COMPOST TEA was Re: Perry's recnt posts

[Allan Balliett]

Blame this one on me, folks, but one of the most astounding upshots of this week's conference was the chance to meet with experienced growers who have worked with compost tea and who have found teas to be much less effective than we have heard people proclaim them to be.

Alan York asks people to ask the hard questions. He says a hard question right now is 'Do you know of a vineyard that has effectively controlled foliar disease with compost tea for three seasons.' He's willing to back this question down to one season. (The unusually dry summer this past year has eleviated foliar diseases across the board, tea or no tea.)

Vicki Bess, who is a compost tea advocate who spoke at this conference, felt that the push to diversity and high counts is not a push towards teas that really work on the soils or even the leaves. She said, and Will Brinton concurred, that it is the feeds in the teas that select the final microbial mix and these microbes were not necessarily the ones that would do as good of works as ones commonly dominant in dry compost. Will Brinton stated that there is not need for pumped up populations of microbials. He feels that this is unfounded, unscientific hysteria. He went on to say that good compost tea has all the microbiology a person needs for controlling foliar disease - WITHOUT BREWING IT other than we do already!! Think about it folks:

Even better: Compost tea and brewer sales people in Pennsylvania have received letters from the EPA telling them that they cannot sell their products as disease control products because there is NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE THAT THEY ARE EFFECTIVE.

Again - I'm sharing this info for your own evaluation. I've got egg on my face, of course.

-Allan