Compost, a Limiting Factor?

General Discussions
21

Biochar may be a permanent solution:

And yes that requires organic matter, but you can get permanent improvement with one year of cover crops if you need to, rather than having to rely on them every year.

And you can make the biochar as a side product of burning dry organic material in an efficient wood-burning stove to cook food. All you have to do is douse it before it cooks all the way into ash.

And you can charge the biochar by soaking it in urine (or water mixed with fresh weeds), so it can be ready to use without any nitrogen tie-up within a few days to weeks.

I don’t remember if he says it in this video or in another, but he says that terra preta, the amazing soil of the Amazon Rainforest, was built by humans using biochar.

Speaking of which, if you mix trees in to your garden and create a food forest, you ought to have a permanent source of mulch (leaves, and maybe all those extra branches if you’re pruning them to keep them small and/or keep the canopy from closing). Mulch + water + time = compost.

I’m thinking a mix of biochar and inviting trees into my garden (on the north side of my annual vegetables that want full sun, so they don’t shade them out) can be a permanent long-term solution to the problem of insufficient compost and/or mulch.

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22

In the Pascal Poot video linked yesterday it is said (at 2’30") that he brings 1500Tons per year of compost made of wood chips and manure !!! This is huge. When you know that it is a 7 to 10 hectares farm (link).
So now I will (try to) do the conversion maths:

  • 1500 Metric Tons is about 1500 Long Tons so 3 360 000 pounds (1 long ton = 2 240 pounds = 1.016 Metric tons = 1016 kilograms)
  • 7 to 10 hectares is about 20 to 25 acres (1 acre = 4046 square meters. 1 hectare = 10 000 square meters. So 1 hectare = 2.5acres)
    Applied to the 7 hectares / 20 acres hypothesis, that makes 200Tons per hectares (20 kilos per square meter) or 168 000 pounds per acre, so to say nearly 4 pounds per square feet.

That is organic, drought resistant, but also high input breeding work! He even says that this compost is what make his plants survive during droughts, and otherwise would die (2’39")
 So I kind of love this guy, and what he achieved thanks to his courageous mindset, but I don’t see his breeding work as a serious alternative in the times we are living in.
He’s only producing heirlooms seeds by the way, and I wonder if @Hugo did not tell him about landracing things, which he did not like very much. Could you remind us about that?
Once again Joseph’s breeding work, landracing, coupled with low or no input, sounds to me like breeding a giant step further. Surely one of the best contemporary work we can do.

I won’t make the maths here but you can imagine the transfer of materials and nutrients from one place to another: he may each year concentrate on his fields 10 to 100 times the nutrients he would be able to provide with the best permanent cover crop + agroforestry growing on his soils. And that of course needs trucks, tractors and many heavy machinery. Far from the idealised picture


- I used that (french) wikipedia page for establishing conversions -

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That is quite a lot. I suppose he use “this type” of compost as half mulch, to preserve water and help plants to survive droughts.

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That is what he says, yes: he says that his “compost” helps the plants keeping water. So to say to survive. WHich we can summarise into : “plants depend on compost to survive”. As much
as hydroponic plants depend on nutrient solutions.
As we can understand that any organic mater going through decay creates water (complex organic maters made mostly of C, O and H compounds creates simple molecules: mostly CO2 on one side and H2O on the other, some O atoms coming from the air
), retains some water (one example), and creates some shade (but difficult to evaluate from videos: seems like compost is incorporated to the soil), it is kind of logical seeing plants growing greatly, even in these very arid conditions.
At the end of the day, this is high entropy farming: there’s nothing sustainable here. There’s no build up of soil life, only an exploitation of the surrounding areas. I don’t mean “exploitation” in a moral sense: there is no condemnation on my part. I mean that in a mining sense: you exploit the land until you there is nothing left. As much as we dig mines until there is nothing left.

But you have to come to this systemic clear understanding before reversing the logic -or just start thinking about it. And it is where living plants, as long and as much as possible, become essentials. There may be other way around (like biochar, as @UnicornEmily wrote about), but I am quite sure we will always have to have living plants. And yes permanent cover crops or trees are even better than temporary cover crops.

