Hi Heiner, thanks for the question. Majority of the nitrogen is in the form of urea. But how soluble/accessible it is, I do not know at the moment. It is something that we will be analyzing in the coming months in preparation of next year's fertilizer batch. Curious, do you remember how much nitrogen you applied and how often? It was recommended to use 150 kg N/ha, but we have started 100 kg/ha.

Cheers,
Jenna 

Hi Jenna,

just a short question. What kind of nitrogen (solubility) is in your dried fertilizer: urea, ammonium or nitrate? 
I grew barley myself and to receive a good quality (low protein content!) it was quite important to have a quick starter. If the plants get the nitrogen in a late phase we had too much protein and the brewery was not really keen for the barley.

Cheers,
Heiner

Thanks for this initiative. I'm interested by the topic. 

Thanks for starting this Jennifer! To share some exciting news about urine concentration, we (at the Swedish University of Agricultural Science) have used dried urine in a seed driller. We stabilized and dried urine into a powder (7.2% nitrogen) and planted barley seeds with the dried urine directly.  The barley will be used to produce beer. This is part of a three year project in Sweden with the aim to customize the dried urine fertilizer for barley production.

There are a number of technologies that are being tested at pilot scales for concentrating urine into fertilizer products. The concept of urine concentration is to remove the large volumes of water in urine to create a fertilizer product that has similar nutrient concentrations was commercial fertilizers. The advantage of urine concentration is that it makes transportation and storage of urine products easier as the volumes can be significantly reduced, as well as making it a more attractive fertilizer for agriculture use.

As many of these technologies are still developing, there can be many opportunities for learning and sharing experiences. By learning from each other we can increase knowledge diffusion, improve the technologies and hopefully increase the recovery of resources from urine.

Is there interest in this community for building a network of actors working with urine concentration? I have started a LinkedIn group that can be a discussion and networking platform (Urine Concentration @ LinkedIn) – welcome to join!

We can also continue the conversation on this Forum thread. Welcome to share your experience and knowledge related to urine concentration.