Humus - the essential ingredient: Graeme Sait at TEDxNoosa 

We call it armor(cover)on the Soil with diversified Living Plants with live Roots growing as long as possible feeding exudates to organisms Living in a Humus Matrix 🕊

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Excellent. Since revamping my personal health by changing the biology of my own gut flora, it was EASY to understand how the soil food web works. And now I'm changing all of my gardening habits as well as adding livestock (properly grazed) to improve my lands. It's scary how UN-known this information is. Keep spreading the word. A better future for humanity demands it. We've really made a mess to clean up.

Ditto.

😂😂😊

Aha, what is the exact title of the permaculture book?

Tom Livanos not everything on farmers markets are organic . Some of the food can be poorly produced. So you will need to double check

Come to know & support your local producers for food security & health 🕊

@@whitefarms3274 I begin and end my reply to your reply in the same way, because it is the most important point in this comment. I begin: thank-you for your input. When I wrote my original comment 6-7 years ago, I was in Armidale. It is a long story but I am back in my place of birth and upbringing, Sydney. Coming to know local producers is a lot easier in a regional town of 30,000 people than it is in a city of 5 million. Still, even here in Sydney, I dare say that some inroads may be made in terms of coming to know local producers. I feel that a lot may be learned by learning about supply lines in terms of all products we consumers buy. I actually think this is an employment opportunity, at least conceptually. About as meaningful as any employment may be. Okay, I take your point and end where I began (because indeed it is the most important part of my reply to you/this comment): thank-you for your input.

Mrgruffy44 wow, what a great way to change your yard’s soil! I’m going to try that this fall with my yard. It had been neglected for 50 years and the soil is hard like concrete!

Look into no till. Back to Eden gardening using a woodchips mulch is the best. Don't till the soil

Grass is the least eco-friendly thing you can have in your yard. Natural biodiversity would have done all of that for you without the damage done by tilling. Lawns are a bygone fad.

hahaha, I saw this hoping it was going to be about humus, then on the new page, just before the video loaded and i reread the title, I had started hoping it wasn't about to be about hummus!

It's been a while but if you still chase the perfect hummus: Channel of Refika's kitchen. It is the method: remove the skins from the cooked chickpeas (she cooks them with baking soda, which I don't do) and let the food processors run for a long time (I think she said 7 - 8 minutes). I seem to remember that letting it stand for a while so the flavors can mend together (well, not it is usually eaten before it has much chance), and that chick peas that you cook at home after soaking them for a night are better (I do that anyway). And plenty of garlic.

Me too spreading the info :)

Saltwindful, I think of compost as an inoculant. A compost heap is a breeding ground for beneficial soil microbes. You can use a small amount to make a large amount of aerobically brewed tea to introduce those microbes to broad acres, but they must land where there is either organic matter to eat ( as in mulch) or living plants to feed them with sugary root exudates. So I love your concept of organic matter being grown in fields in the form of perrenial pasture species which in combination with animals and these good guy critters (sprayed out ) would decompose into that wonderful humus which absorbs any rain that falls and holds it. Love your vision of rehabilitating landscapes with trees and grasses we so need to be removing carbon from air and storing it in soil fro a safe climate.

4 years late but I'll give it a shot. Can you explain more what you mean when you say composting loses a lot of carbon? And you don't think its a good idea on a large scale. And what do you mean by biological matrix?

Nathaniel Brigham I assume he means hot composting, which is making a big pile and as it decomposes it heats up to around 65°c Would be easy to assume that cooks out a lot of volatiles I guess, mulching doesn’t break down as fast or generate the high temperatures

+Paul Kenyon In answer to your question: The vast majority of land and/or land useage is influenced (if not controlled outright) by various government agencies. Agri-businesses influence the governments decisions. And there you are...

What problems have been solved without the government? Did companies just randomly all decide to stop using children for labor? did slave owners just randomly decide to let all slaves go? did factories and businesses do research into their pollution and decide to stop dumping their waste into rivers just because they were nice? Was it a grassroots organization the one that eradicated smallpox from the face of the earth, and which is very close to eradicating guinea worms and polio too? I could go on and on and on, but the point is that I literally cannot think of a SINGLE important and widespread change that has been done without very heavy influence by the government. If you want to do anything in a meaningful way, you have to pass laws and enforce them.

