Composting Methods That Build Soil Biology

0:00 Okay well I think we're gonna go ahead and get started here. Welcome to our Biologicals webinar series. This is our third webinar in our series and I just want to cover a couple things before we get started. First of all, everyone is muted, so if you have a question, please put that in the Q&A panel or you could send a chat to the panelists too. I'm going to be posting some links that we'll be discussing a little bit in the chat so you can take a look at that, but also be sending those out in a follow-up email with the recording. So if you can't copy those out because you're watching the presentation, don't worry about it, we'll send them to you.

1:00 Great, thank you Jonathan, appreciate that. And folks, we're so glad that you joined us today. We've been having a great time doing these biological webinars and very excited about what we have for you today. Our guest today is Jim Ristow. Jim is well, I would consider Jim a friend. We went probably three or four years ago, so I'll give you a little bit of background on Jim and then how we kind of came to know him and been working with him. So Jim's worked in conservation all his life. He's worked for fish and game, he's worked as a fishing guide on the Missouri River. Jim lives up in Chamberlain, South Dakota, right on the river. He has recently been the sustainability director with the South Dakota corn board and is now still working with the corn board up there, but in a little bit different capacity with kind of a bit more of a concentrated project with a few counties there in his area.

2:00 So Jim's got a deep background in conservation clubs and land and just really has a passion and a desire to help people make their land better for future generations. So Jim, I would say you have a very close association to our mission statement, which is regenerating God's creation for future generations. And so we first really met Jim three years ago, the summer of 2019, so three and a half years ago, coming up on four. We had a composting workshop here in Bladen and I know some of the folks that are watching this were here for that. Jerry Gillespie and Christine Jones from Australia, they came. We did a composting workshop and Jim was there and I was really impressed after the event because Jim took these concepts, he went home, and where a lot of us just like, 'was that good information, maybe someday I'll do that,' I think Jim was doing it in his head on the way home. I think because he put these things into practice right away.

3:02 And so we wanted Jim to come on and share some of the things that he learned from that composting workshop as well as some of the things that he's learned about soil biology from working with all of the farmers up there in South Dakota. Another thing about Jim is he's just constantly learning. Jim, I think you said you've made it through the first of Elaine Ingram's section? I think there's three courses, you made it through her first course and are working on the others. And that's no small task. I have not done that, but talking to people that have, it is a course. It's a college course. I would see your microscope sitting in the background there behind you. So you know, feel free to share a little bit about what you've been learning from Dr. Ingham as well as from Christine Jones and Jerry Gillespie, and the links to the recordings of that composting workshop that we did three and a half years ago. Jonathan's going to be posting those. Jim will be referring to some recipes and all that's going to be on the chat.

4:11 And so before I turn it over, many of you watched our one last week on the Johnson-Sue method of composting, which is a great way to go. Jim's very familiar with that. He's going to be describing, at least in part of his talk, what we did with Jerry Gillespie, and it's a different way to compost. Not necessarily right, wrong, or otherwise, but it's a different way to approach it and try to achieve some of the same results. So we want to open your mind up that there are many options, many pathways to get to the same end result of having a healthier soil ecosystem through improving our biology. So with all that, I am going to turn it over to Mr. Jim Ristow. Take it away, Jim.

4:54 Thanks a lot, Keith. Yeah, I was thinking about that event that we came down to in Bladen and you're exactly right. I was kind of posting on the way home what did I put together, you know, what do we need to do here to make this work. And what impressed me was if it was right, what they were saying, what Christine Jones and Jerry Gillespie were saying about our ability to use on-farm resources, it solves so many of the environmental problems we hear about. And I just felt like we have to get an understanding of this because it starts to, you know, we aren't talking.

5:37 About water quality issues and runoff and all those negatives with agriculture. So any farmer could adopt some of these practices if they could get hurt way down the path. Even with this it would have a huge impact on our environment, which I have always been concerned about.

5:54 Yeah, no, and that's great. And while you're getting your PowerPoint loaded up there, I'll just give a touch of background. This is Cherry Gillespie that came over from Australia and put this on. His main thing that he does is he works with municipalities. He's from Australia but he works all over the world, teaching them how to compost all the waste that they generate—a lot of it being food scraps and food waste. So a lot of what Jim's going to show you here is if you make a connection with your local school or your local hospital or local grocery store, you could potentially compost a lot of their food scraps instead of having that go into the public landfill. Because, you know, that's a stupid thing to put in a landfill—something that is easy to compost.

6:41 Yeah, take it away Jim. All right. I'm going to talk to you about kind of my journey since attending that event. A function of our soils in composting can get us there, or at least moves in the right direction, because all we're really doing is feeding our microbes. That's what composting is about—getting the right community and feeding them, keeping them fed, and letting them do their job.

