Re: [compost_tea] sulfur and fungi

From: <soilfoodweb_at_aol.com>
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2004 14:42:37 -0500

Hi Dorothy -

Look out, this is a LONG answer. You might want to print it out and read at your leisure. Some things I just can't explain briefly. You might want to come to ACRES next Decemebr for the "Elaine and Arden show". Grin. We go through the biology and the chemistry, and add examples of how to make this work in practical ways. This year at ACRES, Arden and I ran out of time to do the practical examples.

I talk too much....Grin!? I hope the following is clear enough. If not, ask questions.....

The recommendations you talk about come from people who deal with soil on the totally chemical end of the spectrum. If you have no biology in your soil, then those recommendations are what you have to do.

But it is not a sustainable approach, because you will, every year, be stuck doing more chemistry.

At ACRES this year, there was person saying that they have done what University of California has recommended every year for the last 13 years, and this year, again, the recommendation from his advisor was, just like every other year, "Apply 4 tons of lime per acre, 200 pounds of ammonium sulfate, some pounds of boron, etc......"

The grower’s question was, when does he get out of this trap? He has been applying this much lime, this much nitrogen, this much of some other set of chemicals, every year for the last 13 years. When does the drain on his checkbook stop?

The answer: Never. Chemical sales people don’t want their cash cows to dry up.

Biology will not return to a soil where you are killing the organisms through salt applications. And all those things in the recommendation you got are salts. Those salts ALL kill some portion of the biology, to varying degrees.

Now, don't get me wrong, you have to put the nutrient elements back into the soil. But putting them in as salts is not going to fix the problem.

Instead, do as Arden Anderson is showing us how to do. Get the nutrients into the compost, into the compost tea. In compost and in tea you give the biology high amounts of foods, so that they can incorporate the salts without getting killed.

You could add calcium salts to soil, but then you’d have to be putting 200 gallons fish and 200 gallons of molasses per acre, along with the salts. Insane. Don’t do it that way.

Salts of any kind should be incorporated WITH foods to feed the biology, making sure the correct biology is present. Salts dis-associate in water, and the nutrients are taken up and immobilized by the organisms, who make soil organic matter.

The predators in the soil cycle the nutrients into plant available form, but mostly JUST in the root zone. Leaching losses do not then occur to any significant extent. Next year, you don't need to put in near as much nutrient, because you haven't lost the nutrients from last year.

When adding inorganic salts into compost, you don’t put in NEAR the amount of salt as you would need to add to the soil.

When you add salts directly to the soil, you have to add in a high amount, because you end up losing most of what you add. When you lack biology in the soil, there is nothing to hold the nutrient, and what the plant doesn’t take up immediately leaches out of the soil. In some instances, when you add a nutrient like phosphate, or phosphorus, the existing chemistry in the soil ties that material up in plant not-available, in not-going-to-benefit soil structure forms that you might as well not have bothered. Waste of time and money.

OK, unless you have the biology needed to mineralize that chemically immobilized nutrient. Except you just added salt, or strong acid, to get the chemical immobilizaiton. so, do you now have biology functioning to get the immobilized nutrient mineralized? Nope.

Now, certain approaches to dealing with lack of calcium in soil take the approach the you should add sulfur to release magnesium from the clay, so you don’t have to add 4 tons of lime. Adding 4 tons of lime is expensive. But, do you really want to remove nutrients from your soil in order to improve the APPARENT concentration of calcium?

Wouldn’t it be wiser to add back in the missing nutrient? Don’t deplete nutrients from your soil. Don’t leach something out that you are going to have to add back in sooner or later. What a poor way to fix a problem!

So, add calcium. But not as tons of lime. One possible approach that homeowners like: add eggshells, about 50 pounds of eggshell per ton of compost, and then apply about a half ton per acre of that compost. It seems to give the same plant benefit as applying 3 tons of lime per ac.

Not enough eggshells? Then use 100 pounds of calcium carbonate per 900 pounds of compost. Use a half ton of that compost per acre, and it equals the 3 tons of lime application. Arden Anderson has data that shows adding the lime at the beginning of the composting process OR near the end works just as well, as long as you give the organisms in the compost about a week to do the immobilization. Add humic acids to help them tie things up ASAP, without negative impacts as the result of salt addition.