Thomas Dobyns un

I don't think you've taken a walk through many "modern ag"chemical filled fields. The dirt smells utterly disgusting, is devoid of life, cannot retain water and in some areas they are facing dust storms akin to those faced during the great depression. "Modern ag" is completely unsustainable and killing our planet. Check out Gabe Brown. Using polyculture he is able to get far better yields which means more money (i know thats all some people care about), spend far less to produce that yield, retain 10x as much water as a standard farmer'and produce a variety of products meaning if one has a bad year his whole year isn't screwed.

This isn't Ben Carson...

+Neil Blanchard There is no competition between humus and biochar. It's all awesome stuff!

Right, soil and biochar is a symbiotic combination.

+Neil Blanchard Hi Neil, I would like to see your evidence for this statement. Drs Maartenn Stapper, Elaine Ingham , Walter Jehne and Christine Jones would all disagree with you. Bio Char worries me because it involves burning wood and thus creating carbon emmission. Ingham points out that organic matter provides all the condiminiums the bacteria need, humus cleans the water . I would be very surprised if biochar could hold more water than humus. Terra Pretta is worm castings according to Dr Christine Jones, and Dr Stapper says there may be a plant response to biochar due to the ash but it is short lived. Ive heard a lot of unscientific hype about biochar and am concerned that so many grants are being directed to biochar research when at least these 4 eminent soil scientists are not impressed by it.

+Neil Blanchard Biochar requires vast amounts of energy. It is not a substitute for natural decomposition. See cru.cahe.wsu.edu/CEPublications/FS147E/FS147E.pdf

Zuni, using a biochar retort uses energy from the wood itself - some is burned and all the volatile gases from the rest is used. So, nothing "vast" about it. It is much better than decomposition - because the carbon is stabilized and stays sequestered AND it holds onto the nutrients and the water. Biochar is not in competition with compost - it is a symbiotic thing and biochar is a massive multiplier of the benefits of organic farming and the cycle of life.

+Rory Smith The problem is the _rate of change_. Species cannot evolve or adapt quickly enough to cope with the changing environment - hence the mass bleaching of corals in the Great Barrier Reef and elsewhere.

Im quoting from a climate science forum www.skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm "when people refer to the very high CO2 in the Paleozoic, 400 million years ago, they need to realize that it was countered by what was a much lower solar irradiance. If CO2 hadn't dropped over time, the world would be more or less uninhabitable today. Or, another way of putting it is that a much smaller increase in CO2 today will produce a climate that would have required much higher CO2 to achieve in the Paleozoic " Rory, theres lots of denialist trolls at work muddying the waters of truth on these matters. The Cambrian period was so far back its hard to know what was going on then.

Rate of change, excess pollutants, carbon sequestration in water, etc.

André Abrahami I try and keep my wood out of the chipper

It used to be how the government incentivised carbon friendly activities

Capitalists profit from patrons ! By your food from people that grow it ; not peddle it ! 🕊

yup - humus is compost made naturally whereas compost is humus made by people... ;)

Dudley Barker maybe humus is not compost. It's been said to be in compost, and is a silky, smooth, slimy material that takes a century to create, perhaps more efficiently by human methods??

