This shit is looking more and more like gold...

This article from The Atlantic caught my eye the other day, and I just had to share it. Anything called 'Why Farmers are Flocking to Manure' is sure to catch my eye... Gene Logsdon, who wrote the article says:

Fertilizer machines reporting for doodie...

"In 2009, with no assurance that grain prices would be high enough to cover the high cost of manufactured fertilizers, farmers lined up at animal confinement operations willing to fork over good hard cash for the manure, since it seems to be cheaper (depending on how you jigger the figures) than commercial fertilizers for farms close by."

He even describes how a friend of his is considering starting a cattle operation next to his corn/soy fields just so he can have access to the manure produced there.

Microbe-inoculated organic fertilizer!

What this article shows me is that farmers are starting to really want alternatives to chemical fertilizers. While the move to source manure from CAFOs is not my favorite, I do see it as a perceptual step in the right direction. Now, if we can get farmers to recognize that the real valuable stuff will be the fully composted form of that manure, we are on the right track. Heck, even better, if we can get farmers to realize that giving their fields a period of rest, wherein they are holisitically grazed, they can cut out the whole process of buying/producing and then applying the manure to the fields.


Does this sound to anyone else like a step toward the good-old-days when farms integrated multiple species of animals into the farm both as a cash crop and as a system of resource generation? Personally, I like it. Turnin shit to gold...

Not all Compost is created Equal

I received some good feedback from my post about compost tea, so I decided to do a similar informational post about compost...

Not all compost is created equal. I find myself, much to my surprise, spending lots of time explaining to people that 'compost' is not a blanket term for a single thing. Some compost is good, and some compost is bad, depending on what you are trying to do with it. Let me start out by defining what I mean by compost.

Since compost is no more than organic matter, and the microbes that devour it, the quality of a compost can be measured through the same lens. As far as inputs go, while the end product will differ based on the inputs, equally important is the way the compost is managed during the break-down process. Those organisms we want in our composts, our soils, and in relation with our plants are almost entirely 'aerobic,' meaning 'oxygen-breathing.' Just like us, beneficial microbes generally need oxygen to survive. What this means for compost is that I will want to keep my pile aerobic for as much of the process as possible. The general threshold for aerobic organisms is about 6% dissolve oxygen (DO), or 6 parts per million (ppm). When our piles drop below 6% DO, which they do as a result of the aerobic organisms using up all the available O2, the 'anaerobic,' of non-oxygen-breathing organisms wake up. These are the microbes that make our piles stinky (which by the way, is no more than our vital plant nutrients like nitrogen being volatilized out of the compost and blowing away in the wind), and they are the organisms that can give us and our plants diseases.

Compost can be made in a variety of ways.
-The most familiar is the thermal compost process, in which we make a pile of organic matter, it heats up due to microbial activity, and the materials break down and are consumed/transformed by the microbes.

Thermal Composting

-The most practiced is probably the cold-pile process, wherein a person continues to add materials (like food scraps, lawn waste, etc) to the top of the compost pile, and then leaves it to it's business. The microbes break down this material without as much ferocity and vigor, so it is a slower process, and generally, the oxygen levels deep in the pile are below our aerobic threshold.

-A third familiar practice is called vermi- or worm-composting. In this practice, a community of red worms (aka Eisenia fetida) are responsible for consuming the material, and transforming it into worm-castings. This method produces a fairly consistent product, mostly aerobic, and is also a cold-process.

Fungal Composting - about halfway done

-One method gaining popularity is a cold-process for creating fungal compost. This method involves assembling a large amount of high-carbon material (woodchips, straw, etc) in a shallow, but broad pile, inoculating it with a compost or humus known to have a high fungal diversity, and covering the pile with a breathable material like cardboard or compost fabric. This method produces a highly fungal compost, is a cold process, and takes as much as 2-3 years to make the final product.

And those are just the most popular ways to make this stuff. Maybe you can start to see how one name just isn't adequate for all these different products...

Now, most of the time, when we talk about compost in agriculture, we are talking about Thermal Compost. The interesting thing about thermal compost is that it is an intensively fast breakdown of the organic material provided, so to keep it aerobic requires a fair amount of monitoring and input. Most commercial compost operations just make big piles and leave them for 30 days until they turn them. This means that in the center of those piles, where air isn't able to easily penetrate, the material is spending a large portion of those thirty days below the aerobic threshold, so the organisms being bred are the anaerobic ones. This can lead to some unhealthy consequences... for example, one of my area's main compost producers actually had one of their piles spontaneously combust last summer. This is what happens when the anaerobic organisms, who can produce byproducts like methane, alcohol, and formaldehyde in their process of decomposition, are left unchecked. Once these systems reach a high enough temperature, those anaerobic byproducts ignite.

