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Re: [compost_tea] WSU program on Organic standards



Thank you Judi for the update on the The New Organic Agriculture Standards - Satellite Program" today at the WSU Learning Extension.

I am in Australia, and was hoping that someone back home would listen in and ask questions!  It is good to hear that someone there is listening to the information being given out.

This quote from your e-mail says it all, I think -

Miles McEvoy responded (who works for the WSDA's Organic Food Program as an inspector and program manager. He helped establish the National Association of State Organic Programs(NASOP) and is their President).  He said that compost tea can be used if it was free of pathogens.  He also said sugar and molasses can be used in compost tea.

What we at Soil Foodweb Inc. are doing is establishing that compost tea made correctly is free of pathogens, even if molasses is used.

The paper that Kirk Waterstripe, a Ph.D. student at Oregon State University, and doing the research at Soil Foodweb Inc. will give at Biocycle firmly establishes this information.  The paper recently published in Jr. of Environmental Quality does much the same thing for compost.

So, all those folks who were previously saying that molasses and other sugars cause E. coli to grow in compost tea (e.g., Bess, 2002, published in Biocycle May 2002 meeting papers, and S. Schuerell's recent Biocycle article about compost tea), and that claimed that molasses and other sugars had to be removed from their tea starting materials (New York Times article quote from M. Alms, President of Growing Solutions Inc, Eugene, OR), need to change their tunes.   

Proper aeration and high numbers of beneficial aerobic bacteria AND FUNGI are what result in E. coli being out-competed and consumed in compost and compost tea.

Correct scientific information needs to get out into the world, not information based on one tea machine that goes anaerobic.  Tea machines have to have oxygen concentrations properly measured through the ENTIRE brew cycle, in the places in the tea machine accumulate biofilms, not just at 1, 8 and 24 hours in the water above the aeration disc. 

We surely do not know everything about brewing tea yet, but we do have data that show that if there are no pathogens in compost (and ALL properly made composts are E. coli free; just because some people don't make compost properly, but still call it compost does not mean all compost tea will automatically have pathogens in it.  Just make sure to buy E. coli tested, and E. coli free compost!)

And hear what K. Waterstripe has to report in his paper at Biocycle about teas that are made with molasses, and with poorly made "compost" that contains E. coli. 

Thank you again for your report, Judi! 

Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
www.soilfoodweb.com
SFI Oregon, USA
SFI Australia
SFI New York
SFI Europe
SFI New Zealand

"Hope is not a feeling. It is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what we are doing makes sense, no matter how things turn out."   --  Vaclav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic
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