How to Make Compost Inoculant: A Working Guide to Building Soil Biology

0:12 It's lovely to be here and thank you to all of you for the invitation, for Christine for organizing this. This is a first tour per se that Christine and I have done together. We've known each other for a long time, but Christine with the progressions that she's made, with what she's been talking to you about it, and so autoinducers, the composting process that we'll be talking about. As Christine said, it's a fermentation, it ends with a fermentation process, and it's really important that you hang on to that because that's where the autoinducers are going to come from. You're going to penultimately need that.

0:52 Having said that, the general role of this today is to get you to physically run through this so by the time we get to the end of the process after lunch of going through these steps, you'll probably be really sick of it but you should know it. What we're going to do after you've had some lunch is go over to the area out there and we're going to give you a table each. I'm going to give you a number each, so you'll be working in six groups of about seven or eight, and you'll actually put the entire thing together. So at the end of it, you'll have some extended inoculant at the end of that process.

1:39 But first, before we do that, I just thought I'd run through how I came to get into this composting process. It's fairly important for you to know that I think in all of our lives, many times we build on the expertise of others and we take parts from all different areas of life, and sometimes we have a little bit of an ingenious idea that can actually work far better than we had previously. But the important thing is to accept the knowledge that's presented to you and sort of build upon it. My area of expertise here is not like yours. My area of expertise is not agriculture. My area of interest for the last 35 years has been waste generally, and Waste Acres magazine has just agreed to publish a book I've written, which will come out hopefully in November this year, so keep your eyes out. The subject, the title of the book is 'The Waste Between Our Ears.' It's trying to point out that waste is a concept, that it's something that we invent.

2:51 If you take an empty Coca-Cola bottle, most of your regulatory authorities, as ours will, will classify that product as waste. But how can it be waste? The only thing you've done is taken the silky brown contents out of it, and it's probably better for you empty than it is full in any case. But having said that, it can't possibly be waste. It's simply glass or a plastic product that needs a recycling system for. Having said that, I'll just touch upon the idea of language, and this is a true story so it's not an invented mind. To be a crass vulgar Australian male, one of my lovely daughters who is now 36 years old, when she was quite young, very seriously after her mother while I smoked cigarettes, and her mother said very seriously, 'Your daddy's addicted,' and she seemed to take that on board and sort of wandered off. And when I came home that night, she rushed up and threw her arms around my legs and said, 'Daddy, you're a'—the language is very important. Understanding what we're doing when we're talking about things is sort of fundamental to the entire issue.

4:10 And so what we're talking about today is, I think, when we started the recycling movement—and I've been in the zero waste movement for some time—you have a very

4:19 Large and powerful zero waste organization here in the United States that's based in California and various parts of the country. But there's also another very large group now based in Europe called Zero Waste Europe, and I think quite fortuitously it's actually populated by mainly young people, people under 40, which is really surprising but very encouraging for the future. At least we're going in slightly the right direction.

4:46 So the issue for me has always been organic material and getting people to understand that the job that you do is the most fundamental job for the entire planet. The production of food is the fundamental thing in any human economy. We don't exist without soil. Soil as our mother, that's where everything comes from. When you're the protectors of their great treasure, and so it's a very important and solid role.

5:17 We've had people in the economics area in the Australian economy tell me for many years that agriculture is only 12 to 15 percent of gross domestic product, and my response to that is oxygen's only 20 percent of the air you breathe, but you wouldn't want to do without it for too long. So what you do is fundamentally important.

5:35 So this is a bit of a story about how we might protect that, and I'll just go quickly through how I got to the situation of being involved in this. So the problem with broader populations is that there is an agricultural disconnect and they've forgotten where their food comes from. How often do you see people assuming that they walk into a supermarket and what's on the shelf just sort of magically appeared there? It's not that they're nasty or stupid, they just simply don't think about what the process has been involved, and the social influence of the farming family in Australia according to a Nuffield scholar has fallen from something like—and I don't know how you quantify political influence—but that political influence in Australia according to him has fallen from something like 15 percent in 1949, the year I was born, down to now about five percent or less.

6:29 So the importance of agriculture and the importance of soil, the more intense our agricultural processes and population become, becoming politically less relevant, which is a great tragedy I think. As I said, getting people to understand that the soil is your mother is the fundamental role that I see mine has been for the last 30 years. And so did we, how do we connect, reconnect the community with the food? And so what we were talking about is this project. This project is about, on its 16th, this t-shirts about its 16th birthday now, so it's been doing very well and it hasn't had to expand much either, which is a better.