7:12 I will refer to a couple other resources. I am not the expert. I'm really pretty green on this, but I do have a thirst for knowledge and understanding how we can adopt this and really interested in how we get these things. A lot of these things are not new. They've been going on for thousands of years. It's maybe new to us in the United States because, you know, we're really only goes into doing agriculture the way we do it here. And there were people doing it way better than us probably before that. It's just rediscovery of some of those things. So Jerry Gillespie, of course, we've—he's got a website that I'm sure the link will be available to you. Also, the Johnson Sue, which is the information from Dr. Johnson, is you've heard mentioned. And they discussed that at length last week—great composting method. I've got some pictures of that here in the presentation. I did some of that this year. And then I have taken Dr. Elaine's Soil Food Web School. Terrific information. I mean, if it's surprising if you're at this webinar today, you probably know a lot more than you think you do about how soils work and how nutrients work with the plant in the soil and how all that comes together. But she really does a great job of driving that home and getting you to believe in the system because they've shown that it works.

8:59 You know, basically creating a really, really complex system that's happening biologically and putting it into a format that just about anybody can understand and learn. You know, kind of the functions of these critters that are in the soil. You aren't going to learn Latin names and all. It's just groups and families and functions, and it's really not that hard to do once you get a handle on it and set your mind to it—that you want to learn.

9:31 And then another book that I read, actually a couple of years ago but now I've rediscovered it in my Kindle books, is 'Regenerative Growers Guide to Garden Amendments.' And this is really—it's kind of a gardening book but it shows it really takes the Korean natural farming methods and makes them accessible. The methods really focus on using your local biology and how to collect it and how to grow it and then how to apply it and get it onto the land.

10:06 When I left the workshop in Bladen, I came home and here we go. Right away I'm going to make fish hydrolysis. So I started saving all the fish guts from the cleaning station here in chamber. We've got a great sport fishery. There's, you know, 55-gallon drums of fish cleanings every day in the summer during the peak fishing season. And so I was collecting that and freezing them. And there on the left is one of my fish hydrolysis attempts. It went fairly well. Also, I started a worm bin vermicomposting. And Jerry is one of the world's experts on that. He didn't talk about that a lot at the event, but we've had a lot of email communication as a result of that event. And he strongly encourages people to get a worm bin going—at least, you know, cycle your own kitchen waste, if not take that even further and scale it. Vermicompost is one of the most valuable soil amendments that we can use, and the reasons are because of what's in it and what the process that material has been through.

11:23 Jerry Gillespie and Christine Jones were encouraging us to adopt a method of composting called the SPICE method: static pile inoculant compost extract. So that is referring to the inoculant that you spray on the pile as you build it. And this is my brother—when I got home he said let's do this, let's build a pile. So we had manure in the cattle feed lot just right there in the background. This is an old silage pit that we used to make silage and feed cattle in the wintertime. It worked great for this, just layering in materials. You'd put in a scoop of manure and then layer in some oats and peas straw from the year before from a cover crop we had.

12:24 And as he was layering, I was spraying with the compost inoculant, which we'll discuss a little bit. I won't go into detail how it's made, but those recipes are all from Jerry Gillespie's documents that we'll provide for you. Once we layered all the piles, it kind of started mixing them and just making sure we had a good thorough mix and that the inoculant was throughout the pile. There's some footage of that in the background. You can see the oats and peas stacks. My brother still uses the Heston stacker, and that's a great way to have some materials on hand.

13:14 So that pile started heating up right away. I was really impressed with it. But the next thing after mixing and layering is to cover the pile with a large plastic sheet—just a silage cover type sheet. And this is different than what you would learn in most composting methods, you know, keeping everything aerobic, meaning access to plenty of oxygen. And there's good reasons for that. But this particular method you are actually targeting what our term facultative microbes, and those are microbes that can thrive in both aerobic and anaerobic conditions. So we're specifically going after, and the inoculant is kind of geared for the same thing, to make sure that that class of microbes is really doing the bulk of the work in the pile.

14:22 And as a result, you end up with a compost that has that microbial community, but even more importantly, it has what are termed biostimulants, which are chemical signalers to the biological community that kind of trigger this quorum sensing concept. When there's enough of us, we'll do our thing. It's go time when there's enough of us to do our thing. And there's a lot of beneficial microbes that we aren't seeing the benefits from because they never find any buddies. There's never enough of them there to trigger the quorum sensing activity. So these biostimulants are supposedly in this compost material. It's not so much the microbes—it's these biostimulants that we're after. So that's a little bit different. As a byproduct, you're getting plenty of biology because I've tested it, and we'll go through that.

15:29 Just another shot of the pile. There are some construction considerations. You'd like to leave a kind of a hollow area in the top so that the water collects and then kind of recirculates in there. As it evaporates, it kind of cycles back through. And with this pile, this is our first attempt at making use out of it. I took a tote and cut the lid out and I just took a scoop of that compost. You can see it's pretty well broken down. This is about—well, this is actually the following year, so that had sat all winter. We built the pile in July, I let it sit all winter, and then made some applications the following spring.

