RE: [compost_tea] Small-mindedness

From: Judi Stewart <js_at_olympus.net>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 06:29:38 -0800

Lyle, this is a post from Dr. Ingham. The reason I forward it is
because of the information regarding Soil Soup and Growing Solutions.
Alison is a proponent
of Growing Solutions. That's the main reason I wasn't thrilled about
her
coming to talk to us. I may buy supplies from her, but I didn't want
her
suggesting that her machines or her testing is superior to what we
already
know about our methods and equipment.

The proposed speaker, Tom (and/or his brother) Giannou, hasn't gotten
back to me as yet. He on the other hand, has other methods for
improving plant growth. I'm hoping I hear from him today because we've
got to get a speaker by tomorrow,
the latest!!

Judi

-----Original Message-----
From: soilfoodweb_at_aol.com [mailto:soilfoodweb_at_aol.com]
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 3:22 AM
To: compost_tea_at_yahoogroups.com
Subject: [compost_tea] Small-mindedness

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.
-----
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?
------
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 - 10:43:06 EST

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