Joel Williams - "Making Compost Tea" - Biological Farming Conference 2018

we're gonna do we're gonna talk on compost tea compost extracts and it's in a general context of brewing of microbes brewing other microbes so we are we are going to cover this issue and yeah in a way I have to be honest and say you know there is a lot to this we've only got you know 40 odd minutes here there are lots of details and debt you know devil in the detail etc so you know I can only really present a bit of an introduction okay I'm going to go through some some practical steps so we're gonna cover a bit of theory some principles and then move into some practical steps on on brewing but still it's only 40 odd minutes we could probably do a whole day a half a day on this and you know maybe get outside and look at some Brewers that you know there is a lot to it so I would encourage you this is take this presentation as an introduction kind of presenting get some of the ideas in the bigger picture but do spins if you're really going to get into this do spend some time doing some additional reading online through Google etc you know there's a few nuances there but also speak to others who are who are doing it so let's dive straight into it so core concepts I'm just gonna cover some of the whys the benefits some of those practical guidelines application considerations and just some kind of final summary thoughts there so I'll tease out these different definitions as we go along but just starting off kind of in the center of the core here compost tea compost extracts its essence it is a compost water combination that's kind of the foundation the beginning point where we bring compost and water together and extract out components from that compost now the key thing we are looking to extract out is the living organisms those microorganisms bacteria fungi etc but sure we do also get out and we do also extract out some soluble nutrients some minerals but also some other soluble organic compounds some kind of humic substances humic related compounds that may come out of that compost so that is your three components that you're extracting out but really the core the point of a compost tea is not really for the nutrients it's not really for those humic s-- although they play a role really the core thing we're extracting out is the living organisms the microbes and okay that solution and then can then be applied to the soil it could be to the seed as a seed treatment seedling in treatment in horticulture to the foliage as a foliar spray leaf surfaces could also be used as a compost inoculum or two manures and compost etc so that's kind of wet the various ways and means in which we might then use the compost tea or the extract and why would we do that and one of the arguments is to try and counterbalance you know some of our quite intensive production practices which we are now beginning to learn that many of which can have a compromising effect on the soil biology so okay too much cultivation for example excess cultivation X has too much soluble nutrients in the system of course some of our pesticides could be compaction some of our monocultures all of these things in various ways and means all contribute to kind of narrowing down that diversity of microbiology in the soil so you know the point of the compost tea or the compost extract is to try and counter balance there to offset that to restore some some of the biological function that is a consequence of some of our intensive management practices okay so one of the key other reasons is drive nutrient cycling to as we've discussed that a lot already in the past few days and also as a tool for disease management I think that's particularly relevant for organic producers who have of course less tools in the toolkit for managing disease I think it's particularly relevant for those there are a lot of conventional farmers who use these various microbial amendments as well now there are again just to kind of paint this broader picture before we drill into the details you know there are these two schools of thought which you know some people really lock heads over these ideas one being well you know we can really our focus should be on stimulating and feeding the native organisms encouraging the organisms that are already there and I fully fully support that strategy I think it makes good sense and we can do that through some of the techniques that we have discussed already you know optimizing saw health using plant diversity design and with diversity as a tool and essentially feeding the soil feeding those organisms and and that is an absolutely sound strategy that we should all be all be using in our applying in our production systems so then there's the other school of thought that says well we can also introduce or inoculate these new populations of organisms and okay that could be onto the leaf surfaces or onto the root surfaces or into the soil etc as I discussed then and so for me you know there are these two con paradigms I guess we could say and for me you know I think there's a place for both there's a time and a place for all of these things I think of course the broad strategy is we the key core strategy is let's just encourage the ones that have air and apply good practices but then maybe times that we may need to kick-start the system there may be specific points in the rotation or particular reasons where we might want to introduce some of the new populations and I think so kind of I think the two of them have a plate of time and a place they can work very synergistically together bringing these two pieces of the puzzle together I think there is a real synergy there and at one plus one equal in three and of course they go and they do go hand-in-hand there's no point in introducing new organisms into an environment if we're not going to also look after them so you know we have to be actually using the two strategies at the same time anyway even if we are think we're just using the one so okay and then we're posed with these again this kind of tension between these two schools of thought we're posed with these kinds of questions well isn't there already sufficient biology in the soil and well is this a natural thing to do is it natural to be applying all these microorganisms does Nature approve kind of kind of questions and they're really important and good questions to be asking and I think this idea that we use combating microbials or compost extracts to apply them to the soil to increase the soil microbial numbers yeah that's not quite right it's a drop in the ocean there is a vast greater number of microbes already in soils compared to what we apply that's absolutely true the people who kind of use that argument are not fully really understanding how these kind of products or extracts and things are used we don't use them to increase the soil to increase the soil and population we're using them as targeted inputs right around that seed we're trying to put some of the biology around that seed around that seedling around that root system and let those organisms grow with the plant grow with that root system in that rhizosphere it's and sure they're going to change the dynamic there in that space in that row but they're not necessarily going to change the whole soil microbiome it's not really how we should be thinking about them it's not how and why we use them but they can be very targeted as a seed treatment you know around those developing plants so yes there's already plenty there but there's can still be beneficial benefits in kind of steering the microbes that develop around that root system and I'll come back to some examples of that and you know some people think well again