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Who wouldn’t
be suspicious? Right from the get-go this workshop
is promising cure-all concoctions that bring new life to everything
they touch. The potions work in ways that are difficult to
explain and impossible to actually see. The man conducting
the affair is fast-talking and charismatic—he even lives
in a far-off land. The whole thing smells like snake oil.
Here’s the catch: Gil Carandang, this crafty man from
the Philippines, is not trying to sell us anything. In fact,
he wants us to buy as little as possible—that’s
the point of this seminar. The lesson that’s officially
on the agenda is the same as the event’s formal title:
“Cultivating Beneficial Indigenous Microorganisms.”
But what’s really being taught here, the true objective,
is the empowerment of farmers.
By learning how to cultivate microorganisms, growers become
able to meet their needs with what exists on the farm and
can stop buying amendments from chemical companies (purveyors
who, some might argue, are the real peddlers in modern farming).
The technology was born of ingenuity, but it has spread by
financial necessity, primarily among farmers in developing
countries for whom agricultural chemicals are painfully expensive.
“This technology can reduce your costs by 30 to 50%,”
Carandang says. “It sounds amazing, but that’s
the percent most farmers spend on pesticides and fertilizer.
On my farm, we have only two medicines: Lacto bacillus and
ginger-garlic extract. We make both ourselves.”
Learning how to do that is what has drawn a sold-out crowd
to this vegetable farm in Bolinas, California, for one of
Carandang’s rare seminars in North America. (The class
covered both cultivating microorganisms and making fermented
plant extracts. Only the former is discussed here.)
No hifalutin nonsense, just affordable
techniques that work
It’s a simple set-up, with chairs crammed into the
barn and facing a makeshift stage in the packing area. At
center stage stand two folding tables. On them lie the unexpected
tools of this fantastic technology: A box of generic brown
sugar and a bulb of garlic. A quart of milk, a cutting board,
and some cooked white rice. A liter of the cheapest vodka
in California, and a Miller High Life tall boy.
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He sounds like a crackpot, but in fact Carandang has studied
farming all over the world, including as a Fulbright scholar.
(He now farms full-time back in the Philippines.) This odd
display of un-magical ingredients is evidence not of a sham,
but rather of his emphasis on making technology accessible.
You see, discussions of beneficial microorganisms usually
take one of two dangerous paths. People either get New Age-y
with it and scare listeners off, or (for fear of being called
New Age-y), they legitimize the concept using complicated
scientific formulas—to much the same effect. Carandang
takes the middle road.
“In the Philippines, I’m usually teaching people
who have never been to school, and they get it fine,”
he says. “We don’t need no high-falutin’
nonsense around here.”
With today’s distinctly educated, Western crowd, the
message doesn’t sink in immediately. Everyone is scribbling
madly to keep up with Carandang’s patter, careful to
not miss a word of the lesson. But as we are figuring out
how to spell “hifalutin”, he catches us off-guard.
“What matters here is that you understand the very essence
of this idea. So stop taking notes, just listen.”
We lift our heads, and I realize that Carandang has been
talking for an hour now and hasn’t touched a thing on
the table. With an American teacher we would have photocopies
of a syllabus and already be on section 2b. Instead, our teacher
is circling around the subject, peeling off the outer layers
of meaning, waxing on about the macrocosmic workings of Nature.
We don’t know it now, but this conceptual approach
is essential to the practice we came to learn. Understanding
the idea itself works as a sort of inoculant; without it,
the act of Cultivating Beneficial Indigenous Microorganisms
is more or less useless.
“This is rather than just ‘Oh, let’s spray
this, and put on this fertilizer every two weeks,” he
says. “Instead, you just need to open your eyes and
pay attention, slow down the process. The plant will talk
back. Not literally, but it will always tell us what is wrong,
what is deficient. How could you know what it needs if you
haven’t paid attention?”
Growing soil, not plants: Building up the
soil’s life and biodiversity
Behind Carandang and the makeshift stage is an old forest
so dense and tangled you can hardly make out its individual
members. It turns out it is the perfect backdrop. Promoting
health and growth are the objectives of this technology, and
the forest has both in spades—naturally. It’s
because of its biodiversity.
We all know the biodiversity spiel: the more life a place
supports, the more variation it has; that variation means
competition, which regulates populations into healthy numbers.
The more a place is allowed to be natural, the more it balances
itself out.
