Dr. David Johnson of New Mexico State University explains the process uses for a fungal compost procedure used in the San Luis Valley, Colorado. View the Static Pile Fungal Compost Presentation at: • Static Pile Fungal Com...
Thanks to all those who are discovering how to really farm to avoid the bad practices of industrial farming over the decades. It's so interesting and if I were younger I know what my career would be.
have u planted anything yet this year?? I've been experimenting with korean natural/jadam farming techniques and cannot believe the effectiveness so far
Think of it as building an internet for trees and plants. Once the plants communicate through their roots and the fungal network the garden becomes a connected system diverting water , minerals , predators to parts of the garden that are required . I like to think of it as a city where you can just about get any service you need because everybody is connected. In fact once you realise that bacterial and fungi do this you realise what we eat dictates who we become because the bacterial in our colons determine what nutrition we absorb or don't and what toxins we do or don't and this also affects our psychology ..this story goes deep and wide in our day to day quality of life.
man, i love listening to this and hearing all the questions. It is such a through explanation to a very well informed crowd. I'm glad I understand everything they are saying and is why I'm investing in air pumps to create air lift compost tea brewers. I have a tiny "farm" that focuses on salad mix for restaurants, but I have to move a lot and investing the amount of time required to turn soil productive is something I've done and lost my investment to many times, so now I do hydroponics and mushroom production, but would really like a compost tea soil productivity fast track methodology in integrate into my systems. Because growing in the ground is always going to be the cheapest option for me.
For the lady asking about testings at 22:20 , and others: You can grab a microscope and learn to test your own soils for what they need most--biology. Find that video series with Meredith and a microscope. Micro-biology rules the living world. Also Dr. Elaine Ingham has a video up describing what you need in a microscope. It's going to be fun looking at and counting up those little buggers. All you need to do is identify the good/bad types, then tally them up to calculate your populations and proportions of the various types. You won't be able to identify each species, but that's not important, the work can be done just by knowing the types of microbes present, and their proportions and density. Or hire a lab to sort that out for you-your organic matter and your microbial population. After a bit of work they take care of the details for us.
Looking at microbes thru a microscope is myopic vs seeing how it looks/smells/feeds plants. Throw weeds in a bucket. Add water. Put lid on. Wait. Free soil food
@@manjichromagnon5480 no silly goose! What's myopic is you thinking that we should disregard something valuable and useful, and use it *alongside* other techniques. Literally seeing and identifying organisms in real-time is not wonderful?
@@manjichromagnon5480 wow you’re thick. What are you even doing on RU-vid then if you have it all figured out and no one else has anything to add? Just to boast? I’m sure you’re far more adept than Dr Ingham. 🤦♂️
I am in the middle of doing an experiment in my small garden with a small aerated compost pile that has a lot of woody ingredients and zero animal manure. And so far it is a big success!!! I consider a conical pile that is 1,5 meter wide and 1 meter high (approximate 5ft. by 3,5ft.) as a small pile. Instead of using a big blower fan I am using 2 pond piston air pumps at a total rate of 90 liters or 20 gallons of air per minute, for half an hour on, and half an hour off, per hour. Right now the temperature inside the pile is at 55C or 131F for 4 consecutive days while the ambient temperature is around 10C or 50F. Which is hot enough to be considered as hot composting with thermophilic micro organisms. And there is no rotten smell whatsoever, which I would recognize easily if there were any bad smell. The main ingredients of the pile are more chunky hand cut wood chips and some finer cut wood chips cut by a machine and small twigs, cardboard, leafs, coffee grounds, some rotted conifer branches, a small amount of pond waste materials, a 15kg bale of hay, and a small amount of molasses in order to get things started. I live in the Netherlands and I started the pile last fall, but without the hay and the molasses. Half January I added the aeration to the pile but even with the aeration the pile still wasn't producing any heat. Half February, around 10 days ago I added the hay and the molasses, which I mixed with the other ingredients in the pile. Then the heat started to rise slowly. After a day or two after adding the hay and the molasses the middle of the pile reached the hot composting temperature, but the outer parameter of the pile didn't. So then I decided to cover the pile with used plastic bags in such way that there is still plenty ventilation possible. Which perfectly helped to get the entire pile to a high enough temperature for the hot composting process with the thermophilic micro organisms. The pile had a large amount of moisture before I started applying the aeration. After mixing the hay with the existing pile I added some more water. The hay that I added was bought in the store and it was dry. I applied the molasses with some mildly warm water with a watering can as I was building up the pile, starting adding it at the bottom of the pile. When the temperature is going to start to drop I am going to turn the pile and see what happens. Eventually the thermophilic organisms will consume all their food, which will make the temperature inside the pile drop, and then different micro organisms will continue the composting process as long as they have enough air and moisture.