is this natural do we want to be putting do we want to be applying all these numbers of organisms and well the truth is it is a very natural process for microbes to move into new environments and this is all part of this new kind of microbiome research that is redefining as I kind of mentioned yes they're redefining how we think there's not just microbes all around the root system which is certainly where they mostly are that's where they dominate around that rhizosphere but we know there's now there's microorganisms that live inside the plant these are called endophytes they live inside the plant tissues there's there's organisms who live on the leaf surfaces in the phyllo sphere there's a different microbiome community that lives on the flowers that lives on the fruits there are all unique and different communities and we now know that actually many of these microbes associated with the plant on the phyto biome and this one is called we do know that actually they get carried over into the seed the seed is an inoculant itself there are microorganisms in seeds and we're only beginning to understand that seed microbiome and the different species that live in there and so the plant delivers though so yes the plants take the microbiome with them when they release their seed off into the air often to the water etc so there is a natural inoculation that happens and okay when that seed lands on the ground well then it interacts with the soil microbiome all those ones that exist in the soil these black ones here and okay then they interact then that seed germinates and sure what we find is actually there are some species of the microbiome on the soil microbiomes that do come up onto the foliage there is some overlap of course as that seed germinates it's growing through the soil isn't it it's and all those leaf surfaces will be colonized by the soil microbiome but then that seedling that that seed germinates it emerges up into the atmosphere into the air and yeah it's covered in the soil microbiome they come with it but okay a lot of those species don't necessarily thrive and there so they some of those do decline generally we find that the ones that are associated in the soil stay in the soil and those that associate with the above-ground paths then carry on upwards so very much so it is a natural thing for plants to be carrying taking their microbiomes with them into their new environments when they go and pioneer etc and again it's this whole new field of kind of understanding and thinking about these micro biomes there's some fascinating things happening we are starting to measure the measure where you're starting to analyze the microbiome on flowers and of course when insects come along they leave their microbiomes the insect microbiome gets deposited onto the flower and we can begin to now analyze that and determine which insects have been pollinating those flowers by measuring the microbiome but you can see insects of course are also a vector for transferring microbiomes through into new in different environments and throughout plants so this idea that and to go beyond there is a precautionary principle we do have to be careful about introducing foreign species alien species which may be you know can escalate and cause problems of course I acknowledge that we we do need to exercise some of the cautionary principle there but certainly in nature it is a very normal thing for microbiomes to be moving around into different ecosystems very much so and so here's some of these kind of new ideas thinking around how we're going to go kind of manage plants and in their environment going forward we talked about the rhizosphere that area around the root system some of you might have also heard of the Philo sphere that's the microbiome that lives on the leaf surfaces but there's all of these other spheres that are now emerging which are unique which have unique influences over plant health etc that we're only just beginning to understand so the anthis sphere this is the micro habitat that associated to the flowers is like I just mentioned that the carpus fear associated to the fruits and the fruit surfaces the Kola sphere associated with plant stems okay I mentioned that endo sphere that's inside the plant tissues rise a plane this is again part of the root of the rhizosphere but also this one here the sperm asphere this is the environment around the seed and actually when the see when we plant a seed and the seed germinates we we all talk about root exudates and all of the stuff that's going on in the rhizosphere when a seed begins to germinate it is also releasing exudates into its sperm asphere and actually we're now understanding that the sperm asphere is critically important it's a hot spot of microbial activity and the seed is of course releasing these unique extra compounds into that environment to begin this process of colonization begin this microbial Association as it goes through its plant development and goes through that through its life stages and actually we're now understanding that this initial process is critically important on all of the other micro biomes that then develop so this is this concept of something called keystone species and you might have heard that term use associated with us humans that we call ourselves keystone species we're making such a drastic impact on planet earth in the micro biological world it's this idea that well when our species moves in first particular bacteria for example well it changes the environment it started to grow it started to do things it changes the environments so that new microbial species can then move in and this is this idea of keystone species this is this idea of compost teas and coming back to my point about we're not necessarily changing the soil per se but we might want to be inoculating some keystone species a consortium of microbes who get things started and as they do that they lay the path they lay the foundation for all of the others to come along so there's all of these kinds of new ideas around this whole microbiome stuff that again as I mentioned is going to involve some serious rethinking about what we already think we know and I snuck this slide in just because the question came up earlier about the nitrogen fixation so I just wanted to put this up to you because it's so fascinating this is this maze that's releasing this Musil agent is rooted to these aerial root exudates in which they are recruiting and they colonize and harbor nitrogen fixing bacteria within that Mew cyllage and if some of you may know that the nitrogen fixation process it can only happen in anaerobic conditions that's why the plant forms the nodule so that it can create an anaerobic condition within that nodule that's why in even in those free-living fixes that a lot of nitrogen fixation happens within those aggregates I showed those aggregates yesterday where we protect soil carbon inside those aggregates we also have lower oxygen and that's where nitrogen fixers start to really thrive because those enzymes that they use as I mentioned they are deactivated in high oxygen environments so point being here is now we've created inside this Musil age and anaerobic environment where we have now categorized all sorts of nitrogen fixing species that live inside that new cyllage on those aerial roots and deliver anywhere from 30 up to 80 percent of that total maize nitrogen requirement and those are simply genes in that plant which controls the release of those unique root exudates and all we have to do is transfer through well you know we could do it through traditional crossbreeding I suppose we could do it through genetic modification as well if we shows that it's much easier we