[compost_tea] Small-mindedness

From: <soilfoodweb_at_aol.com>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 06:21:52 -0500

As many of you may remember, Linda Smaltz accused me some time ago of being nasty and unpleasant, because I critisized Soil Soup and Growing Solutions machines. She confused my criticisms of the machines with what she thought were character attacks on Ed Neff, Michael Alms and Vicki Bess. I have not attacked Ed or Vicki on a personal basis, because that is inappropriate.

I replied to Linda’s accusation with a list of the FACTS about the ability of those machines to make decent compost tea. Data reported in the Compost Tea Brewing Manual show that neither Soil Soup nor Growing Solutions machines are capable of routinely producing a compost tea with all the organisms that occur in a decent compost. The teas made with those machines, by people who bought and used those machines, were always missing fungi, protozoa and/or nematodes.

Linda never responded in any fashion to those facts.

To counter those facts, Linda would have to present DATA showing decent organism numbers in the teas. The teas would have to be made by neutral parties, and tested by a neutral lab.

But clearly, Linda has no data to support her point-of-view, or she would present them. I suspect that she went to the companies she is trying to defend, and they had no data they could give her either.

So, Linda is hoping that character assassination will make people disregard the facts.

I think most people are too smart to fall for those tactics.

So, mud-slinging instead of dealing with facts. Linda is trying to tarnish the reputations of people doing data collection, doing the hard work to get compost tea used by everyday people, in practical, inexpensive ways, people unable to get Soil Soup machines to give them good tea.
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Now, let’s deal with what Linda said about me. Linda tried to suggest that I fight with most of the compost tea world. Clearly, Linda is mathematically challenged.

Soil Soup and Growing Solutions, even combined, DO NOT make up 50% of either machine sales or tea production. Dispite the fact that Soil Soup spent over a million dollars in PR to promote their sales, Soil Soup does not even come close to 50% of the sales of machines or tea world-wide.

If those two companies were 50% of the companies selling machines, then is Linda trying to have us believe that there are only 4 companies selling tea machines? We all know that to be completely false. There are many, many more than 4 compost tea machine manufacturers.

I work with probably close to 90% of the people making compost tea and compost tea machines commercially around the world. Of all the companies in the world selling tea commercially, probably most of them test their teas with SFI.

Why do Soil Soup and Growing Solutions supposedly test their tea using plate count approaches? Because they can’t consistently make tea with fungi, protozoa and nematodes in them. They have to try to get approval using a method we all know to be silly for assessing microbial diversity. Talk to any Ph.D. microbiologist, and you’ll get a horse laugh if you try to suggest that plate count methods are even vaguely useful for diversity assessment.

SFI has shown that the relationship between direct measurements and improved plant growth. There are no data sets showing that relationship for plate count approaches.

And neither Soil Soup nor Growing Solutions show any data on their web sites, at least the last time I looked, so one suspects that they don’t even get good data from plate methods, since they don’t show that information. Do you suppose they are afraid to show that data on their web site? Hum, why would that be?
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And now let’s talk about Carole Ann Rollins. If Linda was a decent human being, she would have called Carole Ann up, and talked about her concerns. A decent Christian person would have been concerned about the state of Carole’s spiritual health. But Linda wasn’t interested in doing the decent thing. She dug up what dirt she could and selected just the bad stuff to talk about.

Am I correct in concluding that Linda’s purpose was to attempt to destroy people’s reputations, to harm people to the maximum extent, through mud-slinging and muck-raking?

I think we all have Linda’s true colors in full view at this point. Cheap, tacky and not interested in the truth.

If you are concerned about what was going on in Carole’s life, call her, and you’ll find out the true reason Carole Ann wrote her book. It isn’t right for me to go into that here on a compost tea list serve, but please, instead of going off the deep end, behave like a true Christian, like a decent human being, and before passing judgement, find out the real story. Talk to Carole Ann about her purpose in writing a book on prostitution. The real reason is a far cry from what Linda’s rant would have you believe.

So, as I said before, ANY TIME that anyone from Soil Soup or Growing Solutions wants to show data about their machines' ability to routinely produce tea with decent levels of aerobic bacteria, beneficial fungi, protozoa and nematodes, I’ll be happy to see those numbers.

But data are required. Got that? Actual, hard, data.

Character assassination cannot even begin to serve in the place of FACTS.


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
SFI Culiacan, Mexico
http://www.soilfoodweb.com


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Received on Mon Mar 15 2004 - 10:42:54 EST

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