Re: [compost_tea] How do they do it?

From: <soilfoodweb_at_aol.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 13:56:33 EDT

All organisms need adequate water in order to live. In soil, the organisms
seek out water-films, which are held on the surfaces of the aggregates and seek
out pores of proper size filled partly or fully, with water.

Dry products can actually hold significant water, and if stored properly,
will maintain adequate moisture to keep the organisms in a low level of activity.

Many other products are dried to below the "wilting point" for any organism.
In that case, the organisms HAVE TO BE in a dormant form. That means spores,
dormant stages, dauer larvae, cysts, etc.

Many organisms in soil require several days to weeks to move into those
dormant stages, and many soil orgnaisms do not produce a dormant stage that we
know. They may make dormant stages, but we haven't connected them to the active
stage yet. More to learn.

But, in any case, when you dry any material, you are, therefore, going to
lose diversity. Freshly made compost tea is going to have more diversity than
put-to-sleep compost tea. I don't care how you put things to sleep, you are
losing some species.

If you can keep the critters active, for a long time, at low activity, then
you have a possibility of not losing diversity, or losing only a minimal amount
of species.

But the products you asked about, such as the mycorrhizal products, always
contain dormant stages of some kind. You then have to consider shelf life.
Spores are best, and spores CAN survive for thousands of years, if stored
properly (dry, no humidity, no water). If the materials gets wet, all bets are off.

There are companies that chop up mycorrhizal roots, and sell them, but the
shelf life is limited. The vesicles in the roots are considered to have only a
few weeks to months of viability.

Other products, like bacterial cultures, or fungal cultures, are added to dry
material, which puts the organisms to sleep. The drying process is usually
proprietary. a great deal of time and effort went into developing a process
that puts the organisms to sleep, while maximizing viability, ability to recover
and come back to life. Thus I cannot discuss specifics except with
representatives of those companies.

If you want to develop a process of drying a culture so it goes to sleep
without losing species, or only minial loss of species, then you need to do the
work to document that you do not lose the organisms in the drying process. You
need to document what it takes to wake the organisms back up, what number of
individuals of each species you desire wake up.

A bit of a job, so you can see why the really good inocula cost some money.
It is not just a process of throwing compost tea into a dry material, letting
it dry, and starting to sell the dry material. To know it is a good product,
quite a bit of time and money have been spent developing knowledge about what
is going on in hte product.

And therefore, you should be concerned when you start dealing with a person
who doesn't have information about these things for their product. If the
product doesn't do what you expect, then don't be surprised. Don't make
statements like "mycorrhizal fungi don't work", because maybe, just maybe, you didn't
actually buy mycorrhizal fungi if there was no documentation that they were
there to begin.

If you buy ACT, and there's no documentation of results possible from the
machine, or recipe, and the compost you used wasn't documented to have the
organisms you want, then statements like "see, aerated compsot tea doesn't do
anything" can't be made.

We have some published scientitifc data that supports my point of view. They
neither document aeration, biology, compost quality, or compsot tea quality,
yet they are willing to conclude that compost tea doesn't work.

Same with compost, we have many "scientists" that do not document that they
are actually working with compost (no chemistry data, no biological data), and
yet they want to claim that compost doesn't work, and in fact harms plant
growth.

These aren't scientists. They may have an understanding of the scientific
method, which they applied to a set of trials, but they missed the important
first step.

What is it about compost, or compost tea, that makes the difference?

It's the organisms, the FULL food web. If they miss that point, its like
claiming that bread is impossible to make, just because they threw together
flour, salt, water, and yeast. If you don't do the process right, it's not going
to make bread. If you don't do the process right, you aren't making ACT.

Luckily, making ACT is nowhere near as complicated as making bread. Phew!

Just make sure you are starting with baker's yeast.... I mean, aerobic
compost......


Elaine R. Ingham
Soil Foodweb Inc., Corvallis, Oregon
Soil Foodweb Inc., Port Jefferson, New York
Soil Foodweb Institute, Lismore Australia
Soil Foodweb Institute Cambridge, New Zealand
Laboratorios de Soil Foodweb, Culiacan, Mexico
Soil Foodweb Inc., Jerome, Idaho
Soil Foodweb Inc., South Africa







Received on Wed Oct 27 2004 - 15:05:28 EDT

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