Natural balance is not the goal of the farmer, his work being
the cultivation of select members of the ecosystem. But again:
single crops, tight geometry, and insects and weeds eliminated,
altogether mean a sterile environment that can’t keep
itself in check. But a farm with variegated fields and wild
plants and insects that feed sparrows that feed hawks is one
that begins to balance itself.
Now, few farmers import hawks to strengthen their farm ecosystems.
You just can’t insert something that high up the food
chain and expect it to survive. Instead, build the system
that supports it, and the hawks will come on their own.
“It’s not all about NPK here,” Carandang
says. “It’s not all about sun, air, et cetera,
it’s all about all. It’s all about one, about
a whole unit. The more you are able to understand this, the
more you’ll be able to practice good farming.”
Rather than grow plants, Carandang advocates growing soil.
Not multiplying dirt, but building up the soil’s life
and diversity—that is the foundation of this system.
And the building blocks are microorganisms, whose most essential
work is to break down nutrients into forms that are accessible
to plants and animals. Without them, the planet would be bare
rock.
“There is a Chinese proverb that goes, ‘Add humility
to intelligence, it becomes wisdom. Add passion or fire to
wisdom, it becomes enlightenment,’” Carandang
says. “In soil fertility, it’s the same basis,
that’s my opinion. It’s the fire that makes the
living soil, and the fire is the microorganisms.”
This is the part where most of the world shakes its head.
No amount of microorganisms could be as effective as bringing
in a load of compost or spraying fungicides. They are too
small to be powerful, too unfamiliar to be essential.
And yet farmers rely on them all the time. That pink dye
on legume seed, for instance, is there to tell you the seed
will fix nitrogen because it has been doused with the necessary
inoculant—itself a beneficial microorganism. Anyone
who has ever watched a compost heap steam has seen the strength
of beneficial microorganisms, and anyone who has ever taken
acidophilus to recover from antibiotics has felt them at work.
Any farmer who has suffered Phytopthera or Verticillium
is familiar with microorganisms, but not the good kind. Luckily,
as Carandang explains, these pathogens comprise only three
to five percent of all microbes. “If it were more,”
he says, “we’d all be dead.”
Plants and humans are protected from pathogens by diversity—it
leads to competition, which prevents any single microbe from
going out of control. In the forest, this diversity comes
naturally as different plants and animals attract and support
different microorganisms. But if you have, say, just grapes
and cover crops planted, you’re not encouraging diversity,
in fact you’re discouraging it. That is why you introduce
microbes.
Making microbes
But first you must have the microbes. And that, hours later,
is why we are in the barn, rather cold after sitting here
for so long, but patiently learning how to Cultivate Beneficial
Indigenous Microorganisms.
The act itself, in all its variations, might take 15 minutes
to demonstrate. It’s a basic formula: Set out carbohydrates
to attract microbes from a place—its air, its soil,
its plants and animals. Feed the microbes sugar so they’ll
multiply (or in the case of Lacto bacilli, feed them
milk to encourage a specific population). Dilute the potion
and apply it to whatever needs help.
If sheer diversity is the objective, then the microbes are
collected from the wildest place one can find. The owner of
this farm, Dennis Dierks, has wilderness at his doorstep,
and so collected his microbes from the woods behind Carandang’s
stage. Where there is no forest, the objective is still to
find the place with greatest diversity. This could be even
on the farm itself—a wild area behind the compost pile,
or a healthy hedgerow. In fact, the closer to the farm, the
better, as the most beneficial microbes are those naturally
adapted to the ecosystem.
As the microbes are attracted and arrive to eat the carbohydrates,
they go from invisible to visible, but just barely. Forest
microbes are collected using cooked white rice, and success
is marked by the appearance, after a few days, of mold. Lacto
bacilli are heralded by the curdling of milk, other microbes
simply by a sour smell to the liquid they’re in. Add
some sugar, though, and the transformation is mind-blowing.
Last year, I saw Dierks’ brews as they came to life
in his potting shed. They weren’t pretty, mostly soupy
brown liquids in jugs and buckets, but the life inside them
was astonishing. He went to give me a smell of one, labeled
“Root Brew,” only to find the bottle cap had been
sealed on by liquid seeping out from inside. He wrenched the
plastic bottle between his hands, pulled, and bang! The cap
popped off and liquid exploded all over the shed.
We stood there for a moment, our bare arms and faces and
shirts brown and wet, Dennis holding what had become a sated
volcano, calm but still dribbling out lava. “If this
were chemicals we would be totally poisoned right now,”
he said, “not to mention out of a lot of money. But
that’s the beauty of it. Instead, your skin feels soft.
