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Re: Regulation of compost teas (was: NOSB loses its head)



Hello to all,

I am wondering if anyone has actually experienced increased efficacy of
compost teas after culturing the teas with additives and aeration.

The reason I am a little skeptical is that the great maturity of soil
microorganisms (>95%) are unculturable using all known types of media (let
alone something very simple like glucose).

The addition of sugar and aeration will certainly increase the **total***
microbial population in a tea... however this increase will be selective...
you will shift the microbial community structure of your tea toward microbes
that are highly responsive to sugar and aeration... analogous to shifting a
diverse herbal ley to just a few grass species by fertilizing heavily with
N.

I wonder if this community shift is desireable in terms of optimizing the
disease suppressive (or other beneficial) effect of the tea.

I do not have much personal experience with compost teas and have not yet
done a lit review... but... the soil ecologist in me is skeptical.

If any of you have done on-farm comparisons or replicated research
investigating the compost tea "augmentation" metods that are currently
gaining in popularity, please share your experiences.

Joel

Joel Gruver
Dept of Soil Science
NC State University
jgruv@hotmail.com

From: Jeff Lowenfels <jeff@GARDENER.COM>
Reply-To: Sustainable Agriculture Network Discussion Group
<SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU>
To: SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU
Subject: Re: [SANET-MG] Regulation of compost teas (was: NOSB loses its
head)
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 08:37:39 -0800

The idea behind compost tea is to increase the numbers of bacteria and
fungi, protozoa etc in the tea in a short time....say 24 to 36 hours.
Aeration and sugars increase bacterial counts.

One exception is tea made with NATURAL compost....We have such compost here
in Alaska. It is made over 10,000 years and has no manures, pesticides,
fungicides etc......and one of the highest counts of diversified bacteria
you can get.....up to 35,000 different kinds in a table spoon......You can
contact me off line if you want to buy some for tea brewers and remain
organic even if you use the tea within a day of sales......

Still, despite my business, the NOSB rule against sugar makes NO
sense......

Cheers,

Jeff Lowenfels


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