7:04 So the opportunity was to actually engage the community in organic waste collection systems with the whole idea of having them directly contribute to soil houses as a social and political gesture. We have a thing in Australia called the Product Stewardship Act, which is generally used for recycling televisions and computers and general other toxic material, but its main focuses on environmental protection, and I would think that if the focus is environmental protection, then that piece of legislation more than anything else should be used to regulate the fact that organic material should go back into agriculture. You do have legislation in San Francisco, which is one of the first to pass a regulation to source separate organic material.

7:52 Scottish government followed in 2000 and January the first 2014 with a similar piece of legislation but unfortunately in most legislative areas so people don't follow up they don't push the rules and regulations so hopefully by what we're hoping to do with this these sorts of ideas around the world will actually get sufficient pressure to make that happen in a more political level.

8:13 An extinction we've got no idea what's happening below the soil. We know for example that a gentleman by the name of Francisco Sanchez Boyer you may have seen about three months ago produced a report it was just a literature search from around the world that looked at insect populations and they're falling quite dramatically and there was some one part of it mentioned an impasse of the Amazon they've lost in perhaps as much as 98% of their insect populations.

8:45 I know from where I live I live in a little town called Queanbeyan which is next to our national capital but Fire drive to walk which is straight West for two and a half hours if you drove along that road 20 years ago you'd have to stop twice to clean your windscreen you can drive from my home to Wagner now without having to stop at all you get nothing on your windscreen insect populations that's not of course there's not a great deal of science attached to that but insect populations are going to him befallen quite dramatically.

9:12 MD the UN confirms that with the extinctions that are happening all around the planet so protecting soil and protecting the essence of that soil and your role and I think is becoming incredibly important the whole point that we're we're trying to make with with the idea of composting all organic material and I think with decides that Christine drinks to this conversation and the and the work that you can potentially do in agriculture I think we can actually prove with these sorts of products that we make going to make here today where we always thought that organic waste only constituted a very tiny part of the waste stream.

9:50 And if you applied compost in say where I in this country where I live if you applied all of Sydney's compost at the rate recommended of 10 or 15 ton or 200 tons of the hectare you wouldn't even get to the blue mountains you wouldn't get very far at all but if you can use that same product in terms of litres per hectare as The Hague and here's our doing I'm sorry court Spector or courts per acre your charge you're changing the conversation altogether you can make something that can actually had that effect that we're all pursuing.

10:22 So we've used regulations to manage source separation as I said but how do we take that further what we were doing with city to soil was we gave people these little bags that they could use that's a it was originated cornstarch bag the interesting thing about this is you can put as some of you may know you can put this on your on your kitchen bench and because these bags breathe they allow air in around the material you don't give me odors so it means you don't have if you don't have odors in that bin you don't have odors in that bin and you don't have odors in the compost process.

10:55 So this this project actually proved very very successful when we first did their first trial in the area where I live in Queen bein and we were reward two million dollar government grant to do it over larger areas but we very quickly realized that to actually do that over a very large area we had three councils in this project that were quite close to us but one was this four and a half hours away so distances are not.

11:22 Dissimilar to what some of you have come to get here today and you would imagine if you were using a low loader to take a front-end loader, a bucket and a shredder and a toner and all sorts of things all that distance, you would very quickly get rid of two million dollars and not have very much left. So we had to find an alternate compost process and if you look at the what we decided to use eventually was a variation on Sir Albert Howard's indoor compost process, pages 48 and 49 of his book called 'The Agricultural Testament,' which some of you may have read, and also a combination of that and the work of a woman called Mae Bruce. Mae Bruce had a thing called a composting process called the quick return method and you can find it on a website called Journey to Forever.

12:08 And this, if you can't find any of the things that I mentioned, I've got cards up here. Just about all this stuff's on my website. If you have any questions from this time forward into the foreseeable future, please send me an email. I most certainly will answer any if there's anything I can answer. But the woman's name was Mae Bruce. She originally started making compost in the late twenties and when England was under siege during the Second World War, somebody made the point the other day that probably the people who ate her fruit and vege during the Second World War ate better than they ever did before or after. It was a really high quality product, a very simple process but a cupboard process.

12:54 So the composting process we're talking about is a cupboard system. You'll see later on today when we go out to the compost site we'll show Brian's got some material out there that you can actually use. There's a cover, it's the same sort of thing that you'd normally use if you use grain storage bags in a field. Indeed, there's a photograph coming up of a farmer in Victoria who's using that. This is a banana farmer in Mira Winnie and as you see the clothing style is not that different. We're new farmers in the paddocks, I'm in the field.