On all your crop fields fence lines make a small water ditch and plant a tree that grows year round like Douglas fir pine trees along the water ditch fence line to feed your fungi bacteria compost tea you spray or solid compost added as top layer before seeding your fields that way fungi bacteria and nutrients stay in the soil and when you harvest the crop you burn unused plant matter into bio char for your compost to inoculate and layer next season.
Living in 9b zone in AZ, I've added many tons of alfalfa, wood chip for 4 years, now I'm almost no til, just enough to stir up soil to replant cover crops. I have lots of worms, see even mushrooms in the 90s after a watering. I get about anything I want to grow, still need to add N for the grasses, eg Corn. and less for my winter greens, Brassicas. I'm trying legumes in 2 rotations, low temp, and high temp tolerant. I don't mind feeding my garden, 1st my plants need to eat, so I can eat. This is what I tell fellow gardener's.
Referring to the person’s comment about testing. Is it useful to talk about Brix testing on the resultant plants to have some measure of whether things are going in the right direction? Improving microbiology is in the service of getting more nutrient dense foods after all? Some of the testing will be beyond the budgets of some farmers, Brix spectrometers are relatively cheap.
Brix is just going to give to sugar content. Tissue analysis will tell you what has been happening. Sap analysis tells you what is coming up. But this is just for the plant. For the soil and compost, you need to look at the biology.
Very interesting work. Would you consider a very energy efficient and totally uniform heating system to keep your shelter allowing more production time at very low energy cost? I have my heating system on You Tuce under greenhouse heating by Alphonsus Forgeron. The site was operated through winter heavy snow storms and -35F february weather.
So the reactor is kinda like the wet/dry bio filter on a fish tank, where there is a high surface area filter medium (bio-balls, filter floss, ect) which in this case is the bio-mass (the organic material that's converted to compost) which is Always Wet, but Never Submersed. (if I've interpreted things correctly)
I'm wondering if adding some soil from a native virgin source (local virgin woods) would help the biodiversity in the bioreactor inoculating local species of fungi and bacteria.
I understand this is all emerging science and we are learning. However, as a small backyard grower, someone who has chickens.. I understand that I need to build a pile that heats up and maintains this temperature zone of 131 degrees F for at least 3 days. I find most of learning how to build my own fungal dominant compost very complicated for a simple grower like me. I have found Dr. Ingham’s program to be too expensive of an investment for someone like me. I do wish that someone would share easy and inexpensively how to compost safely for the backyard gardener. I believe in using what I have to make compost. So in my case, rabbit and chicken manure, garden waste. I am working to get wood chips and leaves. I do have a small worm farm. I think it should be easy to regenerate your own yard.
I’ve been making Jonson su compost pile for 3 years I make two piles a year I use woods chips and leaves for the chicken bedding then when I’m ready to build my pile I add leaves and soaked wood chips dried backyard hay food scraps I do buy some things to add more minerals like basalt rock dust sea 90 mineral salt humic acid and mix all the ingredients together I try to add 70% brown material the rest is greens I’ve had really good results and I’ve done test adding the compost in furrow and anything that gets this compost has really good growth and resistant to disease
My homes 5 yard aerated static compost pile is covered with separated tarps to help maintain moisture and reduce heat, here in the desert. Instead of mixing my biochar and rockdust in the pile. I coated the outsides to insure no pathogenic or anaerobic microbes could ever prime my biochar or rock dust. Opinions?
