Dear A.D. Karve,
I am not sure I follow your point?
As part of my degree we studied cotton production in the Mississippi River
Delta region of the US,
wheat production in the Mid West US and truck farming in California US.
Many of the really old plantations and farms kept very complete production
records.
Unfortunately they were not very smart farmers.
They planted the same crop for decades with out adding anything to the soil.
There crop yields dropped miserably each year until the river would flood.
After the soil dried out and farming could resume and the crop yields rose back
to previous levels.
The Wheat farmers in the Mid West and the truck farmers in California had
similar problems but there were no floods so NPK was
added in later years and yields returned.
Old dried Samples of the wheat and produce were found stored that dated back 60
to 100 years.
When the old samples of produce were analyzed and compared to modern samples
they had marked differences in the
amounts of the trace minerals they contained.
The old samples had higher levels of almost all trace minerals than there
modern counterparts.
Some of the trace minerals were totally absent in the new samples of wheat and
vegetables.
Soil samples of the areas where the food samples were taken showed the minerals
were depleted from the soil in the root
zone of the crops.
In some deeper samples the concentrations of the trace minerals improved but
they were unreachable by the plants.
Is your point that the minerals necessary to grow the plants are replenished
through natural chemical and biological actions
faster than the plants remove them?
I have a theory that the food we now eat is missing many of the nutrients that
were in food eaten by our progenitors.
As a result of the missing nutrients we are now less healthy and prone to
exhibit a number of health problems.
If the soil where your "organic manure" is obtained has been depleted of the
trace minerals it may aide plant growth but
not the plants nutritional value.
The areas we applied AD byproducts showed improvement to the soil trace
minerals in the plants over time.
I did not have the time money or patients to determine why the improvement took
place only that it does happened.
It may be the result of a new bio-chemical processes beginning in the soil
introduced from the AD or from AD byproducts
themselves.
Brent
----- Original Message -----
From: Anand Karve
To: For Discussion of Anaerobic Digestion
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2011 8:13 PM
Subject: Re: [Digestion] Digestate as fertilizer.
Dear List,
The fact that the soil micro-organisms contribute to soil fertility is
accepted by all agricultural scientists. Logic tells us that high calorie,
non-composted organic matter would serve the microbes best as nutrition. From
this point of view, we conducted experiments and found that plain sugar or
pulped green leaves were excellent as soil amendments. The rates of application
were 25 kg dry matter per ha. Capillary water in the soil always has soil
minerals dissolved in it. When one applies a carbon source to the soil, the
microbes absorb the necessary soil minerals from the capillary water. There is
no need to add minerals through the organic matter. That is why even plain
sugar causes soil microbes to increase their numbers. The concentration of
minerals in the capillary water is at a dynamic equilibrium. If a mineral
molecule is removed from the capillary water by a microbe, it is replaced by a
molecule going into solution from the un-dissolved pool of minerals in the
soil. We have about 30 km of earth's crust under our feet. New soil is being
formed every day. Only 5% of the dry weight of plants is constituted by
minerals. Therefore there is an unlimited supply of minerals in the soil. Don't
think that it would ever get exhausted by agriculture. And when you apply an
organic manure to the soil, don't calculate the NPK in it but count the
nutritional calories in it.
Yours
A.D.Karve
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