can of course just cross these genes with some of our current mains varieties and we can put nitrogen-fixing into any plant simply through crossing it with this an example like this and it all comes back to the genes in that plant that help to regulate the recruitment of those nitrogen fixers so maize can do it can with those genes overlap can we put them into wheat etc not even not even across ways to just breed these things wheat will have similar genes for encoding messaging to similar nitrogen fixing bacteria like all of the genes are already out there we just need to kind of find the right varieties and you know foster them and select for them but instead all we've been selecting for is yield yield yield you know these are both ground traits that we've been so focused on okay disease resistance some other things too but if we select for finding the right genes then off we go so I just have to put that photo in there it's absolutely fascinating and that's what we were talking about okay I'll show that slide already it's all about this communication and therefore we can use certain microbial products or inoculants compost teas to supply some biology here to help support this whole process of plant microbe communication I don't know one of the big criticisms is well how long do those microbes live if we apply them and absolutely we know that many species are not well adapted in those new environments in which we apply them the native soil microbiota can easily out-compete them so some of the microbes that we apply actually going to stick around for very long they may only remain for a few days a few weeks for example a lot of studies have showed that and again that's used as an argument to say no this whole compost tea thing is a waste of time those microbes don't even stick around but again keep doing this - idea of keystone species well they may be there just to perform a particular function at a particular time and they're not going to stick around if the plant is not releasing those root exudates which are the on/off switches so if the plant moves on into different growth stages and doesn't need those microbes anymore it's not going to turn them on it's going to be releasing new on-off switches so you know these things these this is not as that's a thing it is a constant dynamic flow of time through growth stages etc so again don't disregard the idea just because they don't necessarily stick around which often is one of the arguments made but sure there's a lot we still need to learn there's a lot we can understand better about how to sell them how to support them how to help them do what they do so various kind of biotic and abiotic factors things like the plant age as I mentioned okay that those genes I mentioned that to microbe to microbe interactions but other nonliving factors to nutrient water availability soil types so textures or physics you know the structural compare all of these things all of these things also have an influence and again it's the new microbiome techniques that are going to help us unpack all of those nuances mm-hmm No so from a disease point of view as I said very relevant for a lot of organic producers that have less tools but even for some convenience some of your conventional farmers and many commercial farmers who use these compost teas and extracts and they can absolutely help reduce those that though use of those fungicides you know they have a role to play in an integrated disease management strategy they can still play a role but traditionally speaking in the conventional model that's kind of viewed as well compost teas they're they're too variable they don't give consistent results which they don't it's definitely one of their weaknesses but again the new microbiome technologies analytical techniques is going to help us refine that process and we absolutely the evidence is there already I mean we know many of the major diseases can be suppressed in the literature and the academic literature in the center which of this many papers on this that have shown that they have various levels of degrees of suppression depending on different crops and depend on different diseases okay but nonetheless the point is the evidence is there we know compost teas can suppress some of the major players for example in a whole range of different crops okay okay you know how much funding how much research has compost tea had directed into it very little compared to how much research funds and effort and endeavors we've put into developing new fungicides I mean it would the the financial figure completely dwarfed it so you know give it give it a break so it's not perfect but the potential is definitely there if we applied some some some of our brilliant minds to this of course there's the potential there to refine and improve that process we have the evidence that they can be effective to varying degrees so let's just work out how to improve that so then moving that that's just kind of some base kind of foundation there I wanted to lay then we move into some of the practicals here so I have to destroy now that we have to draw the division between compost extracts and compost teas so let's start with compost extract as it says I mean it's really just this is the point it's just compost and water okay we're gonna mix these two things together extract out all the soluble nutrients soluble carbon compounds and those microorganisms that we've discussed a little bit on hopefully some of us or Dave Beecher's session under the microscope and we kind of went through categorizing some of those various bacteria fungi protozoa and nematodes etc and the beauty of a compost extract is it's very low-tech it's very simple it's just compost some water and however you want to mix that together whatever tanks or materials or vessels and things you want to use you just go do it mix those two things together okay then we have to screen that sieve that out screen that out so it doesn't clog our application and sprays nozzles and things like that but that's the essence just mix it with water or any old tank you want to do it in and that extraction is typically quite short it could be as quick as half an hour it could be a couple of hours up to six hours some people do these extracts just dependent it just depends there and there's no set rules on these I have to say I'm gonna kind of present a range of guidelines because everybody does it differently and sure that's one of the weaknesses of compost tea that everyone does it differently so it's hard to get this consistent effects but it's also one of its strengths it's why do we always have to be so uniform you know there can be strengthened in diversity and etc as well so point being also there is no additional food sources added okay during the extraction itself you may add food sources at the time of application so when you're introducing those microorganisms you give them a little bit of a food source to help them establish in that new environment but you're not adding foods you're not brewing them you're not multiplying them like we'll move on and talk about with composite' it's just simply extracting whatever is there in the compost into the water and then filtering it and using it so the positives of that it's very quick it's easy low-tech small investments I mean it's very straightforward the negative is typically you would need a bit more compost than what you would need for a compost tea so we might be using as much as 10% compost so about 10 K 10 kgs of compost per 100 liters of water to make 100 liter extract which you would typically use that across a hectare okay so that's the principle of a compost extract now we could then take that extract and then