[compost_tea] Re: Re: Soak in a Bucket CT & NOP

From: Kirk Leonard <kirk_at_oregonatural.com>
Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 19:38:00 -0700

Goodness Wayne, I appreciate your thoughtful reply but I don't want to
promote manure tea nearly as much as you may think I do. I understand AH is
good stuff. Knew when I saw a big bag of it in the back of a guy's pickup
full of good organic stuff the other day we would get along. - Same
day I learned about "Sun Tea" which was also set in the Florida sun. I
didn't mention that because I wasn't sure... Does sun exposure suppress
anaerobes?

How was AH formed?

On manures, I'm simply trying to say manure composts can make or contribute
to making good teas, be they aerated or not. Lots of manures are in lots of
composts and we can't let USDA tell us we have to cook to 150 degrees/dry to
12% before it can become compost or tea.

A nuance of Sue Lincoln's Anchorage News article I didn't notice until
second reading -
this may be what USDA wants to do. Call Organic Manure this cooked
and dried crap, and seemingly force all the rest of us working with manure
to do it, too.
Imagine the boon to the natural gas industry, hmm? I don't want feed lot
shit in my beds, personally. Natural composting is vastly superior.

Manure can be easily and should be composted with attention. Raw manure is
attached to CT today by USDA/NOP, nefariously. "Processed manure materials"
is being attached to manure compost, alarmingly. Not my things. Manure is
better than that.

Mike and James and Bob have hit some live wires today here, too. Good
stuff. Let's keep on.

> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2003 17:17:51 -0800
> From: Wayne Lewis <lewiswayne2_at_gci.net>
> Subject: Re: Re: Soak in a Bucket CT

> Kirk, I think you need to hit the old rewind button. If I understand
> your continuing concern, it's that you don't want manure teas to be
> unfairly maligned, misunderstood and treated differently -- and
> finally perhaps even prohibited by regulation -- than compost tea and
> that the best way to do that is to pretend that manure tea is really
> just another form -- in fact the great granddaddy of -- what people
> have recently come to call "compost" tea. No it isn't. Neither is
> Alaska Humus tea. Neither is worm casting tea.

> Compost is compost. Manure is manure. Humus is humus. Worm castings
> are worm castings. As we all know, the common trait and appeal
> ...basically the reason we started our company. Why? Because not only
> do we know what's in our humus, we know what's not in it. Unlike
> manure, for instance, Alaska Humus didn't pass through a colon on its
> way to becoming Alaska Humus.

And manure composted well is manure compost, not raw manure, often mixed
with other
materials and always supporting good compost and compost teas in several
ways.

As for passing through a colon, I've been amazed by the synergy
between plants and animals. They concentrate carbon materials for us and we
concentrate nitrogen materials for them. It's marvelous. Colons are ok,
too.

You may need not concern yourself with pathogens. I need to think about
that because I work with manures. Good composting can handle it. Cooking
manure for an hour and drying it to 12 percent is not composting. Pathogen
conversion requires more hours.

> It became humus over thousands of years... As
a consequence, there's no prospect that it even harbors, say, E.coli
or Weed-B-Gone or antibiotics to begin with. Nor was it ever
anearobic. <

Ya, in your ear too, guy. How do you know in 10,000 years AH was never
anaerobic?:-)

Anaerobic is not necessarily dangerous. We can figure out how to use it. I
go with aerobic is better, but there's more good history here than we might
be getting. Anaerobes might do the best job of whacking pathogens in real
time, in a tea, too, eh?

[snip]

> Wayne Lewis, Alaska Humus Company, Anchorage <

Kirk






------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Get A Free Psychic Reading! Your Online Answer To Life's Important Questions.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/Lj3uPC/Me7FAA/ySSFAA/0PSxlB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
compost_tea-unsubscribe_at_yahoogroups.com

 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/




Received on Sun Jun 29 2003 - 02:14:07 EDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Tue Feb 07 2012 - 14:29:21 EST