I consider it safe to say that I don't want alcohol-producing organisms to be sharing the soil with my food... and as a result, I don't feel okay about putting composts in my garden that come from questionable sources.

So how does one find a genuinely 'good' compost? Here are my 3 rules to live by when it comes to selecting a compost for yourself:

1) Compost should smell good. Healthy soil organisms produce byproducts like water and CO2. Their shit don't stink, and it'll help my plants grow. A good compost smells like rich earth.

2) Compost should be the color of 70% dark chocolate. If you don't know what color that is, go buy a bar and check it out before you eat it. Its not true that darker compost is better compost. High heat, by means of anaerobic decomposition, can actually burn compost, turning it black.

3) Compost producers should know a lot about their compost. A good compost producer will be able to tell you just what goes into their compost, and in what proportions. They also will have data to show you proving, via some third party, that they have a quality product. Chemical testing is good, residue testing is better, and biological testing is best.

Following those rules, while making it a little more challenging to find the right source, has made the difference for my garden, and it can do the same for yours.

Don't be fooled. Not all compost is created equal. Until we catch up with countries like Germany, where there are actually certification bodies for composts, we consumers have to do the research ourselves. The quality of your compost will contribute to the quality of your soil, and none of us want unhealthy soil, so why buy unhealthy compost?

Hope this post has been helpful to anyone looking for information on this topic. Please leave me a comment if you have any further questions or comments!

S 510 and you. What does food safety modernization mean?

So some big news from this past week, the US Senate approved a bill called the Food Safety Modernization Act. That's right, our government, while being stymied by the childish insistence of the GOP to reinstate the Bush-era taxcuts for businesses over $200,000, has actually done something! The Senate voted 73 to 25 to approve of S 510 this past week, a major move in the food industry. I know this may come as a bit of a shock, but I'm totally thrilled! Yippee! I'm excited about something the government has done in the food industry!

Basically, the bill gives the FDA more power over assessing and controlling the safety standards of our foods. Should the bill pass all the way through, the FDA will have the power to force food recalls on private companies, instead of waiting for the producer to do it themselves. Based on how much I trust our nation's biggest industrial food producers (see my post on the recent nationwide egg recall), I am completely in support of letting the government impose safety regulations on these folk, make them write out full safety plans, and inspect their facilities more than once (if that) per year!

There has been significant outcry against this bill. As a matter of fact, I myself called up my congresspeople to express my concern that this bill could be potentially devastating to my small local farmers, farmer's markets, roadside stands, etc. Much to my delight, there is a provision in the bill that says that these rules and restrictions only apply to producers who have more than $500,000 in sales every year. Here is a direct excerpt from the text of the bill showing this.



Somehow, I still hear conservative pundits claiming that S 510 is in essence, the government taking control of our food. The way I see it, S 510 is a great motivator for small local farmers. Doesn't seem a little like a food-system that supports the small, local farmer/producer is actually a way to encourage us to take our food back into our own hands?

Our Nation's history does not demonstrate that the markets are very good at regulating food safety. Again, I refer to Upton Sinclair and The Jungle, and while I'm on the topic of history, lets consider that the FDA, officially founded by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, was specifically focused on food producers who were providing 'adulterated' food (meaning things like they used dye to make the meat look fresher, they used fillers to increase the weight of their products, and they used "filthy, decomposed, or putrid substances" in their products). Reading this out of context, one might think, 'Gee, its great that we've come so far since then,' when in reality, the only things that have changed are the names. Today, our food is 'adulterated' by E. Coli (which lives in chicken shit), and excessive amounts of rBGH (aka chemically induced overproduction).

I say its about time someone stepped in to ensure that our food is safe, and that we can comfortably call it 'food.' In response to those who are crying out that the government is taking control of our food, I say I'd rather have the feds in charge than the producers. I trust my government more than I trust the market. Or is there even any difference nowadays anyway?

However, amidst all the celebrating, leave it to the government to mess it up. Apparently, the Senate made some changes to the bill that would add some taxes somewhere, and constitutionally, only the House is allowed to write taxes into bills. Sadly, S 510 is going to have to run its course again. Maybe it'll make it through twice, who knows...

In conclusion, I recommend that we, as eaters, keep ourselves informed about this bill. There is a lot of uproar about this bill, and I'm not completely sold on it just yet. There is a part of me that is concerned about certain parts of the bill, like where it says that the feds have the right to impose martial law on an area where there has been some kind of contamination and where they perceive a risk that the contaminant might spread... and of course, the conspiracy theorists are having a ball with all of the Orwelian implications that can be inferred from this bill.

Fortunately for me, I will be able to continue buying fresh, local, organic food with or without this bill. I'll be keeping my eyes peeled and my fingers crossed for the rest of us.