2023's Barley Harvest Results

We can finally share the results of this years barley harvest & we couldn’t be happier!

For a few years now, we’ve been running field trials where we’ve been growing barley on the island of Gotland (Sweden) with our urine fertilizer. Every year, we also run trials with a conventional mineral fertilizer as well as barley grown without any fertilizer in order to compare it to the urine. In the first year’s trial, our urine fertilizer ended up being too fine and dusty causing much of it to blow away in the process of spreading it on the field. Therefore, we made it a lot more moist for the following year’s trial and it ended up getting stuck in the fertilizer spreader. However, third time’s a charm!

This year, the harvest was amazing – the consistency of our fertilizer fit the machine really well and we ended up harvesting over 7 tons per hectare in comparison to only 2.5 tons per hectare last year (2022)! Secondly, the difference between the conventional NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) fertilizer and the dried urine was minimal. Below is a table showcasing our barley harvest over the past 3 years in kilograms/hectare.

An especially exciting thing about this year’s trial is that we used liquid urine as a fertilizer for the first time, which also resulted in a very promising barley harvest.

Now, the next step is to turn the barley into beer together with our incredible local brewery. We’re so excited to see how the barley’s protein and sugar content adds up in crafting a delicious beer. We’ll keep you posted and hopefully we can soon all enjoy beer, as well as many other products, fertilized by our recycled urine!