That is that key logic that Lucien SĂ©guy - that I see as the biggest agronomist of the past 50 years, who worked all around the world, and especially in the harshest agronomical conditions of the world- understood first, and then applied. As a pioneer, he was rejected by the french establishment, while obtaining the highest yields with relatively low inputs and less work from Brazil to Madagascar.
In his work, it is the soil life itself and the organic mater created from it through living “covers” (which frequently go as far as solubilising nutrients directly from the rocks otherwise unavailable, like potash and phosphorous), which brings or retains water and nutrients accessible to plants - so nothing to do with the imported fertility of the Poot’s system, through compost. I won’t go as far as to say that L Seguy system is neguentropic (as coming from conventional agriculture he used chemicals, in very very reduced amounts though), but not far from it: farmers following is path sequester carbon by creating humus, which has the best water remediation we can imagine.
For the francophones: Lucien summarized all he did here, from 29’30" to 59’20". He is talking to a young eco-journalist in Madagascar. All water-related issues are adressed at the end of this sequence: water infiltration and water retention increase by degrees of magnitude compared to tilling. In this video there is all the reasons why I consider himself as a giant. A great source of inspiration who left many publications (researchgate), half of them in English
 Also he did great breeding work on dry-farmed rice and other crops. Very versatile man


Won’t expand on that anymore, promise ;-). I hope this helps understanding from where I am looking at this compost question: my “point of view” :slight_smile: .

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Yes, this is what I heard also, some time ago. Incredible to see how humans, caring, can create good living conditions for all the living beings! Like when we create a pond : every living thing is happy with that
 That actually creates local “biodiversity” and all its associated virtues.
Terra Preta seems to be one of these ways human helped humus creation, by collaborating with life processes, in the harsh conditions of some of the poorest soils of the planet
 which became fertile ! And still are. Yes :+1:

26

In London, a pit like that would be a pit full of rats.

I do make small amounts of charcoal in the “barbecue” at the allotment and I do add it to my compost; we aren’t allowed bonfires (local council rules here, not the allotment association), so the amounts I can incorporate are relatively small, but I figure it’s better than nothing. If I could get large amounts of charcoal cheaply I’d be tempted to do something like this with the spent coffee grounds, though; they tend to arrive in large amounts all at once, so I could dig the pit, fill it with layers and have it covered over again before the committee got a chance to yell at me. :wink:

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27

Sounds like you are doing the right things. My suggestion is to bring other people in to the effort. For example, coffee roasters generate a lot of high quality
 not sure what they call it but it’s basically chaff from the coffee beans. Every person potentially can contribute something, either household scraps or larger volume materials. Group participation on what I call infrastructure efforts is really helpful and amazing. Even a one-time contribution of labor or resources can be really valuable - it has been for my garden. I also collect twigs and sticks. They aren’t immediately useful but I throw them into a hole I’ve dug and over time they break down. I get some cool mushrooms growing in there, and I’ve been adding oyster mushroom spawn as well, so am hopeful to get some oyster mushrooms to eat in time.

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Hi Thomas, that’s a terrible amount of compost Pascal Poot is using. Not sustainable at all. But i have to speak up for the guy, i’ve been to his place, the soil didn’t look better than the one where i live. The soils around there were truely awful, like a tennis court, just gravel. If you have to AND garden without water AND garden without pesticides AND on pure gravel in temperatures like Andalucia i think it would be impossible. The hype was too good to be true around him, but still he’s producing tons of seeds that are handy for people who otherwise couldn’t garden. I think that has a big merit.
Yeah the story of me visiting him. It was a disaster, but a funny story to tell afterwards. I went with my gf of the time to his place, 8 hours drive from my house because i was in awe of this grower. And he’d said on one of his youtubes there probably were people like him on the planet. Seedsavers who grow without pesticides and moddycuddling plants, but he didn’t know of their existence. So i thought to go and bring him Joseph Lofthouse. I went with the book, and was extremely lucky to bump into him the helpers over there explained to us, they’d only seen him once in a week or whatever. SO i talked to him in my shittiest French, a Dutch guy coming from Burgundy with an ENglish book by an AMerican. It was all ok until i said Joseph mixed varieties. He looked at me like if i was an alien and turned away to speak to my gf of the pollinationhabit of bees or something like that. End of story.
These superfreaks are not of this world in a way. They’re so focussed on what they do and how they do it and then when they get success, trying to change their mind is just totally impossible. I fried his brain.
But in a way Josep[h is also cheating with his unlimited watersupplies. What kind of a landracer is he anyway! Off with his head!
No i am not rigid at all in these matters. The climate in France is like perfect if you look at what other people have to deal with. I could take a lot more compost from the farmer if i insisted. But getting him to bring it is very difficult. There is always something. Broken tractor or it’s too fresh or he brought everything to his daughter or somebody bought it
And since everything is kind of an exchange between us, if i get him to do this, he won’t do that. So i make do with what has been dumped in the past and grow white dutch clover

