Re: [compost_tea] Re: A great raw material for compost

From: <soilfoodweb_at_aol.com>
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 00:53:18 -0500

If someone said that microbes do not reduce salt levels, first of all, that's a very ambiguous statement. Vague and non-specific, and could be taken a number of different ways.

Define salt. Salts dis-associate in water, they have positive and negative components which water easily "pulls apart".

Calcium phosphate is a salt, for example. Ferric citrate is a salt. Sodium hydroxide is a salt. And you better believe microorganisms can reduce those salt levels!

There is quite a bit of literature on phosphate-solubilizing bacteria and fungi which take up both the phosphorus and the calcium, thus removing salt from the soil. Mycorrhizal fungi are famous for their ability to take up the various salts of phosphorus and make the P available to plants.

Nitrogen salts of various kinds are what most people commonly recognize as inorganic fertilizer. Ammonium nitrate, ammonium sulfate, and urea for example. Microbes take up those salts all the time, and convert them into protein, lipids, carbohydrates, DNA, and other cellular components. Same thing for urine, which is why, when you get the right organisms into the soil, and onto plant surfaces, urine will not cause brown spots in the lawn. The nitrogen thus released is taken up and turned into cellular constituents which are not toxic to the plants. Many people mistakenly imagine that sodium chloride is the problem in urine, but it is the high nitrogen that kills most plants.

But if sodium chloride was applied, bacteria and fungi need sodium and chloride ions in their metabolic processes (big time in the ADP - ATP energy production cycle and in Krebs cycle), and so both bacteria and fungi "eat" or consume, or sequester (whatever your favorite term) "salt" and turn it into organic matter.

Now if the salt is in a place without any organic matter, no food for the microbes, then the microbes have a problem. High salt concentrations remove water, resulting in osmotic shock which can kill microbes. But just like too much water can kill a person, too much of anything is not a good thing. But you can't make the case that water is bad for people - grin! Water in too high concentration is bad - it's called drowning. Too high salt will kill anything, including people. But it doesn't make people unable to eat salt. We HAVE to have salt, in order to live.

Extreme statements of any kind are very dangerous to make, so if someone said microbes do not reduce salt levels, they were not thinking clearly.

There has been some interesting work by several people at the University of California, Davis, on sodium chloride VOLATILIZING bacteria. It does happen. Microbes can turn salt into gaseous forms. Cute, huh? Let's see, the research was done by, darn, memory don't fail me. Ah, Frankenberger, as I recall. Hum, well, I don't remember everything perfectly anymore.

I expect if one wanted to do a literature search through Agricola or BioScience or Soil Ecology sections of your favorite CD ROMS at the library, you could come up with a few more publications about microbes utilizing and converting different kinds of salts into different kinds of organic matter.

Happy reading! Keep those lawns green, even if you have a dog. Oh, and if you still have brown spots in your lawn after applying tea, consider that the biology is trying to tell you something..... you didn't get the biology established, growing and performing it's function.

Just because we dropped parrots in the Antarctic and they died does not mean that birds can't live at the South Pole. You have to drop the right birds in the right micro-habitat, that's all. It may take time to connect the two, or you may need to do something to figure out what the right habitat is to drop them into, or that you can prepare for them so they will do their ecological function.

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
http://www.soilfoodweb.com

 

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Received on Wed Jan 28 2004 - 12:14:00 EST

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