turn it into a compost tea by adding food sources and some oxygen which I'll talk about but we can also just leave it and turn it into a non aerated compost tea so this now goes through into more of a fermentation this moves into an anaerobic process a fermentative process and a lot of the literature you'll read around non aerated compost teas is we'll talk about where they are higher risk for disease they're not as effective you don't you're not growing as much microbial biomass etc and actually if you look into the academic literature on this actually non aerated compost teas have been shown very effective again to be to be very effective against it again a range of different diseases they can be indeed very effective through the various fermentation processes that they go through and then that extract is applied now you can leave that to ferment it could be a day often it's up to 30 days anywhere in between I mean some of seven days I've seen in the literature some go up to fair to do that for 30 days okay you just leave it there to ferment and then you apply okay now you typically should avoid food sources again as a mixture in the literature but you should have be avoiding food sources here because when you add food sources in a non aerated tea that of course feeds the organisms they grow quicker and sometimes therefore it encourages over stimulation they grow too quick so for non aerator teas you should really leave the foods out or or tiny tiny amounts if at all and again pop quick and easy to make small investments just do an extract and then leave it sit for 30 days okay the negatives there are some concerns it is an anaerobic condition if it goes does not go into a fermentative direction it could go into a putative direction there is the potential to harbor some pathogens we could introduce some pathogens through this pathway but as long as it goes towards a fermentative process then it's it's typically okay and we could steer that by adding things like PM effective microorganisms at some of those lactobacillus lactic acid producing bacteria to ensure it heads off into a ferment a tved erection that can kind of help overcome that but there is a risk so but you do have to be a little careful with these there can be that risk of pathogen introduction and that's also why it's best to usually avoid manure based composts it's better to use a green waste compost if you're going to be making something like this okay and that differs from an aerated compost tea where as the name suggests we add air we're going to pump blo inject some oxygen some air into the water to provide oxygen so that we then start to encourage more of an aerobic process an aerobic brewing not really a fermentation it's more of an aerobic brewing and those microbes will use the oxygen to multiply and this is where we then bring foods in so we can add food sources and I'll talk about those in a second and that's the principle the microbes will use the oxygen to feed on the foods and multiply and we'll typically leave them for normally about 24 hours but again it kind of varies can be 18 up to 48 but generally 24 hours is a good time and let them multiply and the point about the benefit of that is we can typically then get away with very small amounts of compost just as a starter inoculum and then we feed them and of course they multiply multiply multiply during that brewing process they will double their population every 35 minutes and at the end of that 24 hour brew we will have a look billions and billions of organisms per milliliter I mean just fast fast numbers which again then can be applied over the foliage see treatment dribble down into the furrow at planting however we want to inject some of those microorganisms there now the negative so positive we need very small amounts of compost it's only 1% ki kg per hundred liters that's really not much compost at all and that'll be applied over a hectare or so negatives okay and I'll talk about that as we move forward we need a bit more specialized gear there's a bit of a higher investment to do the aerated teas they do involve more investment and time and effort there and one of the really important things I have to point out that I think is perhaps missed by a lot of people using the the compost tea ideas is that really compost tea is best applied on to the foliage as a foliar extract and to apply those very active organisms over those leaf surfaces but the compost extract is really better applied down into the soil now you do get a bit of overlap between these two but the reason being is it comes down to this lovely little image here that you can see I have here the thing about microbes in the soil I saw microbiome most of them are there in the soil they are completely dormant they're there but they're asleep and they're waiting for plant root exudates those signaling molecules those messaging molecules to be released to wake them up those on-off switches and so when the plant releases those signaling molecules it's turning on certain species it is recruiting selecting those certain species and it is selecting a handful of species from the soil the bulk soil microbiome this bank of microbes that exists there or dormant and I'm going to recruit a handful of you to come and help me grow at this present moment so it explains it nicely here what we then see is that the diversity of microbes in soils in the bulk soil is much higher we have a huge diversity of dormant organisms here but as we move closer into the rhizosphere into where all those root exudates those on/off switches are getting released right here we are in fact just selecting a handful of species so we're losing diversity as we get in close to the root into the rhizosphere and diversity is lessened lowered because the plan is choosing who it wants to recruit however the activity of those organisms as you can see as we move in closer is maximal so we have incredible density incredible activity around that rhizosphere of those handful of species but as we move away into the box oil of course the activity of those organisms then declines because because how far'd root exudates migrate from the root system again who remembers from yesterday a millimeter that's right a millimeter or two so of course the root it's heads don't get out to the bog soil so the activity drops right off okay but that's where you have the bank of dormant organisms then waiting to be recruited okay so then the point here is the reason compost extracts will go down into the soil is because they are more diverse they have more biodiversity than a compost team because we've just extracted those organisms from the compost and we didn't brew them we just extracted them didn't know whoever was there in the compost they all came out and so we have this good diversity as soon as we start to turn that into a compost tea we've added some food sources as I mentioned an oxygen and that similarly selects for the species that like those food sources that like that oxygen that like that temperature of the water that like that pH of the water so we actually select a handful of species that then become highly active so that's what we're doing in a compost tea and you want those organisms to be highly active if they're going on to the foliage because only active organisms can provide disease protection the organism has to be alive to be active of feeding releasing metabolite antagonizing pathogens for it to be effective against that pathogen a dormant organism cannot suppress a pathogen it cannot suppress if it's asleep so that's why we want maximum diversity down in the soil and then just let the plant turn on who it wants and then however up here on the foliage we do