Compost Tea an Alternative to Chemicals

By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Monday, March 24, 2008 10:31 AM EDT

EDWARDSBURG - The East and West coasts for years have been brewing compost teas, which are finally catching on in the Midwest.

"Results they're getting are amazing," Dane Terrill of Flowerfield Enterprises in Portage told the 63rd annual Cass County Conservation District meeting March 20 at Edwardsburg American Legion. "Whether it's grass for your yard, turf for a golf course, row crops, vegetables, tomatoes, trees - whatever you're trying to grow out of the soil - they're doing it naturally."

Compost is one way to add moisture to soil and improve its structure.

"Good compost has a very rich, earthy smell. There's no bad, stinky aroma to it," Terrill said. "We have to have good, quality compost to make our tea," which they have shipped in from as far away as Alaska. Flowerfield's compost tea will be available at four Kalamazoo garden centers.

"Good, quality compost goes through a series of heat stages. If you've never watched a compost pile work, it's amazing. Bacteria and fungi start working and create heat in that pile. It will actually start steaming from the heat. It has to reach 141 degrees for three days, which kills pathogens - especially e coli," Terrill said.

Compost tea "is a microbial-rich, biologically-active nutrient broth extracted from compost," Terrill said. "We do it with a 250-gallon brewer and put eight quarts of compost in a mesh 'tea bag' and aerate it. Air going through this bag of compost strips organisms out into the water. Then we feed it natural things like fish hydrolysate, molasses and kelp. With that food, with that aeration over the next 24 hours, if you had a million organisms in that compost bag, you now have a bazillion - a lot. It grows exponentially."

"That liquid form is what farmers, gardeners and turf care are spraying to alleviate the need for compost," Terrill said. "This is biology. It's not a manure tea, though it was in the Roman empire because they didn't have a way to aerate it. I used the product on the golf course I owned and had phenomenal results. No chemicals and we cut watering our greens by half."

Matt Wiley, a Schoolcraft farmer using compost extract instead of applying any fertilizer for four years, gave a testimonial.

His farm, organic since 1999, produces soybeans, corn and oats.

"I can't plant several hundred acres," Wiley said. "I can plant 80 acres, which is what I'll be planting this year. A plant gets 80 percent of its nutrients from its roots and 20 percent from the air? False. That equation should be turned around. A plant can get everything but calcium out of the air through its leaves. I know it's foreign to most of you because it was to me. Then I got into compost extract, which forces water through compost. My theory is that if I spray extract on the bare soil, it will then multiply in the soil. Three years ago, the first time I put extract on a soybean field, I put on five applications in seven to 10 days. I could not see any difference, but I kept on because that was my plan. Just about the time it canopied - in other words, that plant got big enough so you can't see soil between 30-inch rows - all of a sudden, the part I was spraying was five inches taller. The farm produces two to three times the income it did before I went organic."

When the number of people who thought Wiley was crazy went down from 50 to 47, the three converts were his neighbors who witnessed his corn growing all summer through drought while theirs withered.

Terrill and "brew master" Joe Mazgowicz of Flowerfield studied in Corvallis, Ore., with Dr. Elaine Ingham, the "visionary for sustainable farming" who has seven labs throughout the world. She helped publish USDA's "Soil Biology Primer" and wrote the "Compost Tea Brewing Manual."

"We're talking about biology - not chemistry," Terrill stressed, "with a paradigm shift from where we're at today to where this new regime thought process is at. Conventional growing wisdom is feed the plants, kill the weeds, nuke the insects and kill the diseases. The new science is old science reincarnated, which is feed the soil. Make yourself good, healthy soil, and you will sustain whatever you want to grow without additional chemical input. Recognize signals. Weeds, insect pests and diseases are Mother Nature's way of telling you there's something wrong with the soil. We have been taught the knee-jerk reaction of spraying to kill whatever's wrong. When we kill it, we haven't fixed anything. If you have a mouse in your house and you kill it, that doesn't solve why mice are coming in the house in the first place. Insect infestation is not due to pesticide deficiency. Understand that there are alternative, healthier ways to do things. We're working the Marcellus football and soccer fields. No more pesticides on those fields where kids could roll in it playing football, soccer and band. We're also doing a couple of schools in Kalamazoo so they're not using toxic chemicals anymore."

Mary Applehof, author of "Worms Eat My Garbage," founded Flowerfield 30 years ago. She designed and patented an in-house vermicompost bin.

"It has red wriggler worms like you fish with," Terrill said. "You take all of your household food waste and put it in there. The worms, bacteria and fungi break that down. What you have left is worm castings. When she did all her research on vermicomposting, or worm composting, she proved if everybody put a worm bin in their house, they would cut what goes in the landfill by 55 percent. That's an amazing number. That's research she did in the mid- to late-1980s. My mother helped Mary run the business for 18 years. She left this dream as a legacy to start the compost tea business."

As for why sustainable alternative methods of growing, maintaining and caring for lawns, shrubs, flwes, gardens, row crops, vineyards, orchards, athletic fields and golf courses are needed, Terrill pointed to Allegan County's phosphorous ban effective Jan. 1, 2009.

States from Minnesota to Maine also banned residential phosphorous fertilizer.