Lol totally. All this stuff is great. But it's still a band aid on industrial ag. We need stuff like this but at a more human scale. And for that we need more people taking more responsibility for food getting
What to use if you can't inject it? - apply on a cover crop? How long does it last in stagnant water- how fast do they die? If it's bagged up in plastic, how long before it goes anaerobic? They need making in the Spring then if affected by freezing, therefore it can't last a whole year!" Not sure I like the sound of the antifreeze? I have funding for a project here in the UK. Can we get hold of your research and collaborate please? We will certainly join on your website but it would help to get a look in order to design the trials in the most useful way for all.
Aerobic bacteria and fungi usually lasts about an hour in water not being actively aerated. Keep your pile from freezing, once it's introduced to the soil I would assume the fungi and bacteria will work its way down enough to prevent freezing. Remember, this is how nature works, humans are what broke the soil. Don't focus on application method. If you can't inject, just water it on. The most important part is getting it on the ground.
I don't believe it would effect much because a no dig system allows the fungi to establish and this is the point of a no dig. So the two methods both result in the same end but are used in different applications. This compost technique is particularly powerful in establishing living soil from dead soil ( dirt) found in tilled farming and herbicide affected areas.
@@das250250 There's a ton of dead soil I've noticed mainly on public land. I know there's no water cause the government doesnt do anything with it, but there's a huge difference where I live looking at the farms and then the public land at the edge of the valley that's completely dead. There's not even sagebrush or grass in most of it. It's pathetic. The sad thing about even trying to help do anything on public is half of the cost is paperwork haha. We worked with the state a few years ago. We rent a state section and even on state land to do a chaining job they had to pay thousands of dollars to a guy to go look for pottery and arrowheads etc before they could do the job. It would be cool though if the government would do some drill seeding with fungi and bacteria when they plant on public land after a fire. Then again a lot of it is seeded by plane.
@@koltoncrane3099 Yes there is much needed work to be done and aligned practices to build soil. The view seems to be the focus on plants or crops but actually the soil needs to be the focus and the plants often take care of themselves. Keep up the good work .
Does this composting process put carbon back into soil when useing wood chips? Can composting be a new method used of forest fire suppression instead of burning piles? Now fire departments use burn piles that release carbon and always start forest fires? Have people made (bucashi Korean) composting piles that work much quicker while also creating significant microorganisms that are needed to create healthy soils?
I am curious about watering with water that has increased dissolved oxygen. There is a commercial electrolysis device for growers (can’t think of the name) that touts 50% more DO in volume of water. The device went through several years University trials and testing and had awesome plant growth results. Wondering if the DO in that water can be delivered to biology in compost effectively. Perhaps could cut labor/turning and deliver proper oxygen.
So question about application , would pumps dice up the fungi? it much harsher than turning a pile i would think, how do we keep them alive? Or are we only looking for the fungi spores, that should be fine i would also think.
Depends on the pump. The soil food web guys did a lot of tests on that front. In short diaphragm pumps seem to be the only ones that seem to be microbe save ish, with still quite a range on how bad but with most around 70% seem to survive each pass. For spraying/injector rigs u have to make sure filters are, if I recall properly, 400 micron or bigger. Listen to a bunch of the soil food web webinars the numbers get mentioned a few times. Also no sharp turns aka 90° corners at fast pumping speeds best is to avoid corner peaces and use gently bent hose instead.
It cut off at one of the most intriguinmments "if it goes anerobic turning will not bring back the fungal community". My question is will the fungal community never return on a static pile left to mature? It seems to me that fungal spores are everywhere and surely they will come back at some point.
There is a great facebook group of people experimenting with the Johnson-Su Bioreactor (search for Johnson-Su Composting); lots of ideas and different ways of applying the techniques at different scales, and starting to see the results.
I think a wire basket kind of thing. Like a hexagon or something else with ribs but lengthwise exterior runs would be ideal as long as the metal wasn't rusting in it. But maybe with an elevator with a wetting spray curtain the media would interlock around a form and just be ok as it goes. Probably that's the ideal because it's nothing to take apart and it requires way less capitol costs
You can search up a johnson su compost reactor. The idea is that air can penetrate through a a maximum of 12” of compost material. So basically you build a cylinder out of remesh steel, lets say you make it 5ft in diameter. You then make a 1ft diameter tube out of hardware cloth or anything that’s breathable and sturdy. You place this tube in the middle of the remesh steel cylinder. You wrap it with planter cloth, really anything that’s breathable and will keep moisture in. This design allows the entire compost to breathe, since no part of the compost is more than 12” from air. Since fungi require oxygen just like us, it means you create an aerobic environment where fungi can grow. You must also keep the compost moist (as they said in the video 70%). That’s pretty much it. You can let nature take its course and the system itself will have a higher percentage of fungi in it compared to just compost piles since those piles are anaerobic and don’t give the opportunity for fungi to grow as well. Fungal spores are in the air, they will make it into your compost and grow if you give them the right conditions.
