fertilizers? The N has to come from somewhere.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's bioaccumulation. There is some potential for them to be
| extracting phosphorous from the rocks in their gizzards, but
| that will mostly be bioaccumulation too.
| oblongx wrote:
| Pigeon, like most bird poop is very high in N.
| lven wrote:
| It does not require fossil fuel heat or feedstock. So it's net
| 0 at least.
| _joel wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano#Bird_guano
| pfdietz wrote:
| So? The N still has to come from somewhere. The natural
| sources of N (nitrogen fixing plants, NOx from lightning or
| natural combustion), filtered through the birds, will not
| come anywhere close to what synthetic fertilizers can supply.
|
| As many as 80% of the N atoms in your body were fixed
| artificially by the Haber-Bosch process. Natural sources,
| using pigeons or not, are not up to the task.
| Valgrim wrote:
| Nitrogen fixation occurs naturally in the soil by bacteria.
| As the nitrogen is consumed by different species up from
| one trophic level to another, from plants to insects to
| bird, the nitrogen gets more and more concentrated.
|
| Birds are fairly high up the food chain, and their
| excrements are very rich in various nutrients, including
| nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.
|
| The Haber Process is faster but requires a lot of energy,
| and provides no phosphorus or potassium, so you have to
| source it elsewhere. Also it requires no technology and can
| be installed pretty much anywhere.
| analog31 wrote:
| I suspect that this can work for low intensity farming,
| like fruits and vegetables, but if you want to feed the
| cattle of the earth, you'll end up running out of pigeon
| food.
| aaron695 wrote:
| pstuart wrote:
| Assuming the N comes from whatever they eat.
|
| This is so cool -- it's a pity that it's not economical to do
| this.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| As for economical in the "traditional" sense, maybe not. I
| don't know how much success they're (still/actually) having
| but if you want a little glimpse into what should be possible
| in easily digestible docu-film format, look up "The Biggest
| Little Farm" (it's on Netflix for example).
|
| One thing I took away from that is that it's maybe not
| economical in a "have a one crop pigeon poop farm" (i.e. you
| sell pigeon poop from feeding pigeons), you can have a farm
| that sells a lot of things that uses a lot of different
| animals and crops in combination in order to not have to buy
| in things from the outside that "traditional" farms have to.
| pstuart wrote:
| Yes, I was thinking of the wholistic approach in your
| second paragraph -- where the fertilizer is used on site or
| traded with neighboring farms.
| dv_dt wrote:
| I would be interested in seeing if that stays true in an
| increased number of niches, especially with fertilizer
| shortages and prices likely to play into the near future.
| pstuart wrote:
| Pissoirs to do the same with humans ;-)
| YLE118 wrote:
| There was recently an article about that in the New York
| times.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/climate/peecycling-
| farmin...
| Jedd wrote:
| In 1957 Fleming wrote his sixth James Bond book, Doctor No -- in
| which the eponymous villain runs a guano mine in the Caribbean.
|
| Even some decades after the Haber-Bosch process was invented,
| stripping massive islands of these resources was still lucrative.
| bolangi wrote:
| On our small farm, we use ducks for fertilizing our fruit trees.
| We put a temporary fence for them around a tree.The ducks are out
| during the day, at night inside the fence. After a week or so we
| move the fence to another tree.
| chaostheory wrote:
| The issue you need to mitigate using this method is bird flu.
| Still, having an alternative to synthetic fertilizer is nice
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