13:32 So what they've done there is this material is this product from their sheds, their produce sheds. The banana farmers are facing quite serious issues in Queensland at the moment. They have one disease called Panama disease, looking at this whole lot as a myriad different arguments you can say as to why it's there but one of the principal reasons got to be the overuse of chemical fertilizer. They have issues where in banana production you cut the top off your tree or you knock a tree down after it's produced and they used to simply leave the trees in a lot of areas between the rows because the soil was so biologically active it was pulled the tree back down into the ground in a very short space of time. But they found they had to put extra labor in by pulling them out because you couldn't get into work.

14:21 But in this process here as you can see they've taken all their organic materials and they put it about yay deep on the ground. They've sprayed it with inoculant and they've got their moisture level up above 40 percent. Has to be wet enough so that if you pick up a handful of it and give it a squeeze a few drops of water will come out of it. That's a very rough measure of 40 percent and you can go way beyond that if you need to. So this person is just applying the inoculum product which is what you're going to learn to make lettuce today. This is a dairy farm in Victoria. This is the older gentleman who owns a family, son who is got fortunate actually.

15:00 Because the young man's an engineer, when they found that they were having trouble though, what they're trying to do here was mix millet stubble with chicken manure. Millet of course is quite lengthy and stringy and it's hard to mix in. He was having trouble getting those mixtures going, so rather than be frustrated, trying to turn that stuff at the front end to get it wet enough in the end, he actually built his own wind turner.

15:29 That gave him the ability to, and you'll see also when we go out to look at Brown and Keys compost site, they've got a wondrous machine that could actually mix product for them really easily. And it's understanding that you've got to come up with a carbon and nitrogen ratio of 30 to 1 to 60 to 1 to get a good quality product. But these people, as you see, that's just silo bagged, split up one end. They're handy to use because they're secondhand. They'll be stabilized. They'll last for a very long time. You can use sheet plastic and you can use shrink wrap product from all sorts of different things. But these things are big and they're sort of suitable. The other thing that you can use that we've used quite extensively is growing cover. But a piece to cover the floor of this hall would be in Australia $800 worth. So you're dealing with a lot of money. But do, if you're going to do this process, try to use something that's going to last some time. And when you put the covers over your compost pile, put it down as tightly as you can. When wind will just flap the stuff to pieces, it'll flap anything to pieces in the longer term.

16:41 So the compost process, we set the compost pile up with a carbon to nitrogen ratio of anywhere between, associate 21, bits better start. Do you want to work your way up? When we first started making compost, so we had this idea of just the cupboard windrow because we were using a combination, as I said, of the indoor method and maybe Bruce's process. So a cupboard window, a plastic on, if it's an upturned V in that shape, as soon as it starts to respire to any level, as soon as it starts to pump moisture, the moisture will go up and hit the plastic. As we found, and of course it runs off. And as soon as it runs off, you've lost all your water. But if you put a little bum in the top, if you put a little dip in, McDonald's sort of shape, on the top of your compost pile, that's what happens. You'll find as the respiration level lifts the water, a great percentage of the water will hit that dip and simply come back into the pile.

17:41 That will save you in a compost process about 80 percent of the moisture you'd normally use in a compost process. The thing that you don't want to do is have to go out and constantly turn the stuff. And we'll get into more detail about the pros and cons of aerobic as opposed to this fermented process. If we did actually, and I have a very small document that came, they did a comparative analysis on anaerobic, that is to say an uncovered pile, and a covered pile. And in all stages, we took four liters out of each pile and dried them in an oven and sampled at all those different stages. And at all stages, the material made using this covered compost process was 20 to 25 percent more than the aerobic process. Well, one thing you need to get really clearly in your head: this composting was designed for the process of, apart from people who are doing it in agriculture, if it's a waste management techniques, it's about waste reduction.

18:44 They're trying to get the smallest amount of stuff so they can get it off the site as quickly as possible. So they get them most of the time if they're in the city they want their land back. So it's making as good a product as you should possibly can and getting it off the site. This is about you making a product that gives you the maximum return on the investment with a minimal amount of labour. This is about being as cheap and tight as you possibly can. This is about not using diesel if you can manage it and it's about not using more of your time. It's about fundamentally being as lazy as you possibly can about the compost process because quite frankly you're better things to do with your time.

