Without a good way to wash your food, that’s a quick route to getting sick. Human waste contamination is the reason there’s so many food recalls on fresh fruits and vegetables from the SW US (that and uncool treatment of migrant workers).
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Just get a low level cleric or Druid to cast purify food or drink on it before consumption and you are good to go.
They could just MAKE food too, so…
I guess I’m just trying to help people find a way to safely use poop in their campaign.
With all the desperation and limited resources on Athas I’m sure you will find an occasional village using “night soil” to fertilize their crops. It doesn’t have to be birds or bird people. Why I’m sure the sun worshiping, dwarven village of Kled just can provide a hearty supply of the stuff especially after harvest and their High Sun festival of eating and drinking mead all day. Plenty of dried logs to throw on the fire if you know what I mean. 
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The_DMs_Revenge makes a good point.
Athasians would want to limit the use of water to wash their food. So, I think they would have to be absolutely sure that the poop they were using had fully converted to fertilizer.
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You can ‘digest’ the poop, similar to how waste food becomes compost. Such processes are common on Dirty Jobs…
Elephant poop can be handled safely, so maybe Mekillot dung is safe for house building or direct fertilization.
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Maybe there can be a modified spell “purify dung” or let purify food and water cover it.
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Generally, magic (or psionics) is never the answer. Proper handling will resolve 99% of the inherent issues.
We just don’t know what those techniques are, personally.
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This does open a whole can of worms (so to speak).
I’ve gone a bit down the Google rabbit hole on sanitation without water. While a little bit can be done with heat, most of it requires chemistry that may be a bit too advanced for the ancient world.
Maybe boiled urine (the old medieval ancestor of ammonia-based disinfectants) is used to clean surfaces, and heat is used to kill germs on fertiliser and objects which can take it? I am aware I’m talking to a professional chemist here with only working knowledge of metal and ceramic manufacturing chemicals on my side. But worth a shot…
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It’s mostly less a conversation about chemistry than biology, but i was thinking of less complex methods.
Chemistry comes into play with: you can’t just pile bird poop on plants, it’ll chemically burn them like dog pee can kill your grass.
For instance, my wife tells me that farmers in her home area spread liquefied cow/pig waste on their fields, but do so long before harvest, not the day before.
I imagine you could spread human waste around farro plants, as you grind the needles for food, but not around potato plants. And you could probably bury waste around plants in a mudflat, as long as it wasn’t right next to a crop…
Chemistry-like treatments for sanitation just won’t scale up well on Athas, they don’t have the infrastructure (and slaves are cheap).
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I only wish I could contribute more to this discussion, but I lack the necessary knowledge😅
The only thing I can suggest is perhapse a dynamic similar to that between elephants and dung beetles, where they spread and bury the dung and so help return nutrients back to the earth.
Perhaps athasians employ similar insects that serve a similar function
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I like the idea of city states laying claim to batshit islands just like the USA did with the Guano Islands Act of 1856 (and maybe some silt skimmer fleet actions). I’d submit though, the barrier to re-greening Athas isn’t a dearth of guano, or even people to apply it. It’s the myopia of the city states and the presence of defilers, most especially Borys.
None of the SKs have an interest in expanding their domains. Expand the verdant belt and yes, you feed more people, but you also need more nobles to farm that land, more templars to keep them in line, more plots to watch out for etc, etc.
If a village or a high level adventurer wanted to re-green their little patch of desert, the first defiler that happens across that bit of green will happily turn it to ash to power his/her/their spells. And that’s assuming Borys doesn’t fly over, see the green, raze it to absorb a bit of energy on the fly (pun intended) and fly off again.
All kinds of things become possible in FY11 onwards, if you have the Prism Pentad happen in your campaign. Then a lack of fertiliser might become an issue…but with rejuvenate spells and maybe a nascent avangion or two it’s not really needed.
I agree completely.
Except about the magic and SM’s.
Merchant houses are more likely then SM’s to want to increase productivity/ verdantness.
“A wizard did it” is my least favorite reason for anything happening, especially in DS. PEOPLE reclaiming land and fertility, rather than SOME ONE guy/gal/whatever with magic/psionics makes sense to me. (If anyone on Athas actually cared).
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So Andy Weir’s “The Martian” was actually inaccurate. Huh.
(The character used his own waste tank as fertiliser for potato plants, and it worked. Maybe it had already been treated…)
Here’s a decent article addressing that.
https://theprepared.com/blog/matt-damon-grew-potatoes-on-mars-using-poop-is-that-realistic/
A few thoughts come to mind
Athasians have more space to work with but the concept is still the same
Athasian soil is superior to Martian soil for the most part. It did once have a green age.
Cultures have used Night soil for hundreds of years. Athasians may have perfected the process to avoid contamination and burning plants.
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Different poops have differing amounts of nitrates and stuff. Human poop is pretty muddy, like dog & cats.
Bird poop is high in nitrates and phosphates - its basically concentrated fertilizer (which is ALWAYS bad for plants, too much Miracle-Gro will kill stuff too).
You might be able to just plant things in cow or elephant or rabbit poop. But you might get food poisoning from the bacteria un cow or human or cat poop.
There’s multiple concerns on different axies. You might be able to grow potatoes in your own poop (i didn’t check the link yet), but depending on your water intake, it might burn the plants to water them with straight urine. And you’d definitely have to wash them well before eating…
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I doubt they would be using fresh poop to fertilize their crops. Athasians are smart enough to let it compost. Human waste takes about a year to compost, so if human waste is being used, they have to store it somewhere for that amount of time. Chicken waste takes 4 months.
The city-states would likely have thousands of small compost bins, or huge compost silos.
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Keeping an otyugh or two in one of those silos or bins may be able to reduce compositing time significantly.
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This is very interesting to see we manage to have a really interesting discussion, for Darksun, of now 39 replies, about bird poop.
Keep up the good work! 
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This is why I love dark sun, show me any other campaign where you could discuss thing like this?
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