From lrbulluck@ucdavis.edu Tue Mar 28 22:25:09 2000 Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 08:36:21 -0600 From: Russ Bulluck To: sal , Sustainable Agriculture Subject: Re: microbial solutions I agree Sal. You seem to be speaking of a different philosophy of agriculture (as has been said in this thread previously) about soil management vs. product mgmt. A 5 gallon bottle of bugs sprayed on an acre of land will not change the microbial population significantly, unless those same bugs are applied via composts (with their food, as you say) sal wrote: > I think microbial solutions are a great thing. I 1st. got my soil Microbes > from Mr. Petrik.Sr over 15 years ago and he 1st. told me of the life in the > soil and how to keep that life alive. I heard that many folks brought fruit > snip > one of the wisest folks I ever heard talk on the soil food web Dr. Elaine > Ingham (Oregon State University) http://www.soilfoodweb.com/index.html told > us while trying to repair strawberry fields that have been using poison gas > for years to kill all life in the soil and now may no longer be able to use > it needed to bring their fields back to life. she said that it took tons > and tons of compost to bring the fields back as it seem the longer the > growers have been using the poison gas the longer it will take to make that > soil good again. She also said and this is the important part that using > inoculated compost the amount of compost was cut way down and the fields did > produce as much as before with no poison gas. it was the Inoculated compost > that did it so to me that is Scientific Basis done in the field that show > that microbes added to compost that is added to the fields do help and is > not fo fo dust but a real something. Microbes can be raised organic also I > snip Dr. Ingham does good work. but, again, (as you say) she's not talking about putting a bottle of stuff on the soil. She's talking about adding the stuff to tons of compost. I also feel that tons of composts are needed for proper soil fertility. Composts need to be tested for nutrients, and assessments of mineralization rates need to be known. If a compost contains a large amount of N but mineralizes it slowly, then less nitrogen is available for plants to use. > Because the USDA pushes chemicals that kill microbes they feel we don't need > them so they are going to say microbes are bull but I think they the USDA > are the bull. sorry I may not be a good citizen for saying that and because > I have a mind of my own and don't agree with the USDA I have used microbial > solutions and glad I did and will use them again. . I feel the USDA is > going one way and we are going the other . and they just stopped us dead by > taking natural farming over and calling it USDA organic. . we like > microbes and soil life I'm sorry about that. when I water I am watering my > microbes and when I feed I am feeding my microbes. The USDA bum raps the > stuff I feel is good and glorifies the poison stuff . they don't regard > soil life and they don't understand organic . sorry about that it is Just > MHO. The USDA is huge and variable. There are many sides to the USDA, and many people (and this list, I Believe) interested in sustainable and organic agriculture are USDA. The funding for my Ph.D. work was obtained through the USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SARE), and I _never_ used poisons. I did use fertilizers (as a relative comparison to conventional agronomic practices). I wasn't asked to use pesticides, in fact the research was funded because of it's alternative nature. . . That's also the USDA. . . Sal, I'm not bashing you at all. But we all need to see the whole picture, and separate USDA the regulatory monster from USDA the research and extension people. -------------------- Russ Bulluck Visiting Post-Doctoral Scholar Department of Plant Pathology 1 Shields Ave UC-Davis Davis, CA 95616 lrbulluck@ucdavis.edu ------------------------------------------------------------- The soil population is so complex that it manifestly cannot be dealt with as a whole with any detail by any one person, and at the same time it plays so important a part in the soil economy that it must be studied. --Sir E. John Russell The Micro-organisms of the Soil, 1923 ------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg". If you receive the digest format, use the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest". To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "subscribe sanet-mg-digest". All messages to sanet-mg are archived at: http://www.sare.org/san/htdocs/hypermail