Re: [compost_tea] basic questions

From: <soilfoodweb_at_aol.com>
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 18:29:50 EST

 
Butch wrote:

Use a field of corn which is produced
for cattle feed. The field is harvested for the ears
of corn and stalks are harvested for silage. In this
case there is very little left for the good organisms
to act on.

Is there enough left if we only harvest the ears of
corn for this field to be self-sustaining. Don't go
into cover crops because in Indiana most corn fields
have little if any cover crops added. So compost tea
cannot build soil by itself. This takes nothing away
from the value of ACT.

Good points, Butch.
 
The purpose of compost tea is to deliver organisms to the soil, along with
some foods to help those organisms get established and doing their thing.
 
ACT can HELP build soil.
 
Without the proper set of organisms, soil can't be built.
Without foods to feed organisms, soil can't be built.
Without temperature in the appropriate ranges, soil can't be built.
Without water, soil can't be built.
Without parent material, soil can't built.
Without oxygen, iron, boron, calcium,etc, soil can't be built.
and so on.....
 
As Arden Anderson always says, No number is right until all numbers are
right.
 
I like to put this another way: We like to "rank" things in the scientific
world. Which is the most important organ in your body?
 
What would a scientist say? Your brain, right?
What would an artist say? Your heart?
What would a pianist say? Hands?
 
Great. So, I can take away all your other organs, and leave you with just
your brain, or just your heart, or just your hands, just your "most important"
organ?
 
How long would you stay alive? Minutes? Seconds?
 
To say that compost tea cannot build soil is falling into that kind of trap.
 
Of course, compost tea alone cannot build soil. But it can go a long way
towards getting you there. Compost can go a long way to getting you there.
 
But we always have to be growing plants, and using the residues to help the
soil build.
 
Silage production, and complete removal of all the plant material is a bit
self-defeating. You have to, eventually, replace the nutrients being removed.
 
Well, unless you are breaking down bedrock at the same rate as you are
removing nutrients from the soil. You add in new nutrients to the soil as you
break bedrock into sand, silt and clay. So, don't make silage from any field
any more often than the soil is being replenished from bedrock.
 
Not practical to put that sort of restriction? But, how fast is bedrock
being broken down, what are the nutrient concentrations being brought into the
soil from that break-down, versus how much are you really removing in plant
material being taken from the land?
 
Silage removes about 250 tons per acre of plant material. Is that wet
weight, or dry weight? So, about 150 tons/ac of dry material removed?
 
How much of that is N? Well, dry silage material is about 30:1 C:N because
it is removed while still green. If it was removed as straw, the numbers are
very different. But silage is what we are working on.
 
So, about 5 tons/ac of N is removed, and since bed rock doesn't contain N,
you have to put replace that N. So silage requires you do the N-fixation
thing, and make sure clover or alfalfa is part of the mix. You can fix up to 7
tons of N per acre with free-living N-fixing bacteria as well. So make sure
they get in your compost. Or tea.
 
Figure that PO4 is about a tenth of the N, so you are removing 0.5 ton of
PO4 per ac with silage. Since in most soils in the US we have lots of plant
not-available P, all we need to do is get the biology in the soil to make that
PO4 plant available.
 
Can the biology do that? We had soil with 70 ppm PO4 after we added the
biology and foods to feed it, and in two weeks, PO4 was 200 ppm.
All the PO4 the plants needed, made available from a pool most soil
scientists dis-regard.
 
Who cares if the work was done in OZ? In soils so limited in PO4 that the
CSIRO will tell you there is no soil in Australia that contains enough
phosphorus to grow plants, so you MUST add phosphorus.
 
Not if the biology can move plant not-available P into plant available forms.
 
The information applies to soil everywhere. The biology works. Just make
sure you get it there. And feed it. And have water.....and....
 
The whole system has to be in place to build soil.
 
What we have destroyed through use of pesticides and high levels of
inorganic fertilizer is the biology.
 
So, get the biology back. Get the right biology back.
 

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 Sat Jan 01 2005 - 00:14:28 EST

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