Hi Ted -
You wrote
> As far as I can tell, it is impossible to tell whether your compost has the microbes needed to deal with salt unless you specifically tailor your compost to do so and get it tested. We are not looking for salt-eating microbes anyway.
My response:
All microorganisms deal with salt. All of us "eat" salt, which means that you hydrolyse the salt into it's component parts, and turn it into something else. We ALL do that.
All you need is the food to feed the organisms, and they will do that for you. You don't have to look for special species to do that. You just need a decent amount of LIFE in your soil to get the job done. Salt build up is a message from Mother Nature - not enough life to do the job. The cycle has been broken because someone killed the critters required to do the job, or forgot to feed them.
Get the organisms back into the dirt, feed them, and you are STARTED on the way. Relative to how badly the soil was harmed determines the time to clean it up.
You wrote:
>What we are looking for are microbes the plant can work with that will help the plant be more salt tolerant.
What is the mechanism for making a plant more salt-tolerant? Are you suggesting a physiological change in the plant? The plant will tolerate higher salt concentration in it's phloem? But if you do that, the fruit or seed of the plant will most likely have higher salt concentration then as well. I don't think you want that. Salty strawberries, hum, no thanks.
The mechanism of biology protecting plants from salt is to mobilize the salt into microbial biomass. Simple numbers. The more biology, the more salt taken up and put into biomass instead of remaining as salt.
> The prospect of salt-eating microbes is interesting. If there is such a thing, I hope they never gets into the oceans.
Ted, this is like saying, uh, oxygen-utilizing bacteria? How dangerous! If they get into the atmosphere, look out, we won't have oxygen left!
But we have oxygen-utilizing bacteria, and fungi, and protozoa, and nematodes, and microarthropods, and people! There are herds of oxygen-using creatures on this planet, and somehow, we manage to have oxygen still in the atmosphere. Hum. How can that be?
Nutrients cycle. The fact that we are accumulating a nutrient - the nutrient in the form of a salt - is an indicator that humans are messing up the cycle at the step after the place the nutrient is accumulating.
Humans have seriously disrupted normal nutrient cycling. We can pay attention and fix what we are messing up, or we'll destroy the environment that sustains us. Once humans no longer exist as a species, the cycle will return to "normal". Nature doesn't care. Biology will do it's job, with or without people. We are just one of billions of species on this planet, and if we mess up, Nature can do without us.
You wrote:
Since we are salt water, they would be rather harmful to us also. There are many types of salts in our systems and we need even the trace amounts of rare salts found there.
My response:
Your body controls the environment inside your body. Your tissues are practically sterile - the only things living in you are the cells of your body. If they become invaded by any organism, you will likely die. All of the carbon in your body is food for someone else, some other organisms, big or little. So why aren't you dead? You maintain environments inside you that prevent other organisms from consuming those wonderful proteins, carbs, sugars, and salts, which make up the life support system that maintains you.
Thank goodness something consumes the ammonium nitrate salt that we pour on lawns. But we still have more ammonium nitrate, we keep pouring it on. How can that be, if we have nitrate consuming bacteria present in this world? Balance, cycles. Everything cycles. Humans keep trying to salt the world to death, and Nature keeps cycling that salt into something else. Thank goodness!
You wrote:
As I understand it Lithium, as used for some psychotics, is also a salt.
Response:
Lithium is an element. In pure form, it is a metal, I believe, if I remember my chemistry correctly. We combine Li with other elements, like sulfate, or nitrate, to make the salt. In water, it dis-associates, and combines with certain reaction sites in the digestive system to be taken up and is carried to certain receptors in the nervous system. Hum, don't remember the exact mechanism of the intereaction to shut down certain receptors in the nervous system from firing. But that is the mechanism by which it works, as I recall. Faulty memory sometimes.
But, once across your digestive system lining, there are no other organisms present to compete with a human for that nutrient. In the digestive, there are lots of things that will make Li not-available to the human body. That's why the dose of any chemical has to be figured out, and why diet is often controlled when trying to get something into the blood stream through consumption.
You wrote:
I would hate to think that all these people who find their symptom aleviated through Lithium are at risk by salt-fixing/eating microbes.
My response:
But we are very lucky that we DO HAVE those microbes that hydrolyze Lithium salts. What do you suppose happens to the Lithium salt in the waste coming out of a human body who is consuming lithium salts? If we didn't already have those organisms in this world, we'd be to our eye-balls in lithium salts.
We keep the organisms that do decomposition out of our bodies by making conditions in the body completely inapproriate to grow those decomposers. But decomposers already exist. It's why we have immune systems.
Think cycles. Everything cycles. There is already an organism to decompose and chew up any natural compound on this planet. (Please note I said natural compounds. Humans are making synthetic compounds that we apparently do not have any organism that will touch it, and those compounds ARE accumulating).
Humans seem bent on destroying all organisms whose functions they don't understand or aren't aware of, and thus are preventing them from doing their jobs. We AREN'T getting back into dirt the organisms that are needed.
Inoculation is required - but just in the right places, at the right times, with the right food.
There are salt-decomposing organisms already out there. You need to get them back in your soil.
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 Wed Dec 17 2003 - 11:39:09 EST