Re: [compost_tea] Re: Tea and powdery mildew
In trials with compost tea, Trichoderma was added to the compost tea.
Just a teaspoon of T-22 was added to 2000 L of brew in a standard ACT-brewing
machine, using 2.5 liter fish hydrolysate, 2.5 liter kelp, and 20 kg compost.
If my calculations were correct, that is 500 gal of water, 1 gal fish, 1
pound kelp, and about 10 pounds compost. Good, aerated, fungal compost, tested
routinely to allow us to know that the compost is always fungal.
25 liters of ACT/HA (5 gal/ac) was applied to half the area, the normal
conventional application to the other half of the area.
No mildew in the ACT side, no mildew in the conventional side. Roses used as
indicators were heavily infested with mildew.
This clearly indicates that "ACT" can prevent mildew.
Can I state that all compost tea will prevent mildew? No, that cannot be
concluded here. Not all teas are properly aerated, not all have Trichoderma in
them.
But if the tea has Trichoderma in it? Many composts have Trichoderma, David
Loring showed that, so perhaps those teas that have protected plants from
mildew, had Trichoderma . If true, then to have mildew prevention, documentation
of Trichoderma in the compost is needed.
As of now, I can only state that this tea, made under these conditions, with
this recipe, this machine, can claim this kind of disease prevention.
The manufacturer of this machine will be using these test results as part of
their ad campaign, once they finish testing their machine under several
different climate conditions. I will not state whose machine it was. You'll know
soon enough.
But, these results emphasize a couple points I want to make.
Is it the tea, or the Trichoderma doing the job? Trichoderma on it's own
will not give you these results, certainly not at the dose being used.
Has prevention of mildew been observed without adding Trichoderma? Yes. But
maybe there was Trichoderma in the compost, and that's why it worked. Hum.
Just because your compost tea doesn't do something that others have observed,
you CANNOT make the claim that ALL aerated compost teas do not work.
All you can say is that your tea cannot perform that job. Extrapolation to
everyone else's tea as being able to do or not do something is inappropriate.
Especially when it has been established that some aerated compost teas are
very capable of preventing mildew.
Ah, but knowing what how to get that protection time after time, that's what
has to be figured out.
The results of the Texas Tea-Off show this very clearly. Steve Bridges will
be writing up and reporting on those results soon, and careful attention
should be paid to the fact that temperature played a BIG role in the results.
Texas, mid-October, over 90 F during the whole brewing cycle. Hum.... foods
added? At that temp? Well, Steve will go through it.
The bottom line? The maker of any tea brewer has to document the effect of
changing conditions on the biology that will be produced using their machine.
Change the recipe? Change the design of the brewer? Use the biology to tell
you things aren't great, or are great, in the brew.
If the brewer manufacturer has not worked out this information, then you need
to realize that you need to do some testing on your own. The Compost Tea
Brewing Manual gives you some ideas on how to do that testing, the Field Guide
adds more detail, and learning to use the little microscopes is the way to be
able to do lots of testing for very little money.
There are several compost tea brewing companies that are doing the proper
testing. They have data. They are doing the necessary work. Their machines,
using thier recipes, produce the same results, time after time. They change
what they tell their clients to do with changing seasons.
It is not for me to publish these data. It is for the people making and
selling these machines to publish their results. They are doing alot of work to
figure out what is right for their machine. They'll tell you what to do with
their foods, or tell you how much less food to add in when the temeprature
increases by..... whatever amount.
You want to know how to alter your recipe for a home-made tea maker? You do
the testing. Do the biology-testing. Or see what effect the tea has on your
plants. No benefit, or dead plants are a good indicator something wasn't
right with the brew.......
It is not up to Soil Foodweb Inc to do this testing. We are the lab that
assesses the organisms in all sorts of materials. That's what we do. We are not
in the business of giving away our information for free.
--------
Although, one piece of information -
SFI developed the knowledge of what ratios of organisms are needed to grow
different plants without pesticides or inorganic fertilizers.
Those data, listing all the testing done on different plants growing in
conditions where they were healthy, no pesticides or inorganic fertilizers used to
maintain them, are about to be published in once place, for the first time.
The book is the one on Forest Systems (sorry, the final title is not yet set),
by David Poste. I'll send out the information on how and where to get the
book when I know that information.
At the composting conference held in Leon, Spain in Septmeber, I wrote a
paper that summarizes much of the compost and tea testing that we've done. That
paper is available in the proceedings of that conference.
It takes time to get scientific papers published. As you all have noted
recently, two of the papers by S. Scheuerell have recently been published. Those
are from his Ph.D. thesis, which he finished two years ago, as I recall. It
takes time to get these papers published. It's great that they have been
published. Several other papers published recently deal with compost tea. Some
show great results from aerated compost tea, some show no benefit from using
compost tea.
Check the "compost tea" they made. No compost in the tea? Then no matter
whether they called it compost tea or not, it is not compost tea. Complaints
should be submitted to the journal that published those papers. They need
better reviewers.
We need to keep in mind that we talk about AERATED compost tea. ACT is what
all the great results are about.
Not-aerated tea can remain aerobic, especially if no foods are added. But
then the organisms aren't growing, and the tea may or may not "work". Why would
we be surprised if it doesn't work?
When someone says compost tea does or does not do something, we need to stop
and ask - wait, what kind of tea was that?
Did they mean aerated tea? Documented that the machine is able to maintain
oxygen without dropping into below 6 ppm?
Without documentation that the machine can do what it is supposed to, then I
am not surprised that mildew cannot be prevented.
If "researchers" say compost tea doesn't prevent mildew, and they have no
data on the biology, or on aeration or on oxygen, then my conclusion is that they
are actually talking about a tea that isn't actually aerobic. None of the
proper critters.
Ok, not-aerated compost tea doesn't prevent mildew most of the time. Only
rarely does it work, and that is only when it stays aerobic, by some miracle.
No surprises.
It would be a surprise to me if properly made aerated compost tea, made with
certain clear conditions imposed on the production methods, so the tea had the
biology needed to deliver the benefits, did not deliver protection. If ACT
was made properly, with the biology tested and oxygen documented, and did not
work, I would like to know about those conditions. Something about the system
wasn't going right. We've just dealt with a situation like that, where
bio-film was hiding out in the brewer, causing E. coli problems. Finally found the
problem, hopefully it is dealt with. Only testing will tell.
Just be sure proper testing has been or is being done. Bug the people who
sold you your machine. The people gaining the financial benefit need to be
doing the testing.
Until tea machine manufacturers do the proper testing, and document
consistent results, claims can't be made.
But they are coming. Stay tuned...
Elaine R. Ingham
Soil Foodweb Inc., Corvallis, Oregon
Soil Foodweb Inc., Port Jefferson, New York
Soil Foodweb Institute, Lismore Australia
Soil Foodweb Institute Cambridge, New Zealand
Laboratorios de Soil Foodweb, Culiacan, Mexico
Soil Foodweb Inc., Jerome, Idaho
Soil Foodweb Inc., South Africa
Received on Wed Oct 27 2004 - 09:41:27 EDT
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