Rip it out and fight with it if it wants to kill my smaller plants. I believe it’s alleopathic as well. Seeds germinate less then in patches with groundcover like cornsalad. SO i keep it on the pathways and then kill it or calm it down with straw i dump on it’s head. Depending on layer and growrate it just peeks through and if the worms wolf the straw down if it’s from a half rotten bale, it goes quickly. I have a love hate relation with it. I wouldn’t say to anyone, he just try this, it works it’s great. Everywhere and everybody is different.
To normal people, i’d say compost is a limiting factor, but that’s because the normies just want everything to look like in the shops. But if you’re openminded i don’t know if it is limiting. You’ll maybe have to harvest three times as much to get the same amount as if it’s grown with tons of compost. But i’m ok with that.
If you use lots of compost and your plants grow like crazy it’s an unbalance as well, you might invite aphids, which you then have to kill and the speed with which unwanted plants grow and shade out your crops is phenomenal. If you bring all to get beautiful rapid growth i’m not sure if plants really get all the nutrients which plants get that have to struggle. The industrial food complex doesn’t care about nutrients, so scientists hardly ever investigate this. When it sells and money goes toward the industrialists and banks it’s all good. Screw the soil health, fuck the earth and who l;ives and eat our food. All the better when they get sick, the industrialists and banks can sell them medicine. But i digress.
If you’re openminded and you safe your own seeds and you don’t compost i guess you get less food per square foot. But so what if you live in a rural area where the purchase of doubling the areal you use costs less than a layer of 3 inches clean hormone less compost on your whole garden. Just double the garden and buy the land, and landrace and do covercropping. It’s a pain in the rear end to be busy hoaling all that heavy animal excrement if you can just get the same results with a couple of kilos of seeds.
I believe that that is the future. So yeah I hope Joseph doesn’t kick me off the platform for demanding his head jokingly, i agree with him and Thomas Picard not with Poot, although he does very important work too. We all do and thanks for being.

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29

Yes, I get some of the chaff for composting too.

There are people who grow mushrooms by making a slurry from bits and ends of mushrooms that they aren’t going to eat (things like shiitake stems which are quite tough, or wild mushrooms that turned out to be wormy), and pouring that over whatever they want the mushrooms to grow on. I haven’t been trying this for long enough to know if it actually works though.

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Thinking about this a bit more, I suppose the other reason I compost is this:

I grow quite a lot of food in quite a small space without using pesticides, and I transport it home by bicycle. I’m limited in the amount of land I have access to, so if I were to prioritise a strict landrace approach (in soil that was heavily damaged when I took it on!) my yield would drop, because there is not enough space for me to expand to in order to make up that yield.

If I bought that food instead of growing it
 I couldn’t actually afford to buy the “certified organic” kind (which is also probably produced using compost), especially of some of the more unusual things I grow, and it would be transported quite a bit further. If I bought conventionally-grown produce instead, then I’d be paying someone else to dump pesticides and fossil-based fertilisers on the ground.

I think the pesticides and fossil-based fertilisers are a lot more harmful than making and using compost, especially since most of what I put into my compost would otherwise have to be dealt with as “waste” of one sort or another.

For what it’s worth, I mostly experience less pest pressure in the beds with my homemade compost than in those full of heavy clay. I don’t know if that’s because the pests we have are well-adapted to clay, or if it’s because those plants struggle so much more that they are easy pickings, or if it’s because of beneficial microbiology in the compost, or what.

All that said – I have started doing some direct sowing in tiny pockets of neglected land, and I certainly don’t intend to import any compost there; I won’t be watering, either. But these pockets are very small, and very dispersed.

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31

I’ve never heard the word “neguentropic” before, and I love words, so I’m curious about what it means. What does it mean?

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Here’s what I think. I think every piece of land and every climate comes with its own unique gifts and challenges. If we focus on whatever practices will magnify those gifts and minimize those challenges, we can create abundance, perhaps even exponential growth. This is going to look different in different places.

Here’s a rather fun example.

In most climates, creating a pond is a brilliant idea. In my climate, it would be a terrible idea, because it would completely dry up during our super arid summers, thereby wasting all of that water and allowing none of the water-loving wildlife to stick around. Swales are a brilliant idea, though.

I have chosen to use rain tanks to capture my winter rainwater. This isn’t sustainable in the classic sense, in that they’re made out of metal and plastic, and thus I can’t grow the materials to make new ones. Still, they would have gone into a landfill if I hadn’t reused them, and they allow me to store rainwater for when we most need it in a way that will not evaporate.