16:13 Just kind of using what's on the farm—that was, I believe, an old Fanning mill screen that worked pretty good to keep the pre-filter out of the tank so we didn't plug up the hole in the bottom. Right off the bat, I just flooded it with some water and let that soak for a little bit. And that's kind of what the extract method is with this SPICE compost: you really don't want to aerate it because then you're altering that microbial community back to aerobic microbes, and you really want those facultative microbes. So you want those biostimulants, which apparently come out pretty easily with a water extraction.

17:06 I think if I had this to do over again, which we will do, I won't use nearly as much compost and do a little more just light stirring with a paddle of some sort, and then collect the extract and put that right into a sprayer. This is my makeshift filtering. I was pretty proud of this actually.

17:33 So the water was coming out of there nicely, the extract right through an old burlap sack and I think that was a coffee bag, coffee bean bag, and then putting it into another container which is pretty well filtered and didn't cause us any problems as far as plugging up, and that it's diluted. I did use about at the time we had a 500 gallon sprayer and I was trying to use about five gallons per 500 gallons of water.

18:12 Since then, my brother-in-law had this sitting back in the storage shed and it was still in pretty good shape and he said yeah you can use that, so I brought this to the farm and this is now our dedicated biological amendment applicator.

18:31 I did mention that I went to Elaine or I'm taking Elaine Ingram's class. I'm about better than halfway through actually. I've taken all the class work, I've taken all the microscope work and now it's more application and the final project. You actually do and measure and evaluate the effects of what you made in your compost, get it out on the land through an extract and then be able to document the results through a biological analysis.

19:08 They teach the aerated compost extraction that most people are familiar with. I threw this in just because I wanted people to see that you can do a good extraction with just air and you don't have to have a twenty, thirty thousand dollar extraction. I mean, that helps to scale and get things going, and if you have a big operation where you need to cover a lot of acres, but even something as simple as this can give you a good quality compost extract. That's a hot tub blower and plumbed it through the bottom of this V-bottom tank and that's my extraction going on. This is how they teach it in the Soil Food Web School, so that's fully aerobic and you let that run for 20 minutes. Then you can see you let it sit and settle and the things that float go to the top and the things that sink go to the bottom, a lot of sand and rocks, and what's left over goes to the bottom, but then you can take a pretty nice liquid out of the side.

20:34 That's probably the typical thing. Well, I built this because I wanted not only something for my own use around the yard but I wanted to see if I could design something that I could scale up. So where I went from that then is to a 500 gallon tank. I was able to use a similar type pump. These are cheap, you know, 150, 200 bucks and plumbed it with PVC and I think I've got a little video here that kind of follows how that works.

21:05 This is actually making an extract with some compost, about two five gallon buckets of compost in this 500 gallon tank. You see it does a heck of a job. It really does a wonderful job knocking the microbes off the compost. I gotta give a fellow credit for showing me this, Jim Williams from St. Charles, South Dakota, has been doing this for close to eight or ten years now and he's been through all the experimentation. I was able to see his operation at his farm and took what I learned from him to build my own extraction.

21:56 We've got some work to do. This did not drain as well as I expected to get the compost back out of here. I think what I need to do is just not have so many 90 degree corners and it would flow pretty easily to empty it. You have to clean everything out once you use it and just don't let things dry because that will instantly cause those microbes to go to work and start making a mess of stuff. They'll leave glues.

22:27 This is another picture then, pulling out of the side, that kind of went from the tank back to the sprayer tank, back to the extraction, and that had bubbled for 45 minutes or so. There again, we let it settle and then pulled out of the middle of the tank so the compost is settled at the bottom and all the floating stuff is on top. You don't want to of course run all the floating stuff into your tank and I do have an inline filter on that that catches anything that does go through. Really having not a lot of problems at all on the sprayer. I did do some modification to it. Again, lessons from Jim Williams, he said you know, get all your filtering done before you get it in that tank in the sprayer and then don't do any.

23:21 Filtering at your nozzles or anything like that because it you just blow everything through. So I use the biggest nozzles I could get my hands on. I believe there's one every 40 inches, so we actually remove some nozzles and then use these big wide 80 degree fan nozzle or even more. I think they're 120 degree fans. I've got a video of that coming up. And that eliminates a lot of the problems in the field so you're not constantly having to get off the tractor and go clean. Now I mean I did a little of that but not nearly as when I did it when I first started, trying to go through little nozzles.

23:59 This was applying on soybeans last summer compost extract and the sun was just nice and I took a short little video hopefully it'll play here. And you know getting a nice, I'm getting about 20 gallons an acre down, 10 gallons of compost, 500 gallons of water. And like that's good. Now I'd like to get this into the furrow. You know we did get some products into the furrow with beans and the corn but on small greens I want and we're working on trying to get that in with our small greens as well. I really think that that's going to be the way to get the best results is get it into the furrow with the seed and then that seed is establishing that relationship right from the get-go.

