It should be noted that glyphosate has antimicrobial and fungicidal properties.
Also, plants can turn the bedrock into dirt, either directly, or through their mycorrhyzal and rhyzosphere bacteria. Trees are especially useful to extract nutrient from rocks.
That being said, I think that Merril has a point. we're accelerating the extraction process (by dumping our waste products in rivers, rather than peeing/pooping where plants grow), and I have no idea how long we'll get away with these practices.
Human effluvia is full of drugs, and thus unfit for agriculture anyways...
For direct application, yes. But it could feed a pipeline where, say, the 3 generation of those nutrients could be harvested and applied to food crops.
some but not all
But annual crops mostly grow either in prairie or disturbed soil ecosystems. Bacterially dominated soils. So any way you slice it, we need a wider mix of perennial and woody crops. Over a long enough time horizon, all of your fertilizer resembles compost and that compost has to derive its minerals from fungal soils.
Left me very hopeful and wondering if it’s something that could scale.
* do everything possible to keep the life in the soil alive: do not use pesticides, funghicides or herbicides since the toxins are not specific and kill all soil life.
* aerate the soil to have enough oxygen (O2) and nitrate (N2) in the soil. Use a broadfork, but only with compacted soil.
* do not plow since that breaks the networks of funghi and ultimately deteriorates the performance of plants.
Want to know more? See the video "Restoring Soil Biology, Increasing Yields and Reducing Costs" by Dr Elaine Ingham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk14Qyulc9E