want the active organisms to help with that disease protection okay and so that really steers the direction there and that's where if many people may start with a compost extract and it's a really good place to start if you're new to this it's easier to low-tech etc and it's a good place to start amongst also conventional farmers who might not want to cut back their fungicides yet you can put compost extracts down around your seed that's a great place to start even if you still want to maintain your chemistry on top you know that's a great place to start it's a good compromise let's start building up the biological activity in the soil while you're still trying to dial those down on the top okay there's ways to wait many roads to Rome so okay that's the principle there okay now let's I'm going to scoot through some of these practical considerations that is a nice fungal spore they're germinating you can see a nice fungal hyphae they're growing in a compost tea so we're going to talk about Brewer design aeration hygiene compost quality food sources brewing application and hygiene again I put that back at the end hygiene is so so important so that's why it's in the list twice okay so Brewer design again I'm really not fussy there's high tech options it can cost you a lot of money if you want to go for those there's also low tech options that you can build yourself if you want to go through those and again no right or wrong some people are very happy to get a kit in some people are happy to do it themselves and there are the key components you need some kind of a tank you need some kind of a pump circulation for that aeration we may need some kind of a tea bag or some filtration equipment and particularly I'm a big fan of these conical shaped tanks especially in old milk fat if you've got stainless steel even better great for hygiene I think those conical shaped tanks are really good and I you can't see that I'm fortunate this photo because I've got this stand but this is a nice conical shaped tank coming down here and I really like this design I'll compare it to some others as we go forward because we've got a simple air blower here that you can see and you know we simply have a cam fitting here to inch back cam fitting and we can hook that up to the bottom of the conical tank and then I really like about this design is that everything happens in and out of that one hole at the bottom so you know we can fill up the tank then we're just going to blast air through that a jet of air and get the nice rolling ball of jet of air being pushed up into that tank for the oxygenation for the agitation aeration etc and of course the point is of course you could mount this higher up than the level of the water if you want to be a bit safer there but the point is you know once you finish the brewing okay close off the valve or the valve up there have another one up there close that off let the tank settle for a few minutes let all that sediment and things come to the bottom and then of course we can just open that Valve let that flush of sediment out just those solid bits of compost and Jenkins been flushed out and then we can drain that down into our sprayer etc and so the point is then everything happens in and out of that hole it's really easy to clean we can get up the top and just hose it down all out of that hole as well so I really like these designs but they are my preferred from a ease of cleaning the ease of use practical point of view minimal bits inside to clean I'll show or compare you some others I'll show you some others in a second so I really think the conical shaped kind of systems are really good from that from a tank point of view okay then we need to think about aeration and that okay that's what that air blower was doing but whichever way we want to use the key is to get that oxygen into the water dissolved oxygen into the water for the entire brewing process we want to keep it aerobic during that 24 hour brew process and remember that the microorganisms are multiplying the whole while they're doubling their population doubling their population and as they're doubling their population their demand for oxygen is also increasing so that's why we've got to make sure that we have enough power in the aerator to keep the oxygen at that six this ideal level here six milligrams per liter sixty parts per million and for the entire brewing process make sure you've got enough horsepower there to keep the oxygen at that at that level okay and without it when we do aeration okay it could be those air blowers as I mentioned it could be a venturi pump so it could be very simple circulation just simply circulating that water as it passes through that venturi is sucking in that off the air there so that's ideal that works very well for us if we have any biodynamic farmers in the room the flow form works exceptionally out of oxygenating water it's also probably one of my preferred methods I would have to say does the best job at oxygenating about water so you can use a flow form there's cascading waterfall there for aeration okay so again doesn't have to be too high-tech either but those are your kind of kind of options now here's again an air blower system that has these kind of membranes underneath these are kind of these tubular membranes that have lots of tiny little holes tiny little slits in there which when we pump we blow the air in its creates these nice little mini bubbles that you can see here and here's another nice example here you can see these nice membranes I have lots of tiny little slits and we're creating those nice little mini air bubbles you'll read a lot online that it says where you need small bubbles or the small bubbles of the best that's the best way to get the oxygen content huh I don't totally believe it there's nothing wrong with that it's fine but I just you know the the picture that I showed you earlier I've seen excellent oxygen with just a jet of 2 inch of air being blasted into that creating a rolling ball it's still oxygenate as well so and again so you can see the benefit look at the insides of this tank and all the bits and surfaces that you have to clean versus this one you know there's lots of bits of stuff you've gotta clean and wipe down and make sure is hygiene and can get in under there it's a bit of a pain in the butt so I'm all about making it as easy and as lazy as possible so those work well nothing wrong with them but I just I think the other systems are easier more practical less time spent cleaning which brings us to hygiene it is really important there is a risk with all of these I should really say for pathogen introduction so we do have to be careful especially with manure based compost so I think for any of these it is better to lean towards those green waste composts there is a potential risk now if we do it properly if we keep hygiene keep good oxygen etc yeah all of those beneficials can out-compete the pathogens absolutely in principle and theory but nonetheless we all know accidents can happen so okay it's possible I have to put that red alert it is possible so you have to be careful and that's where hygiene is also really important because if we don't clean out the tank we can leave bits of old compost tea and goop and gunk there that can begin to Harbor pathogens or that may be introduced in the next brewing so next time we put a brew on okay so that's why it's not just the brewing tank you have to clean it's also your pipes also flush your pulse you know clean everything out you really want to make sure it's nice and thoroughly cleaned between batches okay that's a really important point and that is especially true when we when we add food sources okay there's the