25:02 I did test that static pile compost and this is from B Crop. Of course you maybe heard about Bee Crop. They can do a biological analysis. This is not what you would get from Elaine's class. This is more directed towards identification of the actual microbes and you get an idea of the fungi and bacteria. I don't know that that's really the most valuable information to me. I kind of do like looking at these numbers at the bottom that indicate you know that you have good diversity. That was impressive to me and the functionality isn't too bad so it's a really diverse compost and it's going to provide the function and you can read through those reports and you know 75 of them are cycling nitrogen, you know all those things.

25:58 This is a minimum of what is taught by Dr. Elaine's soil food web of what she has termed and actually trademarked the term biologically complete compost. And you want to have certain levels within that compost including bacteria, fungi, protozoa and nematodes and all of those in there. Actinobacteria to certain levels are okay. These, this is the whole food chain basically of smaller organisms that you need to have working in your soil and we're really trying to re-establish these at levels that can allow them to do that. Of course every situation is different, every soil is different and into what they're going into, you really got to watch the chemistry. If you put this in with a whole bunch of fertilizer they aren't going to do what they are capable of doing.

27:12 So it's really a balance of trying to figure out okay how much of risk can I take here. I want to try this, I want to learn it, I want to back off on how much fertilizer I need. But really if we get these microbes in there with the seed with plenty of food they have a chance and then maybe we get our fertilizer on a little bit later if we can test for that, you know whether it's a sap test or some of these newer in-season fertility applications. As well as every time you go out there and do anything with a chemical come back in with the compost and with the foliar and reestablish that population back on the plant and over time it's expected that you'll need less and less of the chemistry and more and more of the biology and hopefully increase yields as well.

28:10 Here's some more of the composting that I've done in the backyard at my house in Chamberlain. This is the Johnson Sioux on the right and maybe more of the static pile method on the left but I kind of built them about the same time in the spring. And unfortunately it was really hot, dry summer and both pretty well dried out which it just became tough to get them, keep them hydrated. I tried wrapping them and things and but they did make really good compost. You know looking at it through the microscope now, I said you know I took some of this this fall and took it in and it looked really good. The Johnson Sioux pile actually had a layer that kind of was just, it didn't really compost, it just kind of made a gooey anaerobic layer about a third of the way down but everything under that was really really nice and composted.

29:13 Well, so I'm not exactly sure if that's the ideal result, but I was actually pretty happy with it for not putting a whole lot of effort into these two piles. This was the Johnson Sue and you like to see this. I did spray a little bit of the foundational fungi from Elevate egg onto this pile and sure enough, you know, they're there when you can see them and they'll pop up overnight and be gone the next day. It's just kind of really interesting.

29:48 Just some pictures of more the thermophilic composting method that Elaine teaches and others. Zach Wright teaches this method as well. It's a little more labor—you got to pay attention to your temperatures and turn it when it needs it. It's a turning pile to keep it aerated, but I thought this was really pretty interesting. I started the pile on June 18th, and 40 days later it had reduced to about two-thirds and was actually pretty good compost at that point.

30:34 We started a second pile. This is a second pile where I used that static pile compost from the farm, and I use that as the starter or the nitrogen component of this pile on the left, and also some fresh cut alfalfa. This pile really took off. I probably didn't have enough high carbon. I could have probably used a little bit more old dry hay or leaves or something in there, but in three days it went to that. So these microbes have some power, and I've learned so much by watching this and understanding how nutrients flow and this carbon and nitrogen thing is real. It makes a difference. You get the balance rate that the microbes want and they do their job.

31:41 And I think that's really what we're trying to do with cover crops as well—is layering those materials in carbon and nitrogen that allow the microbes to feed and do their job and it'll make soil. Why can't this alfalfa in this—you don't have everything it needs to do that out in the field? It happens just great right here. And then 27 days later, I'm sorry I got a tickle in my throat talking too much. I was pretty happy with that in the short amount of time, and it wasn't long after that we had some freezing weather so I kind of covered the pile and tried to protect it. I did bring some small batch indoors and this was a picture I took two days ago. So that's ready to go, ready for use. Looks good under the microscope. This is one of my makeshift ways of just kind of storing the pile. It'll freeze, but it'll all come back to life in the spring with moisture. You don't want it to saturate, but you do want to kind of keep it from drying out, inject it thermally somehow. The other thing I've done is put some in a tote sack—a seed, actually I'm using a green cover seed tote bag. That works great for storing compost. Zach Wright suggested that as well. You know, poke some holes in the bottom of it so it can breathe a little bit and you can winter compost that way.