@@douglasbaskett2298 you can accomplish this two ways. Use remesh steel underneath and place gardening cloth on top of it and the reactor on top of that. Afterwards you can place the entire reactor on wooden pallets or if you don’t have any, you can dig out narrow channels in the ground to allow air circulation. The nice thing about digging out channels is that it allows for worms and other bugs to naturally make their way into your compost.
@@bear532 I was wanting to know how to build that very large farm scale reactor in that greenhouse and not a "tiny" small scale reactor. I have watched many videos on the pallet size reactors. I know how to build those reactors
@@douglasbaskett2298 as long as you have the holes in the pile like they do, you don’t really need anything else. Oxygen will still reach the soil as long as the holes are no more than 24” apart. However, if you still want air to circulate from the bottom, I have thought of a solution for you. You can use a trench digger to make narrow channels. Over the channels place the remesh steel with the gardening cloth. Place pipes for the holes over the channels (so the channels will have to be 2ft apart). Then just pile on whatever you want to compost while being sure the pile is no more than 2ft tall. The channel opening will also obviously need to be unobscured.
Where can I find out how to do this on large scale? I'd also like to attempt this on my farm, but I can't imagine building so many bioreactors, this method looks like it can be scaled?
What they were doing in that building was an attempt at scale...scaling up under cover. Any size reactor needs to be kept ideally over 40 degrees +. Red Wiggler Worms are the engine of this process & worm death occurs about 40 & below. I lost 2 reactors to excessive cold. The worms die & freezing makes the plie go hydrophobic. I tore down both & just used the contents as rough mulch.
That's an interesting distinction between extraction to add to watering as opposed to "compost tea" which can be made a number of different ways. Supposedly compost extract is only what creates the conditions to build a microbial community whereas compost tea is when the community is already grown. To me they're the same. There's undoubtedly no difference in the end result, the benefits and application to crops. If someone can explain the reason why this "extract method" is objectively different than compost tea, I'd really appreciate it.
Herbicides are volitile and breakdown through various processes, some chemical, some biological. I think Atrozine is the big problem to watch for in this regard, but ultimately it gets broken down too in a strong biological process.
I'm reading elsewhere what I think is misnterpretation of the importance of wood chips to support fungi growth in this video... Some people are saying that the fungi is the most important part of the ingredients to making compost using the Johnson/Su approach. IMO these educators are not saying that wood chips should be used to the exclusion of "greens." The fungal growth is important to convey nutrients in a way that plants can absorb but excluding the ingredients to produce the nutrients is simply making deficient soil in a way that's different than before. It should be emphasized that nutrients are just as important as the fungal support needed to make the nutrients more accessible to the plants.and lack of either produces a poor result.
My piles partially froze in Zone 5 & I only got partial clay-like material in one "layer." I did not have space to do them under cover. I saw a vid where makers were contructing the piles in a barn. No info if they froze.
My biggest concern in this process is that your eliminating hundreds of pounds of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. I don't see a feasible way to do this with just pounds of micros. Eventually you're going to have to replenish the nutrients that you are extracting from somewhere in the soil. You can't just give and not take. I'm not opposed to this process, just don't understand it. At what point are you reintroducing these nutrients?
