Re: [compost_tea] How to add inorganic nutrients

From: <soilfoodweb_at_aol.com>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 00:14:08 -0500

The problem with adding inorganic nutrients is that they are all, pretty much, salts. That is, they dis-associate in water, and thus hold water away from the organisms, thus resulting in organism death, if the salt impact is great enough.

So, if you know that addition of more than 100 pounds per acre of salt will kill many desirable organisms, then how can you get biology going, so you can hold your inorganic elements in the biology? Unless you do that, these nutrients will be mobile in water, and leave the rooting zone very rapidly.

And please don't tell me that Ca, or NH4, or other nutrients aren't all that mobile in water. Relative to what? Inorganic nutrients are quite leachable. If they weren't, how come they end up in your drinking water? Why do they cause toxic blooms of bacteria and algae in surface rivers and lakes? What garbage information is being listened to when the information is in front of people's faces, but they keep believing that ammonium isn't very leachable? Or phosphate? Phew! There are herds of folks that need to wake up and smell the roses - or is that putrification?

OK, tirade over. The point is that we need to learn how to add inorganic nutrients to replace the nutrients lost once the biology was pretty much killed off. Once there were no organisms to hold the nutrients as chelated or biology-bound forms, those nutrients leached, rapidly.

Or why do you have to keep adding tons of gypsum each year? I know people who have added 8 tons of lime each year for the last 8 years, and they still have to add that much again this year - or at least that's what the chemistry tests tell them.

Or take the case of researchers in New York, or New Jersey, or California, where they have added the inorganic nutrients every year for the last 10 to 14 years ,just as the soil chemistry tests says they have to, and they never have gotten improved soil levels. When does this farce end?

How do we add the inorganic nutrients in a way they won't leach, so you don't have to add those nutrients in an inorganic form ever again?

You have to add them with the organisms, and the foods to feed the organisms, so teh nutrients are converted to biological forms, and do not further leach from the soil.

Why is it that bacteria and fungi do not leach from the soil? Well, unless you kill them, of course...

I hope to work with Arden Anderson to develop the exact programs needed for different situations so we can minimize the inorganic additions, make them in conjunction with the biology, so nutrients going in are held, and not lost. Then all you have to add back into the soil is the nutrients removed in the crop yield. No more loss of nutrients to groundwater, or drinking water, or surface waters......


Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
SFI Corvallis, OR
SFI Port Jefferson, NY
SFI Lismore, NSW, Australia
SFI Hilversum, The Netherlands
SFI Cambridge, New Zealand
www.soilfoodweb.com

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Received on Tue Dec 16 2003 - 10:44:49 EST

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