33:26 And I like to test the compost and do a couple of experiments. This is like in February a year ago. We don't get a whole lot of sunlight in my basement, but just enough to things to go. You know, plants like this stuff and it helps verify to me that I'm not doing anything bad. Germination is really quite excellent. That's corn in the middle with I think there was actually some soybeans in there, but this is what if you pull that up, look at how the root structure is just throughout the whole pile. It's unbelievable, and I'm sure you have seen this where you spilled grain in the yard and it creates kind of almost a turf. And if you dig up that stuff, the root structure is just massive, and I think that's just look how that could aerate our soils if we could get that going on.

34:26 A couple more pictures of the rise of phage cycle, which of course Dr. James White has been talking about. It just blows my mind every time I listen to him. Christine Jones as well talks about this. Is how you see if it's working—is pull up a plant, look at the root and see if you have that dreadlock appearance. And I was pretty tickled to see this in corn, and this is from my garden, which was an old sandbox when the kids all grew up. We don't need the sandbox anymore, so I just started throwing some compost and spraying whatever I planted. And I'm not busting the bin in my garden, but I really this.

35:10 It is almost more thrilling to me to see that than having to deal with all that garden produce, but really happy with it. So this is my brother who puts up with me and all my experiments, and you know he's the one making a living doing this and he allows me to go out there and play and try these things, but we're trying to learn stuff and we're seeing some results. He's not as skeptical as he once was. You know I'll come up with something that'll throw us off I'm sure, but when you can see that in your soil and put a spade in there and you just—it really warms the heart and you know you're on the right track.

35:55 Around my wife even is not so angry about all my vermis, vermicompost and fish hydrolyzate so it's sitting around in the garage or in the basement—actually one batch that was probably the best batch I made, hooked it up to the event—but she puts up with it when you can spray the plants and the landscape and you know it's working.

36:25 I think that's what I have. I don't know anything Keith, but that was a great gym and just pulled the claim or dreamcover is not recommending that you make fish hydrolyzate in your wife's bathroom. It's just so we're clear on this—we'll, it's my bathroom but it's her house.

36:48 Yeah, that could get out of hand. One of the things that first strikes me and we've got some great questions that we're going to jump into here, but Jim, one of the things that strikes me is to my count you talked about four different things at least. You did Johnson Sue, you did the spice compost like you know Dr. Jones and Jerry Gillespie showed us, you're doing the thermophilic turn deal, and then you're also doing the fish hydrolyzate, and I mean we could spend a whole session on just each one of those. But I really like the fact that you are demonstrating that there's more than one way to get to the same end result. So don't get hung up on you have to do it this way, you have to use this material to get your compost. Nature has a way of breaking all that down and getting you to the same point with different methods. And so I would think that you would agree that there isn't necessarily a right or a wrong method. There's going to be different ones that are going to be better for different people, depends on their context.

37:52 What attracted me about the spice compost was it didn't require a lot of work. You take you know four or five hours one day and build it and you walk away, a year later you have it. Okay, I don't have to think too hard to do that if I get my inoculant right, and that really is and it produces a stable product as well that you use. So that was attractive. The Johnson Sue is kind of along those lines as well in my mind.

38:33 And so let's jump into the questions because there are a number of questions about the spice compost and folks, we don't have time to completely describe the whole process. So the links that we provided in the chat and these will all be emailed out to you as well, so don't worry about if you don't get them all copied. There's the whole video recording of what Jim and I went to when Dr. Jones is here in Bladen. It's got recipe sheets, it's got step by steps, and so it's got all that information so you can go back later and look at that.

39:07 We've got several questions here. Jeremy's got a couple of questions Jim about that spice compost method. He's asking is it a hot compost, which means does it heat up, and then are you adding some inoculant to it? Yes, as we build it I'm spraying inoculant and I'm trying to remember the ratio. It was like one liter per ton. It seems to me that that's kind of what was recognized and it's on that recipe sheet that's listed here. Yeah, you have to go through the process of making it. So it involves a lactobacillus bay serum, which you do—it takes about five to seven days to make that—and then you put it through a further ferment. So you need a fermentation vat of some sort to make the actual inoculant, and in that you're putting in some seawater and kelp, you know, different things that diversify that, and then that's what you spray on this compost pile. Yes, it will heat up, and it stays hot for quite a while. In fact, that same pile is still hot. It's still hot way down. I mean, there's some snow melt where it's breathing or it's kind of kept some area that's not frozen even in this twenty below winter we're seeing. So it is pretty amazing, and we've kept adding to that pile, and it's also the method that you would use to compost dead animals or feathers or anything. You throw anything in that pile—I mean, you don't want to put anything in that's highly chemically altered or you know, if you know something has got a lot of medications in it or you know.

46:27 Well now and I don't want to open up a can of fish as it were here with your hydraulicate but I know you mentioned earlier when we were talking that you notice that the hydrolysis say process worked much better at a constant temperature but that's a little bit of a different deal can you just just in a couple minutes explain what that hydrolyzate process is?