compost extract and the non aerating tea where we don't add foods that's also it's the foods that can particularly be worrying so just they're the ones that we want to kind of be a bit careful with and again okay cleaning out everything tank pub pipes and the tea bag itself okay what can we use though it could be a bit of bleach and coronated water even a bit of hydrogen peroxide can work very well which of course this breaks down to form hydrogen or water anyway so just sterilizing the surfaces in between bruises is a good idea okay then we move into the compost and of course we could then talk whole another hour on how to make good quality compost so I don't have time for that today but all I'll say is the point is we want to use as good quality compost as we can because the better quality the starter inoculum those are more likely the better quality of the compost tea or the compost extract will be okay so it just makes sense let's get good quality compost even better maybe mix together two or three different sources of compost and use them because now we're increasing the diversity of different sources and bring them into that tea or that extract to encourage maximum divert diversity so you really want to go for best quality if you can and okay I mentioned those rates there before compost tea 1% compost extracts perhaps around 10% and again that's just those are kind of approximate numbers people do all sorts of different things in the literature and on farm people use all sorts of rates but that's kind of a good starting point and that's what it's all about you know this is the surface of the nice quality compost and then of course to us what it just looks like some soil but you know the surface if we scan in close to zoom in close enough that surface of that compost is covered in microbial biomass we can see some nice fungal strands their little various kind of bacteria here here and here different species of bacteria you can see here here here this is probably a yeast Spore here so we have all sorts of wonderful microbes and diversity there which we wash them off into the liquid to then apply out into the field okay so then those food sources that I mentioned that is an important point we've got to match the food sources to the population of the microbes there so if we put too much food in we can overstimulate them and over grow them and then they use the oxygen quicker than they're growing not the oxygen can't keep up with how quickly they're growing so there are these considerations and the typical amount of food that you will use in a broom is around about this point one to one percent so that's about a hundred mils up to a liters 100 mils five hundred mils some people use around half a percent it's pretty good two per hundred liters of water in that kind of range okay so that's a good starting point to kind of shoot for you don't really don't want to go any higher than 1% that's definitely deafening more than enough now the food sources that we can use can be a again diversity of food sources is good so we could use a combination of things like molasses sugars fish hydrolysates etc seaweed kelp extracts and fulvic acids humic acids plant extracts plant teas these kinds of things I would say though I think really be extremely careful with using molasses I would suggest to be safe and avoid it lean towards these other options here the thing about molasses is that it's is such a powerful bacterial stew MOA it just really encourages bacteria to the extent where they can grow so fast than too much and they kind of out-compete the fungi so we don't get as much of a nice diversity you get the sort of dominant of bacterial tea which is not really what we want we want kind of more of a balance maybe even ideally a bit more fungal dominated so be careful with molasses and molasses has also been shown to encourage ecole to feed and encourage Ecoline so you know it's just better to not include it at all in the brew you could mix molasses together in the application tank at the time of application so you could put molasses in then but not during the brewing and just put it in at the time after the brewery at the time of application throw some molasses in to get a bit of food sources going ok so be careful with that one so the process there a protocol for brewing start by filling your tank with water if you are using chlorinated water mains water etc you would want to aerate that to turn your pump on and aerate that for at least an hour and that will help the chlorine to vapor off of gas you want to get that out of the system ok next you should add the food sources they go and next dilute make sure there's a fully dilute and add those in second and the reason we do that is that those food sources are all carbon compounds and if you meant remember my integrated nutrient management slide with that nutrient getting wrapped up in a carbon source it's the same principle gonna add all those carbon sources into the water if there's any salts any sodium or any anything that's in that water those carbon compounds will bind to it first you know you tying those up in mobilizing those and then last we add the inoculum the compost the microbial product whatever it might be we add the organisms last into that into that environment ok brewing time I did discuss this already I really I have to just say I think I really just like 24 hours I just think it's a practical number ok you can go a little less you can go a little longer but I just like 24 hours because you can come in you can you know as they come into the into your brewing room but you're already on your phone so you're already at work you'd have to come into work to think about this you're already at work probably the point is start the day and look at the forecast for tomorrow and ok the forecast toward the next 24 hours is usually a little bit more accurate than if we just start planning further beyond so the point being if it takes about 24 hours I think that's practical we've come in check the forecast for tomorrow if tomorrow looks good put a brew on today and then you'll have a 24-hour brewing cycle tomorrow morning you can it'll be ready you can load that into the sprayer and apply that that's if you doing folio sprays if you were putting it through irrigation etc than through fertigation one of course it doesn't matter but I mean on that point a little bit of drizzle a little bit of rainfall is actually quite okay for applying compost teas that you don't have to have perfectly dry conditions a little bit of light rain is actually quite good for them so that's quite okay it's not such a critical issue but you know I just need 24 hours has a certain practicality about in terms of future planning time plan time management etc so I would lean towards towards that but as I say you'll hear your read different literature online and things but that's a good point to start ok so what happens when we brew as I mentioned we we drop those microorganisms from the compost they extract out into the liquid and then we are multiplying them so of course the only the species that lack that environment the handful of species that like that temperature that pH those food sources they'll typically be the ones that will then dominate so we have narrowed our diversity selected the key species that particularly liked those conditions so and of course they grow they feed they multiply but they don't just multiply it's not just about growing the microbial biomass it's also about the process of the compost brew so whilst they're growing whilst they're multiplying or set feeding and reproducing and doing what they do they're also exude in all of their various byproducts microbial metabolites