19:20 This next slide is a bit disconcerting. This is our national emblem having a rest in a pile of compost. This design concept was actually taken from a piece of research done on the United States on goats relatively recently. Then we've had we've been in drought for a long long time and the New South Wales government recently changed the regulations into how many kangaroos you could shoot. People will all lots of people will try to justify shooting of kangaroos by saying well the number getting what we'll bloodborne there used to be. There's didn't in fact good research to say that there's not many numbers at all more they used to be. But unfortunately farmers are the only ones with good grass and a 2-meter fence our fence means nothing to a kangaroo, you know. It's just so they come in and they and then knocking back production in all sorts of areas. So there's a logic to if you're a farmer there's a logic to shooting them. But there's no logic to just leaving that amount of every single one of those things as a nutrient package which contains everything you need to be alive. They are very very valuable if you can recover that stuff in a compost process then it's it's it's really worthwhile for the farm.

20:32 So what we were trying to do with this process is demonstrate to farmers that you can put kangaroos into this process. Again thinking about you could actually have a process where you're using 80 percent less water than you normally do. But these things they're kangaroos themselves are actual packages of moisture as well. So my argument was if you can get a reasonably green product we ran into a pile with enough kangaroos in it and get a cover on it, even if you had to wet it a little bit to start with, if you put it on top of a hill you shouldn't have to touch it again. Don't go near it or another I'm saying this to Australian farmers of course don't go near it for another 12 months. And then when you do just take the cover off and leave it let nature do the distribution if you can. So it's as I said before it's about being this simple and lazy as you possibly kind of about the process. That this material here is pretty well hydrophobic. It's come from the local council area and it's far too dry. If the green and we can get it the better the better a product we can make. That little pile there's got 27 kangaroos in it. It's only 15 cubic yeah it's a material but a pack in there that temperature of 140 degrees will stayed at that level for weeks at a time. You know I'd ask you when you start using this process to think about temperature and I was saying to somebody earlier there where you got this this dip in the top. I mean another farmer from Victoria was saying about a foot below the top of that rounded dip he was finding that he was.

22:09 Getting lots of action. Marshes is a sort of gray and you'll see it on these piles of bronze got out there when you're digging a little bit on me you'll find areas that have dried out a little and they'll go gray. That generally can tell you that things are starting to dry out too much.

22:27 I've suggested to this farm and keep this in mind when you do this process that if you put that dip in the top it may be a little bit too deep. Just go back in with your skid steer loader without necessarily taking the covers off, just give it a bit of a tap on top to knock that dip down so it's more that sort of shape. It only has to be a big enough dip so that moisture accumulates. It doesn't have to be pronounced or it doesn't have to be sharp or pointy. It just needs to be there. That may solve that problem, but I'd be really interested in any notes you make about heat.

23:02 I should make that point too. There are needs and there are a couple of organic growers in the room. There are needs under your license requirements that will require you to actually turn the compost. The first stage in this compost process is fully aerobic. The first thing that nature does in any situation where it's trying to break something down as fully aerobic. So it uses oxygen to the maximum. But also to nature's principle objective with its whole existence cycle is to use death to create life. So everything that dies goes into the investment in the next round of life.

23:38 What we've done with this process, so going back to the first stage is aerobic and you put a cover on it. So you've restricted the oxygen in a pile to a certain extent. What will happen after that, despite the fact that these things aren't nailed, fixed or zipped to the ground, despite the fact that this isn't totally secure, you've limited the oxygen into the pile. What happens then is when the aerobes, when the first family of aerobic biology is consumed, everything they can, the pH will fall dramatically. It'll come down about 4.5. That will happen after you've immersed your temperatures of peat and the temperatures will start to fall as well.

24:16 But when that crash happens, when that pH comes down to 4.5, the whole power becomes facultative. Facultative things are an amazing function because what you've done, and I'll show I'll explain this as we do it later on today, we start with a broadest biological base that we possibly can. And what happens when we start with that aerobic, when it moves into the anaerobic phase, the fermentative phase, when it gets into that phase, you've got the absolute maximum that you can possibly have there to take advantage of what is in that mix.

24:51 I have absolutely no idea. I mean, you could study that for years to try to ascertain what exactly it is we're using, but we know after 10 or 12 years that we can do it consistently and we get the same sort of product out of it. So the first stage is aerobic, second stage is facultative. But what happens with a facultative process where you've got a very broad biological base, as one of those processes, one of those biological processes might produce methane, something else snaps it up because it's good food. If something else produces a hydrogen output or something else produces a sulphur output, all of those things are consumed.

25:28 We have measured gas outputs on this compost process and it's almost insignificant. So we've taught, we've done with this process is we have a composting system, especially on farm, if you are in a circumstance where you've.

