Founded in 2019, Toopi Organics has developed a crop biostimulant sourced from urine collected at motorway rest areas and other public locations.
Founder Michael Roes’ motivation for starting the company was to remove urine from the drinking water cycle and turn it into a resource for agricultural purposes.”Pee in drinkable water is nonsense,” CEO Alexandra Carpentier tells AgFunderNews. “And with urine you have many nutrients that farmers need [that] they use in mineral fertilizers in their fields.”The concept of urine as fertilizer goes back millennia. As Carpentier notes, human waste is rich in phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium, the same elements in chemical crop inputs that are vital to crop yield. Some researchers have determined that human beings produce between 100 and 150 gallons of urine per year — enough to grow wheat for a year’s worth of bread.Toopi Organics isn’t making its own fertilizer, however. Instead, the company has put a new spin on an ancient concept by using urine in its patented fermentation process for its root biostimulant, Lactop Start.Once collected, the urine undergoes a stabilization and hygienization process where it is inoculated with bacteria and fermented for up to 72 hours. The result is a highly concentrated microbial biostimulant.The product can be used alongside traditional mineral fertilizer and, according to Carpentier can reduce the need for synthetic fertilizer by up to 50%.To read the entire report click here.