46:47 Yeah and I've got as many questions as anybody about it I took Jerry's methods and went home and tried it and by golly the very first batch worked out great it didn't have a it didn't have a totally offensive odor put it down and it was kind of a mild summer I did it in the shade on the north side of the garage you know so it was seeing some flex fluctuation in temperature but it it came out with a pretty nice product.

47:15 There's all kinds of information on how to make fish hydrolyset on the internet and I don't know what what's what's good and what isn't. You know you're really after amino acids and base proteins when you're making any sort of hydrolicit from from anything. So that's what you get out of it.

47:38 Now I've had some go bad as well and I I tried to salvage it and it's like you know dealing an assesspool you know that it's bad it's it's overwhelming I I won't go into it but the good stuff is really kind of kind of sweet it's tolerable or at least I think it's good stuff it it's not an offensive odor it's got a nice orange color to it.

48:06 Work better with consistent temperatures like I said. You know Elaine teaches in her class fish hydrolicit is nothing more than chopping up fish and and mixing it with water and using it. There's no fermentation at all and there's other fish products out there that don't go through fermentation now there's there's other fish products that have been through a heat cycle and and different things and I I don't know if I'd be so fond of using those.

48:38 Yeah and and so folks you know what what Jim is really trying to demonstrate here is that you know you can buy all these products you can buy a Johnson sue you can buy all these if you want to but you can also make them it's it's not rocket science to do and so he's you know been demonstrating and proving that you can do this and hydrolyzate typically is using some sort of a protein some people do it with pigs some people do it with you know fish you know you're using fish gets you can use a number of different things and so that's a whole other deal so get online search for that but that's another option but it's a completely different end product than what we're talking about with these compost extracts either from Johnson Sue from the spice method or or the thermophilic you know turnpile the hydrolysis is an excellent food source.

49:32 Yes and it's going to happen in your sprayer when you're putting biology out there so yeah I've heard it you know you're sending you're sending your workers off to work with a lunch bucket. Yeah so it's it's not a substitute for those it's it's an addition to it so it ramps it up so yeah I like that a lot.

49:50 Lots of other questions here uh someone is asking here about water Rhonda's asking about water are you using uh Rural Water do you have to if you're on real water and it's got any chlorine in it how how much of a concern is it with the water source that you're using for wetting your compost?

50:06 Good question and I I am concerned about it I mean there's some commercial products you can buy that are relatively cheap that you can add to water to make sure that they don't have any chlorine chlorine and chloramine are the two things you want to worry about a lane teaches that all you have to do is add a little humic acid and it'll take care of any issues if you start just seeing a tint of color to your water you're probably that's probably enough.

50:34 And and humic acid can come right out of your worm bin it's the same thing that's what you're making with compost is humix. So that's how you can get your own humic acid as well you don't necessarily have to buy that.

50:47 The other thing you can do is just bubble that water with the air and and give it you know half an hour 45 minutes but before you add the compost before you add anything to it and that should bubble that away.

51:02 And then you know kind of watch where your water is coming from uh I sent our water in on our farm that is coming it's coming from the Missouri River actually through a through a big pipeline uh that they you know is where so it's pretty good water yeah because we have a lot of chlorine in it yeah yeah but I still you know go through the steps and make sure you hate to have that be the reason.

51:25 Uh so Landon has a question about you know you talked about you need to have that depression in the top of your spice pile you know to let water collect and stuff he's asking do you need a hole in the top of the plastic to let water in why don't you just explain that a little bit more because the the water is just cycling from the inside it's not coming from the outside it's just kind of daily condensation that collects above that air space.

51:50 And then it'll drip back down in and it just kind of recirculates to the pile. So if you had your moisture fairly consistent throughout the pile when you start, you shouldn't have to add much more. It just kind of recycles through. So really, and in a lot of ways, this is less labor intensive and less maintenance than Johnson too because you have to keep that wetted all the time because it's breathing. All of that moisture is transpiring into the air, where this is recycling the water because it's kind of a sealed and they're kind of trapping that in there on purpose. And it's a little more efficient as far as output, so not so much as getting gassed off as CO2. It's kind of staying in there and the yield is a little better compared to an aerobic composting method.

52:46 Yeah, and I remember from that workshop though, you know, because this is totally different than a lot of things we've been taught. You know, anaerobic is bad, and I remember them saying anaerobic is not bad if you have the right organisms in there to begin with. What's bad is if it starts out as aerobic and then goes anaerobic. But in this situation, we're starting anaerobic, we're adding the right organisms through that inoculant, and that's what makes it work, right? Yeah, and like I saw that with, you know, I used some of that in and then I used it for a thermophilic. So it kind of went through that anaerobic then the aerobic, and all of it kind of does look the same actually at the end of the day once it's aerobic again.