What’s super cool is that my city’s government came to almost the same conclusion, only on a far larger scale and in a far more sustainable way! They said something like, “We got lots of extra rainfall last winter. Rather than leaving it all in the reservoir, where a lot will evaporate, we’re going to start working to refill our natural aquifers, which were completely drained over the twenty-year megadrought.”

Yesssssssssssss! :tada: Smart thinking! That’s exactly the right thing to do, in this climate!

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33

Try putting trees that actually produce nitrogen so you don’t have to

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34

Especially if they’re edible nitrogen-fixers!

Runner beans would be an awesome perennial nitrogen fixer for someone who lives in climate with warm enough winters and cool enough summers. Not a tree, but it’s perennial, so that’s good.

As for trees, I know of a few that can be a crop in their own right.

Moringa is a great idea because you eat the leaves, so you will get food even if you can’t get it to grow fruit in your climate. Of course, if you can, and I’m hoping I can, you can landrace it and grow it as a locally-adapted annual. (Or, you know, if you’re in a tropical climate, you can just plant them.)

I also really want to grow carob, which is probably reaaaaaaally marginal, given that it’s a zone 9 tree and I’m in zone 7b, and I want to get fruit from it. But, you know. Hope springs eternal. I’ll probably keep one as a permanent fixture in my greenhouse and hopes it overwinters just fine in there.

As for nitrogen fixing trees that produce an edible crop for a temperate climate, black locust and honey locust (relatives of carob) spring to mind. Apparently the black locust flowers are delicious, and so are the honey locust fruits. I don’t want to grow either because of the big giant massive horrible thorns, but for somebody who doesn’t mind those, they may be great options.

Do you know of any other edible nitrogen-fixing trees? :wink:

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Yep.
Yes first: I am no master of these thermodynamic concepts. But have been familiarised with them about 20 years ago. So I will translate what I meant in general more than what these concepts meant in details.
Second: made a spelling error : in american you would write negentropic! Not negUentropic
 French tendency to add "U"s after some consonants!!!

So what I meant, in this context :

  • there is a tendency to energy dispersal in any organised system,
  • but the life itself (meaning: all the living things) brings more subtle levels of organisation each day.

Example: there was no biodiversity on earth billions of years ago, and it increased day after day, making earth ecosystems more and more complex. Life, using solar energy, creating even more life, which can be looked at as more complexity


The english adjective “organic” also implies something which is simply 
 organized:

Also, “organic” is an adjective meaning that there is a dominance of the carbon compound in the mater: organic materials are made of “everything that is living or has been alive on the planet”

So, what I meant in this context, in that entropy/negentropy debate, is that this can be summarized into two tendencies :

  • a tendency to energy dispersal (what, as a non specialist, I would call “entropy”)
  • and a tendency to increase in complexity: any “organisation”, if meant as a process (what I called “negentropy”)

And to organise anything there is a need for energy. That, in nature, comes from the Sun, via light : through what we call photo-synthetis. Leaves, being -to my knowledge- the highway to initiate complex organisations, so to say to create complex organisms. - By the way, any fossil “fuel” being the result of an old photosynthesis, as we all know -

So when it comes to soil and land use in general: either you go towards a greater “organisation” - which will bring in more biodiversity, water retention, water infiltration, and then “sustainability”, and also shock absorption now called “resilience”, etc -. or you go towards “dis-organisation”, which is - if you look at it from a chemist point of view - : simplification of a complexity - in simple words: destruction.

That later is what agronomists refer to as the mineralization process, opposed to the humification process:

  • Humification being the tendency to a greater organisation in complex molecules organised around carbon atoms, and including minerals (and some parts of hydrogen and oxygen). i.e. humus
  • Mineralization being the tendency to a greater energy dispersal, which means dissolution of the carbon bounds, discharging of minerals on one side and CO2 on the other. + occasionnally some parts of H2O. - the additionnal O elements being taken from the atmosphere.

So, as in nature, and as in farming the 2 processes are known for ages and occur simultaneously, the main notion to introduce here is the one of balance sheet year after year, so to say the dynamic. Otherwise we don’t get it.

So to summarise this in dynamic terms, and from a farmer point of view, as some advanced farmers say : “if we leave behind more soil on the Earth than there was before, it means you have been successful, and that the next generations will be able to keep producing”. That is what I meant by negentropy. In other words how can we, as humans, and as gardeners or farmers, create more humus than we destroy.

