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Subject: Compost Teas: 24 hour, EM, IM, BD & fermented plant extracts
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- From: "Frank Teuton" <fteuton AT sympatico.ca>
- To: "Jeff Lowenfels" <jeff AT gardener.com>, "Tom Jaszewski" <tomj AT lvcm.com>, "William F. Brinton" <wbrinton AT woodsend.org>, <compostteas AT lists.ibiblio.org>
- Subject: Re: [Compostteas] Re: Safety and E coli
- Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 08:04:38 -0400
Hi Jeff,
Of all the comments in here, the following one lept out at me:
"Stop being an organic gardener and become
a scientific one."
It would be illuminating for me to know what you think is unscientific
about organic gardening and farming. It may interest you to know that many
people feel the word 'organic' hinders English language practitioners; in French
and other languages the distinction is between chemical farming and biological
farming. Thus organic gardening translates as 'jardinage biologique' in
French.
When you recognize
this and re-pose your comment as:
'Stop being an biological gardener and become a
scientific one.'
I think you will realize that it doesn't quite make sense.
There is, of course, no limit to the amount of scientific knowledge a
particular grower could ask him or herself to gather in the course of growing a
crop, to the point of being uneconomically obsessive. (At this point you may
decide to become a researcher rather than a grower, eh?)
There are legitimate questions about the robustness or fragility of the
compost tea making technology. They include the possibility of anaerobia when
recipes are exceeded, the issue of aeration parameters, and the need to begin
with high quality compost. Just to illustrate this, consider the
following:
Factors affecting oxygen transfer include temperature, bubble
size, salinity, and depth of the water.
A four foot deep tank with identical volume and
aeration equipment operating at the full depth, would deliver twice the carrying
capacity for fish as a system 2 feet deep, all else being equal, and bubble size
difference can affect carrying capacity substantially as well.
****************************
While using compost from vegetable sources is one way to attempt to
sidestep the whole manure problem, see if you can find vegetable matter that has
zero bird droppings, no trace of dog manure, or any trace of other vertebrate
manure. Not too easy, eh?
Recall the alfalfa sprouts with salmonella problem?
Note that they seem to be seeking a sterilizing type of answer. Remember
Bob Rodale, who wrote long ago in Organic Gardening magazine about the Chinese
practice of sprouting in earth boxes? That is just the opposite type of answer.
It is the kind of answer biological growers and compost tea people are looking
for, the answer of finding a competitive microbial matrix with which to
outcompete and control disease.
In earth boxes sprouts can begin right away the crucial
business of organizing rhizosphere mutualists; in a sterile
sprouting environment these mutualists are virtually absent. The food value
differences Rodale recited in earth box sprouts were really quite
remarkable.
The long and short of it is, that compost tea and soil food web and organic
(biological) growing are part of a paradigm which sees healthy life as
intertwined and interdependent with other life forms, whereas the matrix society
we live under too often turns to sterilizing everything (e.g. anti-bacterial
soap) as the answer.
It might be worth your while to read some Louis Bromfield, for example Out
of the Earth is quite a good read, see especially the 'Chicken Litter Story'.
The idea of sterility in agriculture, and the battle of those holding to
ecological, balanced matrix concepts against it, is a very old one.
It is sad for me to see members of the US Composting Council
who have every reason to know better, engaging in what looks to me like
'echo-effect' germophobia. But, Dennis Avery used it to advantage in his screeds
against organic agriculture, and as Auden put it:
"You and I already know what every schoolchild learns, those
to whom evil is done, do evil in return."
Another thing to keep in mind here, Jeff, and others, is that
the parties in this dispute also represent institutions which compete with each
other; SFI, Woods End and BBC labs, for example. I am not saying there is crass
loss of objectivity, but the fact that competing interests are at work here
should not be forgotten in considering the arguments being put
forward.
Remember too, the difference between science and
technology---properly understood, science is a quest of discovery of law like
regularities, demonstrated by repeatable experimental evidence, whereas
technology is usually connected to market forces to a degree that
science is not. Science is made possible by the
development of wealth sufficient to support it, but it is not dependent on any
specific wealth center, but on the repeatability of core
experiments.
That is why what I have specifically demanded of the compost
tea naysayers is the details of their experiments which purport to show the
E.coli risks of compost tea making. At the same time, I hope we can get
more clarity on the parameters needed to properly aerate and house our
multiplying microherds.
Yours for more clarity,
Frank Teuton
|
-
[Compostteas] Re: Safety and E coli,
William F. Brinton, 06/17/2002
- Re: [Compostteas] Re: Safety and E coli, wpb, 06/17/2002
-
Re: [Compostteas] Re: Safety and E coli,
Tom Jaszewski, 06/17/2002
-
RE: [Compostteas] Re: Safety and E coli,
Jeff Lowenfels, 06/17/2002
- Re: [Compostteas] Re: Safety and E coli, Frank Teuton, 06/19/2002
-
RE: [Compostteas] Re: Safety and E coli,
Jeff Lowenfels, 06/17/2002
- Re: [Compostteas] Re: Safety and E coli, Frank Teuton, 06/18/2002
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