Willikers! Will save you money!? A half ton of compost, properly made, with the added calcium, instead of 3 tons of lime out on the field, which will kill the biology you have worked so hard to improve.

Is this a Duh!?

Why so much less calcium needed in the compost system? Because we KNOW you will lose about 95% of the calcium you add as lime. So, when adding a salt, in order to get any benefit, you have to add TONS of lime. What a waste!

Why do you think we have the water quality problems we do? Where are all those nutrients coming from? Tons and tons fertilizer and nutrients poured on the soil every year? Were those nutrients exported in the plant material you sold? Nope. So, where'd they go? If they were still there, in your soil, you wouldn’t need to apply more this year, would you?

I try not to get depressed when I think about what we’ve been doing to al the critters I care about for all these years.

So, you've been advised to do inappropriate things. What do you do instead?

Dorthy wrote:
> We've been advised to apply 100# of elemental sulfur
> to our vineyard and crop fields.

Ask the person giving this recommendation where the data are that this sulfur is going to help anything.
If the hypothesis is that this sulfur will knock Mg off the clays, and thus the ratio of Ca:Mg wil be improved, you are now making MgSO4, what does the MgSO4 do to the plants?

MgSO4 is a soil “softener”? No, calcium floculates the soil. There’s a “battle” if you will between Ca building good spaces between clays, and Mg flattening space between the clays. You need both. Remove Mg in order to improve the ratio, and you’ve depleted your soil of Mg. When you finally get Mg reduced low enough to make the Ca:Mg ratio ok, you now will have to add Mg. Just think this one through for a minute. How do you ever get off the chemical treadmill?

ADD calcium instead.

Consider what 100 pounds of elemental sulfur will do to the biology LONG before the sulfur knocks Mg off the clays. It will kill a herd of beneficial fungi, and some pathogens too, in the soil. But you are going backwards faster than you are getting a benefit. You are playing chemistry, but it is biology that builds soil from sand, silt and clay.

Dorothy wrote:
> Also zinc sulfate and
> copper sulfate at lesser rates. Our soils are high in
> magnesium and the cal/mag ratio is not in balance. I
> believe the theory is that the sulfur will attach to
> the magnesium and dissipate, resulting in a looser
> soil that is relatively higher in Calcium.

Zinc sulfate is also a salt. More killing. Add copper sulfate, and there is even more killing. Anything over 3 ppm copper, and you are killing beneficial organisms in the soil. Just try to keep diseases out of your roots.

If you need sulfur, add it as organic matter, which contains sulfur. The biology will make that sulfur available to your plants, and work to establish an equilibrium with Mg on the clay surfaces.

Using S to remove Mg is much like the case when I say the ratio to fungi to bacteria is too low, which means there is too high bacteria compared to fungi. So people try to “solve” that problem by killing the “excess” bacteria. Whoa! No! If fungi are too low, you add fungal inocula and/or fungal foods. Kill the bacteria to get the ratio right? There’s a backward attitude. Now you not only have to improve fungi, but you will have to do something to get the bacteria back.

Remove your Mg by leaching as MgSO4, and you will have to put Mg back into the soil. If you need to add calcium, add calcium. But do it in a way that will not mean death to the biology you have.

> Are you saying that more biology will bring the
> magnesium and calcium into balance? If so, how would
> this work?

The way to do this is to add calcium to the compost. You have to have calcium, but the way to incorporate it is in the biology. That way you don’t leach the elements you add. You add the biology that will hold what you have and prevent further losses.

I get tired of people who don’t want to add soil biology into their understanding. I suspect the lab you sent your soil chemistry analysis to was one of those I asked if they would want to work together to include soil chemistry and soil biology in one package. Their response was that they would be happy to send me their soil chemistry analysis without their interpretation on it, so I could do it myself.

That “don’t bother us” attitudfe does not advance our understanding of how biology and chemistry work together. It does not give the grower the knowledge needed to stop paying so much to grow crops.

Well, this has gotten too long as it is. I expect questions will come out of my response, so ask away.

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

 

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Received on Sat Jan 03 2004 - 15:05:21 EST

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