waste products these kinds of things and so there's all these bio chemicals getting exude 'add into the broom now that means that compost is not just about the living organisms that are there it's also about their metabolites and these antibiotic antifungal plant growth promoting compounds that they exude these are the same compounds they exude all around the root systems and on the leaf surfaces the ones that are naturally there they're also exerting them during the brew so in theory we could take the brew and sterilize it we could cook it and kill all the organisms in there we would still have all of these beneficial bio microbial metabolites in the brew which can have many many plant growth promoting benefits or disease suppressive benefits that said in terms of a disease point of view the evidence is quite clear you've got to have living organisms they are the primary method in which these kind of things can suppress pathogens so it is I wouldn't I'm not encouraging you to kill the organisms or to sterilize them you want the living ones but I'm just pointing out that they're also exerting all of these compounds during the brew and those are also there at the end of that brew process when you apply them okay application fresh is best this is particularly true with your aerated compost tea where you've added food sources as soon as you finished brewing you really should be applying that straightaway okay don't store it just load it up into the spray tank and off you go fresh is best is always the rule diaphragm or piston pumps are preferable if you need to use a transfer pump to get it into your spray tank centrifugal pumps which of course have that propeller that spins very fast can damage the organisms so more softer gentler piston pump diaphragm pump is a better way to transfer that tea or even better if you can gravity feed it into your spray tank that will be even better if you also have to consider your filtering no finer than 200 micron if you go lower than that you start to filter out the organisms so try and keep it as coarse as possible you know work back from your nozzles try and get some spit more coarse nozzles and your a spray on your sprayer that and work back from there but you want to try and keep it as coarse as possible certainly no finer than 200 micron now some people will put the compost into the tea bag and thin and compost tea and immerse that tea bag down into the water during the brewing and that's quite okay but as you can imagine as we feel compost in there as it gets wet you know it does kind of slump down it does compact a bit so it gets a bit harder to do a good extraction you got to wash those organisms off the compost to get them into the solution so I have to be honest I do prefer just adding the compost in the loose and just letting it all slush around or loose throughout the broom that makes it a lot Messier job but again if we have a nice conical shaped tank as I mentioned you can turn that off let all those sediments settle at the bottom of that cone and then just collect the first washing x' into a bucket and then load the rest into the spray tank you know or you could drawer you know let all the sediment settle in the bottom of the conical tank and draw off the top you know that's also another way to bypass that issue but I think it's just better you get this really nice extraction throughout the brew rather than putting it into there where that fine mesh can sometimes restrict the extraction of those organisms out but that said many people use tea bags many people use tea bags with with success etcetera so again know no set rules on this whatever works for you I know different people prefer different things spray pressure is another one less than 60 psi the pressure is too high it can kind of kill the organisms they say pass through the nozzle or as they come out of the nozzle and hit the foliage they kind of go splat is it too much pressure is too hard for them so keeping that as low as possible certainly less than 60 psi and as I said I mean you know the application rates really depends on the hot again everyone does different things but 20 as low as 20 odd liters a hectare in kind of some situations being kind of dribbled down into the fellow with that seed up to 50 up to a hundred liters a hectare I mean it's it's in this ballpark of different people do different things horticulture is typically gonna go high on your cereals and things are gonna typically go a bit lower just to do to those economies there so that's your kind of you know application rate and I have to really echo you know what Gary mentioned yesterday I totally agree with this point that it's the seed is your bang for best buck you know so so using these as sea treatments or seedling treatments in horticulture or getting them down into the furrow the point is to put that little bit of biology that inoculum not as I said not to change the sole microbiome no that's the one way to be kind of talking about it thinking about it it's about a targeted application of target it's approach around that seed around that ceiling all right dribble down into that furrow just to put that an ocular move organisms there for the plant to recruit on to call on as it grows and develops you know it's just a little starter it's just the keystone species it's a little primer just to get things going in help with establishment through the rest of the growing cycle etc so you know I really have to echo that I think you know focus your efforts on this this kind of day zero you know be that SC treatment or be that planting day zero like this is where you want to focus your effort to put some biology in especially if you're new to it okay as you go along you might then start to branch out into the foliar applied the compost teas on the foliage etc yeah go for it absolutely this is a really good easy place to start and this is the point that you know I kind of really touched on this is gonna be part of this whole kind of quantum leap thing that we're kind of going through with the microbiome research it's about understanding now that you know the soil microbiome is this Bank sorry about that now is this bank of organisms and it's a bank of a whole big gene pool and we know that of course plants have genes and their various compliant varietal genomes and really this is what's exciting is about this stuff is a bit complex and academic and pie-in-the-sky a bit it sounds at the moment but this is the point is that when we couple this thinking when we bring these three pieces of the puzzle together though all of these genes in microbes that do all sorts of cool things all these genes that plants have to do all sorts of interesting things and then the messaging molecules right in the middle this is where we have the communication between them for the soil micro genome and the plant genome and this is their language they talk the language not the language of love folks it's the language of root exudates and there's signal T's acting as signaling molecules etc and so this is their language and this is what we're going to do now with science and technology and the stuff that fiona was talking about yesterday excellent we're gonna now go and approach plants microbes and soils and plant production and agriculture as we know it with thinking about these three things and how we're going to line them all up to work for us I make sure that the plants have got the right genes that encode for those root exudates that in courage the nitrogen-fixing jeans like we saw in the maze example earlier and then we're going to tailor and design new varieties going forward with this exact kind of trio in mind and it is it's super exciting it really is