"That's one reason we have to change the way we do things," Terrill said. "Conventional methods cause problems. We do a lot of seminars for lake associations. Nutrient values of crops are lacking. This is a wonderful alternative to that. A study by the Maine Department of Environmental Quality proved that one pound of leached phosphorous that runs into a watershed can cause up to 1,000 pounds of wet weeds or algae.

"Maine also proved that for every three feet of water clarity you lose in a lake from algal blooms from phosphorous or nitrogen leaching in, your home value drops by 5 percent. Oxygen levels go down, sometimes causing fish kills, sometimes causing slime on the lakes or odor. Optimally, for lawns, you'd have 22 parts per million of phosphorous. One lawn Allegan County tested was 589 ppm of phosphorous. How long before we come through and say nitrogen is a problem? Nitrogen causes algal blooms. Nitrogen does all of the things phosphorous does."

Terrill said of 30 common pesticides, 19 are linked to cancer, 13 to birth defects, 21 with reproductive effects, 26 with liver or kidney damage, 17 are detected in ground water, 23 have the ability to leach into drinking water sources, 24 are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms vital to our ecosystem, 11 are toxic to bees and 16 are toxic to birds.

With numbers like these, the only logical question becomes is pesticide use really necessary and what can we do to stop or prevent this kind of contamination? Terrill asked.

"I'm not just talking about pesticide use, I'm talking about inorganic fertilizers, too. If you're a seed salesman or fertilizer or chemical salesman, you're not going to like me when we get done," he said.

As Arden Anderson wrote in "Science in Agriculture, Advanced Methods for Sustainable Farming," "Over the past 50 or more years, agriculture has functioned, officially anyway, in a paradigm whose philosophy says that nature is flawed and must be controlled with man-made materials. This paradigm has placed agriculture in a state of constant war with nature, continuously battling pests and diseases. A new paradigm is gaining acceptance due, in no small part, to solid science."

"This paradigm shift we're talking about," Terrill said, "requires us to think outside the box from what we've learned, what we've done and what we've been marketed to. Those three things are: the only way to manage weeds is to kill them; the only way to manage disease is to kill; and the only way to manage pests is to nuke them."

But "insect pests and diseases are a sign of weak soils, not a lack of chemical weapons," Anderson asserts.

Soil is an ecosystem comprised of inorganic minerals, decomposing organic matter, live organisms and growing plants.

The health of this ecosystem is determined by soil food web interactions.

Mazgowicz said the soil food web is a biologically complex community of organisms that live in the soil.

As these organisms eat, grow and move through the soil, they make it possible to have clean water, clean air, healthy plants and moderated water flow.

"Once healthy soil is established, the plants take care of themselves," Mazgowicz stated. "That's the way it happens in the forest, which greens up every year. It's similar to the ocean food chain, but it's a little more complex. We call it a web rather than a chain because rather than bigger eating the smaller all the way up the chain, you've got all kinds of interactions. Organisms in the soil interact with each other. Sometimes they eat each other. Sometimes they feed each other. These are all micro-organisms that are invisible without a microscope."

The soil food web is characterized by this symbiotic relationship between plants and organisms and the predatory behavior of its inhabitants.

"We all know plants manufacture food through the process called photosynthesis," Mazgowicz said. "Plants take light and turn it into carbohydrates, sugars and proteins. What I never realized is that 50, 60, sometimes up to 80 percent of that food manufactured by the plant is sent down into the roots and exuded into the soil. Why would the plant get rid of all the food it just manufactured? Because beneficial bacteria love that 'cookie mix.' They come up and glom onto the roots. Bacteria have a lot of nitrogen in their bodies that is not available to the plant until the predatory relationship. That's how plants get nitrogen and a tree in the forest turns green every year."

Terrill said one teaspoon of healthy soil contains 600 million bacteria, 25,000 species of bacteria, 800 micrograms - several yards - of fungal strands, 5,000 fungi species, 5,000 to 8,000 protozoa - amoeba, flagellates and ciliates, "the things we learned about in 11th grade biology that we didn't know what we'd do with it" - and 10 to 50 beneficial nematodes. "The numbers of how many living critters there are in a teaspoon of soil is overwhelming."

"That helps your soil from compacting," he explained. "There are air holes and pockets to hold moisture. We don't have to water as much when we have good fungal matter in our soil. Every time you put a fungicide down in conventional farming, you are killing not only the bad fungus that you're trying to kill, you're also killing good fungus that does good things for your soil."

As long as nitrogen is part of a living organism (bacteria), it cannot leach into its surroundings. Bacteria have a larger percentage of nitrogen in their bodies than any other living organisms.

Functions of the soil food web include nutrient cycling, nutrient retention, disease protection, decomposition of toxins and improving the soil structure.

"When you have stressed soil or a stressed plant," Terrill said, "Mother Nature is going to take care of that by sending in the garbage collectors - aphids, dandelions, weeds - pests. Dandelions (indicate) a calcium deficiency. We've been taught to spray an herbicide to kill the dandelion, but that doesn't fix the problem. If we look at the cause instead of the effect, fix the cause and put down some calcitic lime. That's what those long tap roots are going to find - calcium, which it brings up to the plant. The plant dies and we now have calcium in the soil there. That's Mother Nature's way. Clover is not enough nitrogen in your soil."

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