Just tuned in 15 minutes ago. I am nearly "speechless" perusing this farming research. Seems like last big CSU event occurred as Mr Rush Limbaugh came to town. This fungal research may be more awesome than his visit....(anxiously reading your progress in kansas)
It is a great way to kick off the bed if you are willing to wait a year to build it. Some may argue is it worth waiting? I might suggest doing it in parallel or start quickly using standard compost methods and apply that over many years and not till the garden bed.This will create a living and rich fungal ,bacterial soil .Maintain them by always have living roots in the bed at all times . It takes time but expect with consistent application the garden will kick into gear after approx. three years and provide you infinite years of harvests while also improving soil at the same time. This is the single largest error in global farming and environment today. Every person who practices soil building and passes on the skill is contributing to Earth healing. The key with a veggie garden is the engine room. The engine room is gathering all the harvested materials from around the garden ( weed and cuttings ,lawn etc ,food scraps ) ,carbon, nitrogen ,a manure if possible (say organic pasture cow) ,worm wee (home worm farm ) ,castings, weed tea and weed compost ( weed bin ) and water and recycling them into a rich compost. The compost is your engine room. A large compost (1m^3) plus will give you the heat to cook weed seeds and breakdown materials ,compost fairly quickly ( month to 2 months ). If you don't get that quantity compost what you have and start there and let it sit until it looks earthy and smells like forest. ( see making compost vids). You might check out Charles dowdings vids on compost. As a gardener your job is to feed the soil life not the plants . The plants know how to grow in good soil and light ,you just need to feed the animals in the soil which feed the plant roots. Not tilling the soil will allow that life to burrow into the soil and create air tunnels and preserve water stored in all the life in the soils. (Life = 70% water + 30% minerals elements ). Fungal life starts to build substantially when bacteria colonies and biology are large enough feeding on organic material . This increases the average moisture content inside the soil which then supports the growth of these fungal colonies. The fungal colonies grow inside the beginning soil using standard compost (especially mix with some mushroom composts) when the above conditions are met. For really bad soils ( = dirt = no life ) Using a fungal dense topping helps accelerate the rejuvenation but it still takes time. Think of how long a town takes to turn into a city. That is what you are doing to the soil , building a complex community with lots of individual services and resources(for the plants) . The larger the variety of biology ,the more robust the plants because they can address their nutrition and pest response needs quickly. Living,diverse soils is the focus.
I"m a bit surprised that the content of this video is still news on the date this video was published. There's nothing new about it from what I learned at the Solana Center in Envronmental Innovation more than 8 years ago which I assume was courseware based on known scientific principles at least a decade ago. Of course, there have been many good academic studies and papers on soil health published over decades if not centuries that were consistent with available technologies of the time. But, I give this video high marks, I don't see much to disagree with a couple years after this video was published and I see advice carefully worded to not overstep or oversell.
It all works together and we don't understand it all yet. More biology is better than less biology. Good bugs far outweigh the "bad" ones. It all self-checks in a balanced system. More diversity gives best balance.
I imagine its similar to seeds and animals - some seeds are eaten entirely but others are shat out of the digestive system and go on to germinate. Worms also aerate the soil. Fungi may also benefit from the digested waste from worms. I imagine it may also depend on species of worm - some probably better for the process than others etc.
As with any ecosystem, the worms are part of a circle. You are waiting to add the worms to the soil so that there is enough fungi food for the worms to feed on without letting it go extinct - checks and balances
It's painful watching these farmers trying to parse the exorbitant high price of multiple micro biology tests with all the other over priced inputs necessary to grow crops
Hoping to build two 20 x 12 compost bins following the Johnson-Su protocols. Construction would consist of Hay bales for the exterior. Silage Tarp or Billboard Sign for covering. Pallets underneath covered with landscape fabric and predrilled holes. A mixture of 2 parts wood chips and 1 part cattle manure. and A mixture of 2 parts wood chips and 1 part chicken house cleanout. 209 pipes spaced one foot apart. This system would be outside near Atlanta, GA. Question- What type of pipe is the most economical? Is this pipe supported by 3/4" PVC driven in the ground? How do I determine 70 percent moisture? How do I determine the ratio of manure to wood chips? Is it ok to place this system outside or should it be in a building?
Due your due diligence. He gives you links with all the information. If you don’t know how to test moisture content by squeezing it with your hand, you’re getting ahead of yourself already. I’m glad you’re as excited as I am, and hopefully by this time since your post, you have completed your project. How’s it going thus far?
where are the young? they all retire people... lol bring your kids and young farmer into that kind of speach.... if you want the future to be more eco fun guy!
