Re: [compost_tea] newpaper article

From: Robert Norsen <bnbrew_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 15:02:21 -0800 (PST)

YES Butch, Chris smith needs to follow this List for a few months, take a few classes from Elaine, go to the Texas Conference Jan 26 27 28 become a member of ICTC, talk to another writer, Jeff Lowenfels, UNDERSTAND what he is talking about in his writing, THEN start to advise the public. This goes for many popular writers who write without much understanding of the subject. Probelm is the public think such writers come well informed.
 
Not sure the compost Chris writes about was the best. It worked for that garden. So Chris is convinced that compost is good. Where was his "control" in that "research'?
 


butch ragland <wilddog_202_at_yahoo.com> wrote:

I found this article while doing a little surfing. Let
me direct you to the paragraph about research. This
makes me about 1/2 sick. This makes the Newspaper? The
reason there is insufficient research is Monsanto or
GE or ADM can't control ACT. Some years ago while on
the board of the Kentucky Nurserymen's Association we
gave money to the University of Kentucky to do nursery
research. They used it for tobacco research, remember
in 70's tobacco was a big deal in Kentucky.

Those of you planning to use ACT for your income need
to budget money to support research or leave it to
fools like this or create a vacuum for the republican
supporters (large multi-national corporations) to get
control.

We can gripe and do nothing or take control or leave
it to others. I for one don't want this idiot or
Monsanto in charge. I'm 64 retired and I'm not going
to do anything but gripe. When I owned a compost
facility I was involved in my source of income. My
interest now is what will become of the world we're
leaving for my grand-children.

Don't get on me about the republicans, I've said to
much already. Don't want to be sent to Guantanamo or
Egypt for retraining.


Thursday, August 19, 2004

Good Enough To Eat: Value of compost tea is still in
question

By CHRIS SMITH
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

My dad is a believer in compost. When I was growing up
in Massachusetts in the 1950s, Hurricane Carole blew
over our silo. Dad turned its concrete foundation into
the mother of all humus pits. We dumped some of the
manure from three heifers, two steers and a flock of
chickens in it. Household garbage, plant waste, dead
chickens and woodchucks and anything else Dad thought
would break down went in too.

The pit was so big he could operate the compost the
way you would a series of bins. Within a year there
were wheelbarrow-loads of finished product, which he
lavished on the vegetable garden, lawns and
ornamentals. Early on, my brothers and I could see
that our garden was lusher, healthier and more
productive than other gardens. We were taught that
compost and manure were the reasons.

In the course of time, I questioned most of what I was
taught. My mother, trained in science, was a skeptic.
I think she passed that habit of thinking to me. It
was hard to be skeptical about compost though, when
its good results were so apparent.

As I learned more about soil and the community of
microbes that give it structure, add to its fertility
and even protect plants growing in it from some
diseased organisms, the benefits of compost became --
for me -- one of life's verities. So it may strike you
as odd that I'm going to wax skeptical about compost
tea, a product that, for the past five years or so,
has received often rhapsodic tributes in the popular
press.

I'm not ready to come to the tea party yet. Claims for
compost tea as a suppressor of disease sound too
miraculous to me and rely more on testimonials than
tests. What's needed is more science. Let me explain.

A gardener in one article will declare she sprayed all
her roses with tea and that all were healthy as a
result. In another piece, a local man will claim he
hasn't had late blight on his tomatoes for two years,
since he began spraying them regularly with tea.

There's no mention of control groups. In the above
cases, such a group would contain the same plants,
grown the same way, with the exception that they
didn't get any tea. The presence of a control group
and honest reporting of how it fares is critical to a
scientific test.

Let's continue with the example of the gentleman's
tomatoes not having blight for the past two years. I
can think of another reason they were spared -- one
that has nothing to do with tea.

Initiation of infection depends on stems and foliage
being wet long enough for spores of the disease
organism to germinate. The past two summers have been
so dry, I haven't had to spray for the disease. By the
time blight arrived, if it arrived at all, the fall
rainy season had started and tomato harvest was over.

If our gentleman had grown a control crop, it's likely
it too would have been free of blight, and he wouldn't
be making the claim that tea had spared the plants.

For the most part, university horticulturists have the
same reservations about tea that I do -- too much hype
and not enough science. Linda Chalker-Scott, Extension
horticulturist at WSU Puyallup, in a recent search of
peer-reviewed scientific journals, discovered just a
handful of articles about compost tea, most of them on
the non-aerated variety.

To summarize Chalker-Scott's findings, success in
controlled experiments with non-aerated compost tea as
a disease suppressant has been variable, suggesting
these teas "may be useful in suppressing some
pathogens on some plants. Aerated compost teas have no
scientifically documented effect as pathogen
suppressors." (From the August 2003 issue of Balls &
Burlap, a publication of the Washington State
Nurserymen's Association).

So why isn't there more academic interest in compost
tea? The benefits of compost as mulch, soil amendment
and nutrient provider and even as a suppressor of some
plant disease organisms is generally accepted by
scientists.

Brewed into tea, is the stuff less promising as a
subject for study? I suspect some scientists do see
tea as a less-compelling subject for investigation;
after all, we have access to regular compost, a proven
material that has many of the effects claimed for tea.
And I'm not sure anyone has waved money at the
universities for tea research.

If I had to predict the course of academic research on
compost tea, I'd say it would be slow. In the short
run, our knowledge about teas may depend more on
individual gardeners and gardening groups conducting
scientifically respectable research than on
universities getting to the task.

In next week's column, I'll discuss setting up test
plots. They can't be as precisely controlled as they'd
be in a university setting, but with attention to
control groups and the limiting of variables, they
can, nonetheless, generate useful information.
Chris Smith, who lives in Port Orchard, is a Master
Gardener and is retired from the WSU Cooperative
Extension. His columns appear in the P-I garden pages
on Thursday. Send questions to P.O. Box 4426, South
Colby, WA 98384-0426.
--- soilfoodweb_at_aol.com wrote:

>
>
> Hugh sent the following message about anaerobic
> digestion. The benefits are
> only possible if you have a highly uniform set of
> starting materials through
> the whole year.
>
> And struvite can be quite toxic when it becomes
> concentrated.
>
> In dairy lagoons, it is the struvite that is
> usually the problem going out
> onto fields - too concentrated. High-quality
> organic P? Not when it get to
> the concentrations typical in anaerobic digestion.
>
>
> Although as you say, more work is needed.
>
> Elaine
>
> 2. Anaerobic Digestion
>
>
> Other co-products from digesters include fiber,
> nutrient water, heat,
> struvite, and CO2. Fiber can be used for
> lower-value products such as organic
> soil amendments and animal bedding, or for
> potentially higher-value products
> such as a peat moss replacement in potted plant
> production. Nutrient-rich
> water serves as fertilizer since the nutrients are
> readily available for use by
> plants. Struvite is a high-quality, organic
> phosphorus fertilizer, waste
> heat from the electrical generation process can be
> used to heat water, and CO2
> can be "scrubbed" and captured from the biogas.
> More research is necessary
> on all of these co-products to improve the quality
> and consistency of the
> anaerobic digestion products and to develop and
> capture value-added markets.
> Best wishes for the New Year!
> Hugh
>
>
>
>
>



__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250




Yahoo! Groups Links














Received on Sat Jan 08 2005 - 21:50:31 EST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Tue Feb 07 2012 - 14:15:43 EST