Re: Soil equilibrium

From: Elaine Ingham (Soilfoodweb@AOL.COM)
Date: Sun Jan 05 2003 - 01:30:22 EST


Hi Greg -

Compost tea machines basically take a very small amount of your good, aerobic
(non-stinky, properly heated or processed by worms) thermal compost or worm
compost, use water movement through the compost, (air bubbling through, or
pump the tea through), to extract the organisms from the compost by ripping
them off the surfaces of the compost to get them into the water. Bacteria
are well-glued to compost surfaces and fungi are wound around the compost
particles, like the threads they are, so they have to have a fair amount of
force applied to get them off the surfaces.

Don't ask me about CFM to pull them off. I don't think in those terms.
Testing is required, if you are making your own machine, to determine if you
are getting enough water movement through the compost to get the organisms
off the compost.

But that's why dripping water through compost doesn't do much - the organisms
don't want to get washed off their food. It's like trying to get starving
people away from the dining table - not happening unless force is used.

Once you start the extraction process, then you want the beneficial organisms
to grow in the water. Soluble nutrients from the compost are extracted, and
that helps grow beneficials. Addition of humic acids, fulvic acids, small
amounts of molasses, complex sugars, proteins, help grow good guys. Fish
hydrolyzate grows good guys too, but you need to be careful of those
materials. Some fish hydrolysate isn't good stuff. Not my business to tell
people about what is wrong with their product, but please, check the SFI web
site to see those products that have been tested.

Again, no data about whether a product does what the sellers say? Don't buy
it.

So, grow lots of beneficial bacteria and fungi during the 24 hour tea brew
cycle by selecting for the growth of particular organisms based on the
compost and the foods you add.

You need to aerate well enough to keep the brew aerobic. If the tea drops
into the anaerobic zone, you lose your fungi, and lose the ability to prevent
mildew, anthracnose, blight, wilt, curl and many insects, like aphids, white
flies, beetles, etc from growing. And, if you let the tea go anaerobic, you
are likely going to grow human pathogens, if your compost was poor, and not
properly made, and had E. coli in it.

So, maintaining aerobic conditions is important. Make sure the person you
buy your compost tea machine from has data that shows the tea stays aerobic
through the tea cycle. But look out for those machine makers that apparently
have no idea how to calibrate oxygen probes.

The tea machine maker should also be able to show you REPEATED trials where
they measured total and active bacterial biomass, and total and active fungal
biomass numbers in their teas. These numbers should be in the "desired
ranges", shown on the bottom row of the SFI report, for place, time, desired
plant.

SFI has done the experiments showing that if you have these levels of
organisms in the tea, and they arrive safely, your leaves, blossoms and roots
will be well-occupied with the good guys, so the disease organisms have no
place to grow, no way to infect the plant, no foods to eat because the
beneficials already ate them before the disease had a chance, and you build
soil structure so anaerobic conditions do not occur in your soils. Select
against disease by making sure the soil stays aerobic.

Ah, but you do have to test and make sure things are coming along as you
wish. If you make "tea" and don't test - at least once! - to make sure you
know how to make good tea, you can't complain if the tea doesn't work for
you.

You should test your soil, to see what is missing from your foodweb, so you
know what you need to improve. Or maybe the biology is doing fine. Then you
know you have to concentrate on some chemical nutrient, not on biology just
now.

We have a publication that summarizes the work on compost tea, called the
Compost Tea Brewing Manual. We're at Third Edition, with an update to the
manual on the December, 2002 e-zine. Please just copy that from our website,
www.soilfoodweb.com

Please ask more questions, this is one of my favorite things to talk about!

Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
www.soilfoodweb.com


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