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Re: Soil equilibrium



Hi Greg -

Compost tea machines basically take a very small amount of your good, aerobic (non-stinky, properly heated or processed by worms) thermal compost or worm compost, use water movement through the compost, (air bubbling through, or pump the tea through), to extract the organisms from the compost by ripping them off the surfaces of the compost to get them into the water.  Bacteria are well-glued to compost surfaces and fungi are wound around the compost particles, like the threads they are, so they have to have a fair amount of force applied to get them off the surfaces. 

Don't ask me about CFM to pull them off.  I don't think in those terms.  Testing is required, if you are making your own machine, to determine if you are getting enough water movement through the compost to get the organisms off the compost.   

But that's why dripping water through compost doesn't do much - the organisms don't want to get washed off their food.  It's like trying to get starving people away from the dining table - not happening unless force is used. 

Once you start the extraction process, then you want the beneficial organisms to grow in the water.  Soluble nutrients from the compost are extracted, and that helps grow beneficials.  Addition of humic acids, fulvic acids, small amounts of molasses, complex sugars, proteins, help grow good guys.  Fish hydrolyzate grows good guys too, but you need to be careful of those materials.  Some fish hydrolysate isn't good stuff.  Not my business to tell people about what is wrong with their product, but please, check the SFI web site to see those products that have been tested. 

Again, no data about whether a product does what the sellers say?  Don't buy it. 

So, grow lots of beneficial bacteria and fungi during the 24 hour tea brew cycle by selecting for the growth of particular organisms based on the compost and the foods you add. 

You need to aerate well enough to keep the brew aerobic.  If the tea drops into the anaerobic zone, you lose your fungi, and lose the ability to prevent mildew, anthracnose, blight, wilt, curl and many insects, like aphids, white flies, beetles, etc from growing.  And, if you let the tea go anaerobic, you are likely going to grow human pathogens, if your compost was poor, and not properly made, and had E. coli in it. 

So, maintaining aerobic conditions is important.  Make sure the person you buy your compost tea machine from has data that shows the tea stays aerobic through the tea cycle.  But look out for those machine makers that apparently have no idea how to calibrate oxygen probes. 

The tea machine maker should also be able to show you REPEATED trials where they measured total and active bacterial biomass, and total and active fungal biomass numbers in their teas.  These numbers should be in the "desired ranges", shown on the bottom row of the SFI report, for place, time, desired plant. 

SFI has done the experiments showing that if you have these levels of organisms in the tea, and they arrive safely, your leaves, blossoms and roots will be well-occupied with the good guys, so the disease organisms have no place to grow, no way to infect the plant, no foods to eat because the beneficials already ate them before the disease had a chance, and you build soil structure so anaerobic conditions do not occur in your soils.  Select against disease by making sure the soil stays aerobic. 

Ah, but you do have to test and make sure things are coming along as you wish.  If you make "tea" and don't test -  at least once! -  to make sure you know how to make good tea, you can't complain if the tea doesn't work for you. 

You should test your soil, to see what is missing from your foodweb, so you know what you need to improve.  Or maybe the biology is doing fine.  Then you know you have to concentrate on some chemical nutrient, not on biology just now. 

We have a publication that summarizes the work on compost tea, called the Compost Tea Brewing Manual.  We're at Third Edition, with an update to the manual on the December, 2002 e-zine.  Please just copy that from our website, www.soilfoodweb.com

Please ask more questions, this is one of my favorite things to talk about!

Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
www.soilfoodweb.com