Re: [compost_tea] newbie intro and question

From: Robert Norsen <bnbrew_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 01:24:18 -0700 (PDT)

Bill George After centuries of use with mixed results some good, some bad a few scientificly trained, dedicated people carried on careful research to find out why compost and tea worked sometimes and failed sometimes. Dr Elaine Ingham is one of these trained, dedicated people who also has a gift of transmitting that information. With her information and from some others of like skill and dedication the reasons that some compost was beneficial and some was not and the reasons that some TEA was good and some was detrimental - the reasons were found. The methods of achieving reliable processes was developled by severral manufacturers. They made the process simple, lower costl automagic and much more effective., much more reliable. Can it still be done with a stick and enough patience? If you can afford that much time, of course. .
 
You are right that compost and tea has been used without this knowledge and often not good or good. Not predictable. In some areas of the world where the technoloy has not reached yet they do something the with enough fuzzyness it looks a little like what Dr Elaine recommends. Sometimes because nature is very adaptable whatever works. Does it work as well as the aerated system Dr Elaine has proven? Ask the banana plantation owners who were going broke until Elaine showed then how. Ask, hell, a hundred ohers who have gone from poverty to economic success with her help.
 
You asked for help. I suggest you go ahead and do whatever you want to do. You were offered the knowedge that science develped. You can use it in it's best forms or fuzzy it until with luck you will still get good results in your garden.
 
Ted P suggests all this science is just BS. If you have enough BS and treat it without the science it becomes dam damaging. Ask the folks on Vashon Island who drink water with high nitrate content and suffer poor health. . Go live along the streams below the pig farms of virginia. Think as you inhale that PS or BS, it has been handled with utter simplicity and all this modern science if just BS.
Then if you can see with your eyes streaming tears from the stench look at the Gulf of Mexico where 12,000 sq miles is dead because chemicals and BS have so washed into the river the high nitrates and silt and low O2 resulting kill every live animal and plant in that area. The dead fish lay in windrows on the beach. The dead erea gets bigger every day. Then if you have the stomach after seeing what is happening to our once bountiful shrimp harvest Go up stream , visit some giant farms where this comes from. Farms that once had great deep soil, productive fields and economically sound income / expense balance. With the unkown results of fuzzy compost know how and no Aerated tea know how these farmers turned to chemicals. Their farms are washing and blowing away, being bancrupted off the farms. Only government keeps then paid. Water absorption is down, irrigation is up, farms are not sustainable economically nor soil-wise. Now go to the sick bays of hopitals and discov
 er that
 the nutritian provided by the chemically grown food is suspect of causing many of those sick.
 
Does the science that tells us how nature works have value? Will it help people of all levels of agriculture know the right way so they can approach it as closely as they can?
And benefit from it? Ignoring the science because we feel mentally incapable or lazy is going to happen. Some call what they don't want to bother with BS.The LIST was aimed to put out the science so it could be used to advantage at all levels and passed on to the world where it is being used effectively, welcomed by farmers on every continent who are not satisfied with a Monsanto dictatorship. .
 
You asked an iportant question Bill George. The science is more complex than you or I or Elaine will ever know in it's entirety. Elaine and some others have learned enough to know a highly beneficial, reliable way to handle compost and compost tea. She has measured probed some of the bondaries of use. In the manufacture of brewers several manufacturers have measured and tested boundaries of when and how does it work and when does it not work. I have seen and measured just a few of the infinite possible combinations. A measured performance results. You are talking about telling the world simple ways so the world can understand and do compost and Compost Tea in those very simple ways. A 5 gallon pail not complicated compost you want an answer you can use when? next week? You are asking people who have spent fortunes and years to know the answers you asked for.. This entire subject we did not make complex. It IS complex. Nature is so forgiving and so hard to measur
 e and so
 INVISIBLE you can go about this afair thousands of ways and not ever know what is happening. UNTIL you measure what is invisible. Until you test KNOWN compost and Known TEA against plants under many conditons Be thankful that the knowlege has been discovered and that it is beig made available at no cost. Farmers can grasp the idea of natural soil biology. . How to develope good soil, good compost and good ACT. The language can be their language. Don't expect them to farm right if you give them bad infomation.
 
It is easier learn to farm succesfully than to live with failure.

 
Bill George <wbgeorge_at_verizon.net> wrote:
Thank you Ted for the vote of support, and thank you Robert for the
critique. It's not my intention to mislead or to start dissent here. I do
appreciate and abide by this forum's mission to forward thoughtful
discussion on compost and tea making. My specific interest is to increase
the level of recycleing done by urban gardeners, and to improve the final
product from their composting efforts. This includes introducing them to
tea making. Internally I am estatic people of Dr. E's caliber are
indentifying and quantifying these ancient techniques scientifically
proving their worth. However, I am equally dismayed that some mysticism is
creeping in. Language has been adopted that shrouds otherwise simple
processes in inexplicable terms, and establishes absolutes where none
should exist. Perhaps it's an attempt to satisfy a society hungry for
precision. I don't know. I've had discussion like these before with people
telling me that tea is such and so. I've been told about the possibilities
of damage to plants by anaerobic bacteria, the coulds, the mights, and the
maybes. None of these are probabilities. Neither are there guarantees
aerobic bacteria will benefit the garden.

My main concern though is this push towards precision in tea making will
lead to absolutism in compost making. If compost and water in a bucket is
not tea, then how long will it be before my compost is declared not
compost? If specific ingredients in specific amounts cured at specific
temperatures over specific periods inhabited by specific species of macro
fauna become the requirement, how will the average person make compost
much less make tea? What about the third world with their lack of
resources? I don't want to see compost be relegated to the realm of
wizards only. I don't want it to follow the accounting path organics have
adopted to prove thier organicness. And I don't want it to follow the near
religious feeling of biodynamics. Science can apply it's rigorous
standards for reproducible results during studies. But the application of
the science needs to relax a bit to gain popular adoption. There are many
of us who've proven to ourselves that simple things work well. Life allows
for fuzziness.

Enjoy!
--
* Bill George
*
* TIDR Wilsonville OR




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Received on Mon Sep 13 2004 - 09:18:09 EDT

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