Yes

The elements on earth do not change, nothing is lost of added. Sometimes the carbon is part of rocks, of soil, plants, oceanlife, maybe some is deep down as part of lava , and definitely as part of oil and coal - and a part of it is in form of gas (like CO2 or CH4 = methan), but the amount of carbon has not changed for billions of years. Yes all elements come from hydrogen, and the other very common element is helium when a star has nuclear fusion going on, all elements above that are created in supernovas at the end of a life cycle of a star. if the element is higher on the table of elemetns than iron it is an element that is "recycled" and upgraded in another supernova (or severals). The 92 natural elements of earth needed at least they cycles of two large stars (galaxies ?), with stars ending in supernovas to form. They assume that some large (gas like ?) object with lots of water hit the earth so we have more than our share. (hydrogen alone will eventually escape from a planet the size / mass of earth, it is too light to be contained by our gravitational field (which is determined by the mass of the earth), so the orginal Hydrogen atoms either found something to react with, like a Carbon or Oxygen atom or they eventually were lost to space. Only a star like the sun or a large planet like Jupiter is heavy enough = gravitational field to contain these volatile atoms. A star is an object that has such high mass that its atoms eventually "collapse" under the force of "weight" as the hot gasball contracts to form an object (plantet, star, moon, ...) Or more precisely: the forces that make hydrogen atoms reject each other (they are very powerful but only over extremely short distances) are overcome by the forces of gravitation. So the atoms are "crushed" and nuclear fusion starts. 2 hydrogen atoms become 1 helium and lots of energy. And early on there must have been a collision with moon, we got some of moons metals (which is a good thing because we have now a core that creates magnetism. but we probably lost some lighter elements because of the collision (I think that was indirect). And moon lost all of its atmosphere (would have even w/o that massive collision). The ball that became the moon must have had the same mix of elements as the ball of gases that became the earth later - when it contracted and cooled down. So that at least the metals etc. became solid.

+Curtis Grantham Too expensive and impractical. In order to build something big enough and mobile enough to cast a continual shadow, would require many times the natural resources that we actually have on this planet. It would be FAR cheaper to paint the deserts white!

+Curtis Grantham Also some corporation would own it and then start charging us for sun light.

Material scarcity and pointlessness.

please make sure your aluminium foil hat to protect against the mind reading satellites is made from recycled material

seems to me the current system of taxation and other selective corporate benefits the bureaucracies offer to skew things there way have been monopolizing the planet to their benefit at the expense of all life. What he is suggesting is to do a 180 and put it the other way round. a totally necessary spoke in the wheel of life if we are to make a go. a good topic and a great talk

The humus that is being talked about is basically COMPOST, meaning well rotted plant material, for the most part, along with worm castings (worm poop). I`m not sure what you mean when you say you have a container of "humid acid". IF you mean that you have acidic humus it can be used (as is) to fertilize acid loving plants like Rhododendrons or blueberry plants. If you need to neutralize the acidity just add limestone or white wood ash.... Humus can also be Peat Moss, it is mostly just organic material.

silver togn If you do not know what humid acid is, or is used for or how to use it, your post is of no use to me. Here is what Wikipedia says: Humic acid is a principal component of humic substances, which are the major organic constituents of soil (humus), peat, coal, many upland streams, dystrophic lakes, and ocean water.[1] It is produced by biodegradation of dead organic matter. It is not a single acid; rather, it is a complex mixture of many different acids containing carboxyl and phenolate groups so that the mixture behaves functionally as a dibasic acid or, occasionally, as a tribasic acid.

If it is a commercial product, doesn't it explain the what, why, and how on the label? I would assume that, like most liquid fertiliser products, it is diluted with water and applied to the soil. As for ratio, again, it should specify, but as a rule of thumb 10:1 would be a safe bet.

silver togn Spot on, he did say it in the video though but he can't have watched it long enough. He needs to start a compost bin for his green (grass clippings) and brown (fallen leaf) waste and a worm bin for his kitchen scraps (veg pealing). It takes some time to make but once you get a system/cycle going its good. Also try and source some locally produced compost, I get mine from a diary farm that produces its own. I also like to get a bit of organic horse and chicken manures too to increase that organic matter.

silver togn i think he means (humic acid) [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humic_acid] - #Justgivemethetruth , do some reading into #permaculture design - basically what it teaches is that by imitating natural systems, we can heal soil faster than Nature can. also, by getting chickens to manure your plot you're getting a type of ecosystem going that will provide you with food at the same time as restoring your soil - you might find that your local extension officer (or whatever they call them in the States) will be only too willing to assist you as well. enjoy :)

Hi Pertwang, if it was humus to a depth of one meter, it would be an increase in OM of a whole lot more than one percent. Ive heard it said that humus holds 10 times its weight in water and believe it from personal experience. So re do your figures on that basis and lets see then.