going to redefine how we do things that picture I also showed yesterday of the einkorn wheat and the modern wheat and then very different root structures you know it's along those lines just think of what we are going to be able to do when we couple all three of these things together and start breeding with this intentionally in mind breeding for these root systems breeding for the genes that that wake up the nitrogen fixing organisms can we cut back our nitrogen inputs absolutely we can but we need the intention and the will to do it and now we've got the tools it is a very exciting quantum leap that's coming up and it's not gonna be too too far away I mean this is some really hot stuff will come out of this in the next 10 years there's gonna be some really big things happening for sure so then what happens okay the microbes they are applied they protect the plant they live around the root system they live over the leaf surfaces they live over the stems over the flowers over the fruits all of these new spheres that I mentioned earlier we could colonize the plant surfaces the phyto biome they can protect that plant from disease they can feed the plants they can drive nutrient cycling provide nitrogen soluble eyes phosphorus etc etc but also the plant will nurture those microbes it will release those root exudates those signaling molecules to have a nice conversation to recruit the ones that it requires and now we also have this emerging kind of concept of inducing resistance that we can use microorganisms but also other biostimulants use seaweeds and kelps for example are very good here other plant extracts all of these things can be these can act as inducing agents these compounds that can turn on the plants immune system and help it fight off disease and again it's like this these kind of coupling this with you know what we were just talking about here it's like all of these ideas are now converging together and are really going to produce some really exciting kind of mmm systems models of farming integrating these kind of varieties that have better ways to communicate better biostimulants and things to induce this resistance to manage disease to manage insects as an integrated strategy and when we start integrating many tools together that means we can start to dial down our dependency on the pesticides on that insecticide on that fungicide you name it they'll still be very valuable tools I think we should keep them I think so many of them are very valuable tools and that's why we want to keep them and not accelerate the development of resistance in our pests in our diseases etc they can be very important and useful rescue remedies that's why we should keep them there for as long as possible and use all of these other integrated strategies to reduce our dependency on those and of course if your organic you should be doing that anyway because you also have very much very less lesser tools that your dispense so you know it's very exciting times I think going forward and these are the kinds of things that will happen when we can start to couple science technology with the understanding of micro biomes and that's you know just for example under the microscope this is kind of what we can see before and after an application we've used a special stain that makes the active ones grow so you can see we didn't have as much colonization coverage over that leaf surface a few bacteria there that are a bit out of focus and here we have some nice fungal hyphae that have now colonized that post application and I'll leave you with one quick example and a point about some really again kind of interesting stuff where things are going this was I won't read it out this was a study that was looking at the flowering time of plants and the treatment was very simple they applied some different micro biomes and different microbial consortiums in variety you know st. growing conditions same central st. plants here's a here's a consortium of microbes here's a different one here's a different one and what they found is that the microbes the microbiome can absolutely influence the plant expression and they would look at studying flowering time in this in this particular example so you know here we are we've been breathing all of these many parts decades you know looking at flowering time if that's what maybe what we were breeding for we were looking at the flowering time and we were breathing how this one's good let's choose that one this one's good let's choose that we've been doing this without ever thinking about the soul microbiome and what this study has shown is that that flat that the microbiome can totally change the flower time that it is a key regulator controller of that flowering time and that's what the experimental design proved so highlights this really important question this highlights this very important point which is well that means when we've been selecting and breeding for the past many decades at our research stations and out etc where our breeding stations well those plants have been expressing those traits in those soils with that microbiome and now we know that microbiomes totally control the expression of the plant of the flowering time or the disease resistance or whatever the trait was that was being selected for now you take that same plant and put it into your soil with a different microbiome we now know that therefore if you don't have the right microbiome you don't have the right trait you don't have the right expression of that trait so you see there's a big problem there now we have this idea we should go back to pure C and buy seed each year and have true stock well if you don't have the right microbiome folks you're not even going to be getting those benefits so that's a big problem we need to be saving seed ourselves because then you're selecting for the seeds and the expression of the right genes based on your microbiome in your soil and you do that generation and another generation another generation you begin to fine-tune the expression of the in that seed according to your own microbiome and that's why it's seed saving is so important and it says something else if microbes can control the expression of the plant what about microbes in our stomach can they also control the expression of the human they sure do and again this comes back to we are what we eat and diet we know that the microbiome controls all sorts of processes in our bodies gut brain access how we think how we feel so if we can have changed the expression of the human of course therefore through our food through our diet we can change the expression of our society of our culture how we interact I mean it's big stuff and it's very very exciting ok in summary designing farm systems to support the native soil organisms is absolutely priority let's just get some soil health and good practices in let's help encourage the native ones for sure but compost teas couple sex-chats other micro Buell's etc yeah there may be an ideal tool as a tool in the tool kit to kick-start to reintroduce to just get things fired up under certain critical or difficult stages or tea times in the rotation etc there's still much to learn though absolutely but the new and emerging microbiome and analytical tools will absolutely help us through this quantum leap so I think that's a very exciting time going forward ok [Applause]

Channel: National Organic Training Skillnet

Views: 7,330

Rating: 4.9375 out of 5

Keywords: biological farming conference, biological farming ireland, farming conference 2018, farming conference ireland, national organic training skillnet

Id: 9wZARVw9Tj8

Length: 60min 23sec (3623 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2019