Re: Soil equilibrium

From: Elaine Ingham (Soilfoodweb@AOL.COM)
Date: Thu Jan 02 2003 - 22:03:03 EST


Hi Greg -

I've had rice growers ask about this before, and have suggested what they could try, but then have not heard from them again. So, either it worked so well they had no further problems, or the suggestion for improving the biology was not effective and they didn't want to tell me I didn't know what I was talking about. Grin.

I think most growers have no problem telling somebody they are full of hot air, so I would like to think that the first choice was what happened. Growers like to keep success to themselves, sometimes, and just smile quietly that they don't have the problem anymore.

But it would be nice to know if the following suggestions work or not, so if you try them, could you please let me know the results? If they don't work, advertise it on this web site, ok? If they do work, advertise it on this website!

They certainly work in sports fields and in turf. Just ask Tom Jaszewski at www.living soil.com (I got his e-mail address wrong yesterday, sorry!). He has done this on turf with bad thatch problems, in Las Vegas no less, and decreased water use on the turf by 20% in the first year.

Information just for the price of letting other people know if it works! Deal?

As soon as the rice straw goes down, apply either compost at about 1 ton per acre, which is just a bare sprinkle on the surface, I know, but provides the inoculum and some foods,

 - OR -

apply 15 gal to the acre compost tea. Please make sure it is a compost tea with bacteria AND FUNGI in adequate amounts.

Please be aware there are so-called compost tea machines on the market that do not in fact make compost tea. There is a machine on the market that has been documented to allow E. coli to grow, so you should probably not buy that machine. Buy a machine that stays aerobic through the whole tea brew.

The lab that tested the tea did not document that the tea brew stayed aerobic. They only measured oxygen in the tea at three times through the 24 hour tea-making process, at 0, 8 hours and 24 hours. If too much food resource is added so the brew goes anaerobic, the time the tea goes anaerobic is when the organism are growing most rapidly, between 14 and 20 hours. The testing lab missed the critical time altogether. Thye cannt say whether the tea went anaerobic or not.

Anyway, good compost tea applies the organisms, soluble nutrients and micronutrients to help the soil return to health. Making sure that fungi are present, and growing, in the tea means you apply the set of organisms that decompose rice straw in short order.

No fungi, no straw decomposition. Good fungi, the straw is half gone within one month.

You need moisture, but not too much. Don't leave standing water in the fields. If the bacteria grow so rapidly that the water goes anaerobic, the beneficial fungi that decompose the straw will be killed by lack of oxyen.

If you flood the field, add only enough water at any one time to wet the soil, the straw, and get the fungi growing. At 15 gal tea per acre, applied in water as the carrier, you can flood the field in order to wet the soil and straw. Easy to do, right?

One question that remains to be answered is whether the straw should be incorporated, or left on the soil surface. Given your conditions at harvest, I think applying the compost or compost tea, and incorporating is the way to go. Or can you try one field incorporated and the other field just rolled?

It is important to get any standing rice straw covered with beneficial organisms, and in particuolar the beneficial fungi, to both out-compete any disease organisms that might try to grow, as well as to decompose the plant material.

If you have any more questions, please let me know!

Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
Corvallis, OR
Port Jefferson, NY
Lismore, NSW, Australia
Hilversum, The Netherlands
www.soilfoodweb.com

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