53:33 Now I just spurred a thought when you mentioned, you know, anaerobic being bad. But most from what I understand, most of the nitrogen fixing community is anaerobic, and that's, you know, you think of rhizobium. They build that shell that keeps the oxygen out because nitrogen fixing can't happen in the presence of oxygen. So that's, you know, very natural for anaerobic processes. Think of a cow's rumen, and that's the ultimate composter right there. That's all anaerobic. And what's happening in a worm, that's anaerobic. Yeah, it's the facultative microbes that go through that are really the beneficial guys and the ones we're trying to get that quorum sensing response from.

54:29 Yeah, that's great. So we've got a question all the way from Alaska here. Bryce is asking about the ratio of compost to water. You know, so when you run your extractor, what is the, how much compost do you put in versus how many gallons of water? And then how many gallons of that extract do you try to apply to your field? And I'm sure it makes a difference if you're doing foliar or if you're going in burrow. This is it's a frustrating. I've been through all this. I want to know exactly how much do I need, you know, because it'll drive you nuts trying to figure out. Well, I want to make sure it's just right.

55:06 Every compost is different, as long as it has the biological, you can't go wrong. Put it that way. You often hear one pound of compost, one to two pounds of compost per acre. Less as you get healthier. But to start out, I've heard as high as two pounds per acre. So you kind of have to work backwards. How many acres can I spray with a load on my sprayer, however big it is? And how much water is that going to take? And how many acres am I going to cover? So how much compost do I need? And how much of this basically kind of a concentrate do I need to get in the sprayer and then top it off with water to cover what I want to cover? That's how I think about it, you know. If you start kind of just thinking a pound to two pounds, we can cover about 40 acres on our with our sprayer. Well, not quite. But 800 gallon sprayer, and I try to get it full when I go because you're making the pass. You don't want to go out with half a sprayer. And I think that's what Dr. Johnson recommends with Johnson Sue is about two pounds of compost per acre, and whether you're putting that on with 10 gallons or 20 gallons or whatever you're doing is better. Yeah, that's kind of up to your equipment. Some people put it on through pivots, and so then at that point, you know, it's very diluted. So lots of different ways of getting there and getting that and getting it in the furrow. And also, one or two foliar applications on the plant is what is suggested, and more if you can, but you know, yeah, you don't have so much time and so many acres.

56:55 Larry's asking, have you ever added biochar to your compost to get started? Do you see any value in that? Have you any experiences with biochar? The only thing I've done is I emptied the ashes out of our backyard campfire and trying to keep it from turning into ash. It shouldn't be even ashes, you know. I kind of try to keep that nice black coal or charcoal-like material, and I've thrown that in there. Won't hurt a thing. Biochar.

57:24 It seems as though it's just more carbon. It's really stable carbon. It doesn't break down very quickly. It kind of creates a place for minerals and nutrients to cling to or chelate, so it can hold on to some things, biology included. But I don't think it's a bad thing, but I wouldn't base my whole agronomy on biochar from what I've seen so far. I mean there might be some other experiences out there. I'm not real knowledgeable on it. I'm fascinated by it and I know there's work being done and maybe there's more to it than I've picked up on, but it's basically stable carbon.

58:12 A number of questions revolving around earthworms, and of course we all know that earthworms can be a big part of the Johnson suit composting method. Once it gets through its heating phase, you're not really adding any worms or anything in this anaerobic environment, is that correct? Right, wait till it cools down, and if it's outside and on the ground, they actually will find it.

58:37 So when you pull that tarp off before you get ready to use it, you have worms in there that just naturally found it? Yeah, well I had mine on a wood pallet because I wanted to be able to move it or whatever, but I know people have had it on the ground. You know, some of the natural worms will find it. Different creatures, not just worms, but there's all kinds of organisms that will use it for habitat and create more experience.

59:09 Do you think after it really got through its hot cycle, you could pull that tarp back and see different worms and then turn it back up again? Sure. Mine got a little dry. I'm going to try it again and pay a little more attention to it, but it really was kind of a situation where I don't think I had quite the right balance of coverings and air and water. It got tremendously hot last time too, so it's just hard to keep up.

59:44 Well, I know we're up against our hour here, but if you're okay, we'll maybe take a few more questions. You still have some good questions. Have several around the whole concept of seed treatments. So number one, are you still using treated seed when you plant your corn and beans on your operation? And then number two, if you're using any type of fungicide seed treatments, is that hurting the fungal populations of what you're putting either as a seed treatment yourself on the seed or with what you're making or the infurrow application?

1:00:19 You know, I don't have the science. There's been science done on it at the ARs lab in Brookings. Actually, Michael Layman did some work with fungicides and seed treatments, and he didn't see a very significant negative effect. However, it is a fungicide, and that's kind of a wishy-washy answer, I know. But I'm going to plant some corn on a test plot this year. I found some that was non-treated, and just because I want to try that, I want to try to do a full biological approach with no chemicals. We'll see how it goes. Last year the weeds got me. I mean, they beat me last year, but we're going to try it again this year.