It is an approach, a way to look at dynamics, from the organic balance sheet point of view. I used “negentropic” in regards to this organic balance sheet, meaning overall dominance of the synthesis process of complex, stable, energy and nutrient dense, organic matters, with all its collateral
 advantages!

Links :

  • “The Job of a Farmer is to Feed the Soil - podcast” organic maters, animals, soil microbiomes, cover crops, inputs, nutrient density, etc.
    (Personally -as most gardeners - I prefer more radical approaches, using no fertilizers, etc. But it is a great podcast to get those concepts from a farmer point of view. She is a great teacher. Slightly contrasting is my approach, directly inspired by Yann, himself inspired notably by Fukuoka, so to say, from a radical, zero input agriculture mindset, confronting this great problem of organic balance sheet, so to say the problem of losing soil, which we reverse through cover crops, and the corollary and mostly inconceived problem we both see in the systematic compensation of this loss through high entropy inputs to produce vegetables. Compost being one of them
 and of course far from being the most problematic
 But still, and globally, the compost equation is: first you undress Paul to dress Peter, then you cook Paul’s clothes for a while, during that process most of Paul’s clothes go in the sky as CO2, and then you bring the mineralised part to your plants, so to say you bring a highly concentrated solution of nutrients
 Which is - sure!- great to grow most of your vegetables
 but as soon as you dezoom a bit from your squash - or whatever vegetable - and you understand the bigger problem, you may want try adressing it. In other words: search for and then try to localize the solution to this bigger problem - “problem” that most gardening trends of the past 40 years don’t even conceive
 Then, as most of us, from a practical, localised and opportunistic point of view, I use for parts of my garden composted cow manure of my neighbour, to boost my cucurbits a bit, and will do that until I find my life’s soil as great as I want)
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3_w_Gp1mLM Chritine Jone, saying about the same things in other words, from a scientist point of view
 “Making life from light”, as she says nicely.
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36

Caragena shrub and goumi berry srub, alder for the non perishable wood is a great soil builder as well.

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The geology book I posted in the resource section applies. Basically the ground is made up of rock particles. Sand, silt and clay are words we use to describe the size of the particles. These particles can be made up of different source rocks, containing different concentrations of minerals. These particles are being broken down as we speak.

Also, I had to pull dandelions out of the cracks of my concrete. There are enormous ants that bring dirt in the cracks. Then dandelion seeds blow in the wind and land in the imported dirt moved by the ants. It’s all really aggravating to me, to keep having to pull these dandelions out of this concrete. Yet they manage to keep coming back, growing strong in this desolate concrete crack, year after year — with nothing to sustain it other than the dirt imported by the ants.

Those dandelions must know something the vegetable seed doesn’t know.

It is my goal to create the conditions to give the vegetable seed the opportunity to relearn. I don’t think it goes in a linear pattern, but it’s easier to talk about and understand. So here’s a stated goal. I want my vegetable seed to relearn at a rate of 10% a year. So each year they are 10% smarter.

This is why I said “spinning wheels” earlier. Because it’s possible to go around in circles if the soil is constantly improved while seeds are being selected. It’s almost like working harder to get a worse result. Improvements can be made year after year, but the ability to grow outside of the fertilizer/compost situation is questionable.

Take my recent onion posts: I selected for growth without fertilizer. Then, when the selection was over, I gave them fish fertilizer. Now I am selecting for growth with organic fertilizer. Not only do I get to eat more onions now, I get to ensure my seed grows well with fertilizer. When I share my seed, I want it to succeed for people - - whether they use fertilizer or not.

We do not have a mineral shortage. The ground under our feet is literally broken down minerals. It’s literally everywhere. We have a vegetable plant stupidity problem, born from inbreeding and breeders trying to maximize yield for thousands of years without being aware they were weakening the plants.

I might have too much calcium, or not enough sulfur, or whatever. Despite all of that, the weed succeeds! Does it substitute one mineral that is abundant to replace a mineral that is low supply? Does it absorb things from the air or the rain? I don’t care really. It’s right there in my face, proof of the possibility. That’s what matters.

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I agree with both. And better understand what you meant by the risk of “spinning wheels”, in a breeding process. I will shortly ask my friend for reference of what he told me: that the Romans did most of their breeding work on poor soils, then brought their seeds to better ones for serious production. Westerners of the past 150 years went the other way round


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He say it is in Pliny’s Natural History, and that this transfer of seeds from poor breeding ground to rich cultivation grounds was about arboriculture or vine cultivation. I don’t find the exact quotation though.

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Nice find — we have to go to the old books to get the good stuff! To the time before the rot happened.