It feels alive. And it’s free. I haven’t been
this excited about farming for 25 years.”
Later in the season, several of Dierks’ long-time customers
commented that his produce tasted better than in years past,
and was keeping for longer. Meanwhile, Diane Matthews, another
local farmer who had learned Carandang’s techniques,
was using her own microbe brew to fight off the Phytopthera
that was decimating her raspberries. “The plants were
supposed to die,” she said at the workshop. “I
didn’t know what would happen, but I figured I’d
try the forest microbes. What happened was the Phytopthera
disappeared. I got a crop at Thanksgiving! The berries were
small, but their taste was excellent.”
The specific power of Lacto
Carandang explains that one can also home in on specific
microbes for targeted results. The most useful is Lacto
bacillus. This microorganism is the workhorse of the
human digestive system (though luckily it is also found elsewhere).
On the farm it’s used for similar tasks of digestion,
something Dierks was relieved to hear last winter after the
NOP had mandated that all manure be fully broken down before
use. He applied his L. bacillus culture to the mound
of manure beside his field, and the composting was faster
than ever. Similarly, when sprayed on plants, L. bacilli
will digest the biomass on the leaves and stems—dust,
for instance, or mud—thus making that free food available
to its host.
“Lacto” is the only microbe Carandang will mention
by name, but it is only one of millions that can be collected
and used. His instructions are characteristically simple:
walk around the farm, find elements you want to reproduce,
and collect the microbes that surround them. You could get
the microbes from around a particularly robust tomato plant
and spray that on next year’s crop. (These concoctions
last for months, even years.) To make a growth promoter, find
a beanstalk growing like mad, clip the leaves at the top of
vine (where all the growth is happening) and make a brew of
the resident microbes. Do it with bamboo, or even kelp, which
grows inches each day.
“In the Philippines, we use water lettuce,” Carandang
says. “We spray it on the cucumbers and boom! You can
do that and be three or five days ahead of the other local
farmers. If you’re a market gardener, that can be a
big deal.”
After talking for nearly seven hours straight, Carandang
ends the workshop because the daylight is starting to fade.
The energy in the barn only rises. Despite the chill in the
air and the stiff legs it granted us, we are all now bustling
about, discussing how we plan—already—to put the
technology to work.
Alan Mart does organic landscaping and soil management plans.
His first thought is to collect the microbes from willow roots,
which suffer no transplant shock, and apply them to other,
more fragile specimens that he’s planting.
Patty Salmon is a goat rancher who has been turning her farm
organic for years, but has always hit a wall when it comes
to feed. With only 8 acres, she can’t possibly grow
all the grain and forage for her herd of 100. Carandang explained
that his brother, a chicken farmer, ferments his feed and
applies Lacto bacillus to it. This causes a pre-digestion
that makes a greater percentage of the nutrients available
to the chickens, and results in their eating less. Salmon
thinks maybe she can extend her reach by doing the same.
Also conferring are Doug Gallagher and Annabelle Lenderink,
from Star Route Farms, one of the oldest and most venerated
organic farms in the country. Gallagher heard about beneficial
microorganisms 25 years ago, and the farm is already using
some store-bought varieties to combat lettuce drop and mildew.
They’ve had moderate success, though Gallagher admits
they continue using them less because of quantifiable effects
and more because he believes in the concept. He’s hopeful
that will change with microbes collected from the farm’s
forested acreage, which have evolved to thrive in that particular
piece of land. And if not, well, at least they’re free.
Of course Carandang is swarmed with students and their questions
after the talk. While waiting their turns, a few pick up the
two clean brown bottles on the larger folding table. They
contain Carandang’s own Lacto bacillus culture,
made back in the Philippines. He brings them along to demonstrate
a finished product, but he also has a few for sale. Frankly,
though, for all his charms, he’s a terrible businessman.
One workshop student carries a bottle over to him and asks
the price.
“It’s ten dollars,” Carandang says, “but
you don’t need to buy it. Just make your own. I guarantee
it will be better.”![]()
Gil Carandang offers workshops and, for those who cannot
attend, detailed booklets on indigenous microorganism cultivation
and other innovative technologies. Carandang has also written
a book on the topic, Indigenous Microorganisms - Grow your
own: Beneficial indigenous microorganisms and bionutrients
in natural farming. To order write to: Gil Carandang
Herbana Farms, Km. 59 burol, Calamba City, Laguna, Philippines,
email: gil_carandang@hotmail.com
or visit: www.herbanafarmsphilippines.com
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