1:01:03 You know, these are the problems we have to work through. And there's guys doing it that have been very successful doing it. And as the system matures and the biological community is healthier and more diverse, those weed problems and some of the nutritional things become less and less of an issue. We're still working through that. We're very much transitional. We don't have this figured out by any means. It's just going to take a lot of experimenting and willingness to try and willing to fail, actually, to go out there and just see how far you can go.

1:01:41 Have you used your, whether it be the Johnson Sue or the spice extract, have you treated your seeds with it in addition to trying to do infurrow and the foliar feed as well? I'm using the vermicompost primarily for that. So you're using the vermicompost. Yeah, I'll make an aerated extraction from the vermicompost, and then as we're filling the drill or whatever we're doing, in some cases I've used an old mineral tub and dumped the seed in and sprayed it, and then I've actually thrown in some kelp right with that, mixing in kelp. You know, raw kelp or the stuff that you can buy in a bag, just to help fill in some of the space and get all that mixed together. I don't want to overly wet it. If you're using kelp, I found that out because that can kind of keep your kelp down. But yes, spraying the seed, I think, is the best thing we can do. And then like I said, we're going to try to get more and more of this into the furrow, and I'm going to use some elevated egg stuff as well, you know, mixing our biology with some of those foods, which brings another level of microbial response to those foods.

1:03:05 That everything is just in as good a condition as we can have it, just from the get-go with the seed. Yeah, yeah, and then hopefully we don't need to use nutritional starters as much. I'm going to use more of a biological starter, and then if it appears we have some nutritional issues of some sort, we can always apply that with a foliar if we need to.

1:03:33 So Jetta is asking, have you seen anybody using either this or maybe Johnson Sue extract on pastures, on perennial grasses? Have you done any of that? Do you are you aware of people doing that, and what kind of increase in production are they seeing on that?

1:03:53 It works in anything from what they teach in the soil food web school. That once you get the right biology in the soil, your plants are going to respond to that. Some of the issues with hayland or compaction and the grazing, there's so many management things that come into play. In anything, there's management issues that probably are going to have a bigger impact, you know, that you have to be thinking about. That's what we used to do, you know. But the microbe community starts building that soil aggregation in the airspace, and they start giving them a chance to do what they do, which is to build soil aggregates. And if we're destroying that all the time, it just doesn't happen. We gotta allow them that opportunity as often as we can.

1:04:53 One of the microbes I've just recently learned this is that the lactobacillus stuff is really good at creating those aggregates. So that's why that's often the basis of the Korean farming natural method is getting that particular microbe doing that work early on.

1:05:18 Well, I think I'm going to kind of wrap it up. We're going to bring this thing in for our landing here. We've got we I think we can continue the discussion for quite some time. Really grateful for everybody that jumped on and participated, asked questions. Again, we will send out all of these links. We'll send out the questions that people asked here. We appreciate everybody jumping in and joining. Next week, we're going to have David Olson on. Jim, you mentioned some of the foundational fungi products that we sell through Elevate AG. Well, those are being made by David Olson, and so he's going to talk a little bit more about that. And this is going to be more of a product that you can purchase that is going to be very high in the fungal component because that's the hardest thing to do, yeah, with the biology. So make sure you join us for that. We'd love to have you back for that.

1:06:16 And before we let everybody go, I do want to just mention one more thing about Jim that I think is really fascinating, very exciting to me. He has a book that's going to be published here very soon, and it's not necessarily a book about composting, but it's a book about really regenerating God's creation, both the soil as well as the soul. Jim, you sent that to me, gosh, I don't know, six, nine months ago to read, and I just loved it. I said why aren't you publishing this? And so now you are. So tell us a little bit, you know, just in the next two minutes, tell us about Farmers of Light.

1:06:55 It just was on my heart. I'd been to all these conferences and listening to all these discussions about soil health, and I could just see this comparison of the soil and how these principles kind of align. And I just started collecting my thoughts. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and think, oh yeah, I could, you know. So I just started writing and collecting, and pretty soon I had quite a bit of content put together. And then I thought I could actually organize that a little bit into maybe some readable book form. And of course I sent it to a few folks like yourself that encouraged me. Thank you for that. It is going to be published, from what I understand. I've seen the first draft, and then we're going to make some corrections and fix some things. But it should be out soon. I'm so excited about it.

1:07:51 So folks, when that comes out, we'll make sure we'll be letting people know where they can order that and how they can get that. But it's going to be a great personal devotional book, a great study connecting our souls to the soil. So I think you'll enjoy it. Jim, thank you so much. We really appreciate it. And folks, if you missed any of this, we will have the recording on our YouTube channel relatively soon. If you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel, please do that. And then anytime we post something new, you'll get an alert for that. So thanks everybody for joining us. Come back next week when we'll be talking with David Olson. Thank you. Thanks, Jim.