Dear Jean-Luc, feeding sugar to the soil microbes is done by the plants themselves. The water of guttation of sorghum and safflower contains sugar. All the plants that are infested by aphids also drop sugar on the ground below their canopy. The leaves that fall on the ground also contain a type of sugar (cellulose), In the case of many trees, one finds a carpet of fruits underneath their canopy. The fruits contain sugars. Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) leaves exude organic acids, which too fall on the ground to feed the soil microbes. In India, in the region where I live, literally thousands of farmers have taken up the practice of applying sugar to the field. For every hectare,they use a mixture of 25 kg sugar, 25 kg cattle dung and 25 litres cattle urine. It is applied once every three months. In an earlier experiment, I got the soil from a non-irrigated and non-fertilized field analysed consecutively for 5 years and found that in spite of growing crops on this soil, there was no change in the soil composition over this period. In India, the agricultural yield is positively correlated with the rainfall and not with any other factors like the sale of fertilizers, pesticides, hybrid seed, etc. Humus is a typical topic raised by European agricultural scientists. Nobody talks of it in India, most probably because our soils do not have the humus layer that European soils have. Yours A.D.Karve
On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Jean-Luc Sallustro <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear A D Karve > > For my understanding microbes have an important role in the soil at a stage > where endemic proto nutrient are made available for them within the humic > clay complex. > This deep stage of macro nutrient (organic NPK) evolution can be depleted > for many reasons such as K sustainable sequestration, unavailability of > macro nutrient, not enough water percolation (soil solubility) etc. > Don't you think that one of the risks of depletion in N chain can be the > demobilization of upper soil decomposers due to the fact that immedialty > avalible nutrient are provided (sugar) > Regards > J-L Sallustro > _______________________________________________ Digestion mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/digestion_lists.bioenergylists.org for more information about digestion, see Beginner's Guide to Biogas http://www.adelaide.edu.au/biogas/ and the Biogas Wiki http://biogas.wikispaces.com/
