Agape Community

Straw-Bale Construction at Agape

People have built homes using straw, grass, or reed throughout history. These materials were used because they were reliable and easy to obtain. European houses built of straw or reed are now over two hundred years old. In the United States, too, people turned to straw houses, particularly after the hay / straw baler entered common usage in the 1890’s. Homesteaders in the northwestern Nebraska “Sandhills” area, for example, turned to baled-hay construction, in response to a shortage of trees for lumber. Bale construction was used for homes, farm buildings, churches, schools, offices, and grocery stores.

Straw, the stalks remaining after the harvest of grain, is a renewable resource, grown annually. Each year, 200 million tons of straw are under utilized or just wasted in this country alone. Wheat, oats, barley, rice, rye, and flax are all desirable straws for bale walls. Even though the early bale homes used hay for the bales, hay is not recommended because it is leafy and easily eaten by creatures great and small. Straw, tough and fibrous, lasts far longer. The U.S. Department of Agriculture indicate that America’s farmers annually harvest enough straw to build about four million, 2,000 square-foot homes each year, nearly four times the houses currently constructed.

Straw is a viable building alternative, plentiful and inexpensive. Straw-bale buildings boast super insulated walls (R-50), simple construction, low costs, and the conversion of an agricultural byproduct into a valued building material. Properly constructed and maintained, the straw-bale walls stucco exterior and plaster interior remain water proof, fire resistant, and pest free.

Designed and constructed by Doug Clayton of Gap Mountain Permaculture, who provided the following informationToday 40% of all residential water of drinking quality is consumed by flush toilets. There is no rational justification for so much energy and capital to be used to build municipal water systems to capture, purify and pump this water to flush away our bodily wastes, creating the need to build a sewer system to attempt to re-purify it once polluted. Water-based systems can and should be improved by lowering the water quality and quantity going in and radically redesigning the treatment of their effluents.

“Safe and sanitary disposal” is an important goal, not truly satisfied by conventional water-based toilet and municipal sewer or septic tank / leach field systems. Even properly designed, built and maintained septic tank / leach field systems are known to contaminate the groundwater with nitrites.

The objective of the Agape system are to:

1. Achieve safe and sanitary treatment of fecal wastes.
2. Conserve potable water.
3. Function with a minimum of maintenance and energy consumption
4. Operate without unpleasant odors.
5. Be an economical integrated part of new construction
6. recycle so-called “wastes” for horticultural use
7. Return to nature the nutrients we consume in a form nature is able to handle, rather than turning them into groundwater or surface water pollutants.

This compost toilet cost $400 in materials. It is constructed with two chambers so that each chamber may be used alternately for a minimum of two years. This strategy of having one chamber in use while the contents of the other thoroughly decompose before removal, simplifies the nature of the system.