29:31 Different council green muster biosolids green must. This is one of the most exciting one so I thought green washing coal washer e-waste done under the supervision of a woman called Dr. Sarah Beavis in from Australian National University, one of the big issues in New South Wales when they change the regulations about what's waste and what's not. As I said before, the Coca-Cola bottle becomes waste. The same legislation actually captured all things to do with coal washer waste.

30:01 They do a when we mined coal in Australia now they do a thing called walling. So once you're underground you cut from one side but you can't afford to put you used to have this process where when you emptied one hole you just filled it up with your excess or your waste but you can't do that with walling. So they actually have to put coal washer waste into landfill which means they pay $15 a ton. You know Sarah and I did this, we did a trial where we put ten percent in one of those really big windows we've turned we use cold washer waste and the idea was based on a gentleman by the name Harry Gold who had this hypothetical notion which was later proven to be fairly sound I think that coal deposition was actually caused by a biological process rather than compressed reefs but that's another conversation all together. But anyway given that given the coal is basically a is a organic product we figured we could break it down see we had a good composting process.

30:56 And yeah now I talked about polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons it gets to been anyway we found once we put the coal washer e-waste in there the nutrient transfer out of the washer a waste in the compost was quite phenomenal and we headed off and this goes to that some way toward the idea of change we headed up down to the coal company thinking war on a winner here we got a couple of million dollars research project out of this and the engineer said now since or I've got the problem solved or just pay the fines the depends are you working with green waste and fish sawdust on its own that was that was Australian native sawdust just you slips basically there was up to 18 years old it composted over a ten-month period. So you can compost with very very low levels of nitrogen using this method but it will take a long long time but it will produce a good quality product when you are in store.

31:46 So as I said before it saves water saves turning has high humus levels and a high cation exchange capacity which we won't get into right at the moment but this is Canadian fleabane which was born into Australia exactly for their process of filling filling up people's pillows and mattresses so they didn't employees but it got away this is was in a town called Tamura that's a standard round bale with that and I'm sorry I don't know the exact name but it's a webbing that was around the outside of those bales. The interesting thing about this process is that if you get it wet enough to start with no matter what temperature you get to you won't get a fire it's too wet to burn so in those round bales our objective here was to give this farmer his paddock back so in tomorrow some of the soils is a bit like this concrete floor it's it's not very forgiving.

32:40 The plants during the after rain will be no more than about an inch apart there unfortunately just about the exact eye height of a sheep so they said sheep blind I miss mother lambs and the farmer loses the paddock so the idea was we cut it very green the reason we cut it green is we're trying to use the protein.

33:00 That's in the plant and the sugars and moisture that's in the plant to the best advantage in this process. So I know it's counterintuitive for anybody who's used to the ocean of hanging off, but if with the wetter we get it, the more of this sort of effect we're going to get in a natural compost process. So the feature of the process is the enhancement of the fungal growth view and the secondary fermentation stage.

33:23 Look, we won't talk too much about this. We're going to leave a little spot for this this afternoon to talk about hydrolysates. It's taking a protein source using the same inoculant product. I'll just talk about it briefly. So you take a protein source, you macerate it down to something as small as you can. So it can be an animal body, it can be a plant material. And in the hydrolysis process, you take a protein and you put it with—sorry, you take a protein, you break it down, chop it up as small as you can, put a hundred percent water with it, 70 percent of the weight of the original animal or plant that you put in, and then an amount of lactobacillus and the formula—or I can give you. Put under a fermentation lock as if you're making beer. And after four weeks, you'll have 80% folio fertilizer, 20% solids. It makes a very good product.

34:14 And we'll do perhaps in question time later on this afternoon. Christine will explain to you what happens with that because basically what's happening is you're breaking the proteins back to amino acids and peptides. And amino acids—what you're chasing all the time, which is nitrogen. It's a very interesting process. So this is some of the stuff we've made using that process. One, this one here is car. That's a national plague in Australia. And the river systems is European Cup. And this one's food waste, which is really interesting actually because you can make this at any size. You can make it using a kitchen whiz, or you can make it using Norma's machine for a community. And you've got the ability to make yet another progress product for agricultural use. That's just about out from that.

34:59 What I might do is just explain what we intend to do with this other process. What we basically got here is the first elements. Now let's talk a little while about this. We've used dry because we didn't have rice, yes, that afternoon when we put this together. It's not fundamentally important, and any of the things that we've looked at tend to indicate that you can get—you can make this initial water product. So even though we've used rice here, you can make it out of almost any grain. Well, all the ground—put it another way—all the grains I've used include wattleseed, rice, wheat, grass seed from a number of different places in Queensland. And all of them as work just as successfully as anything else.

35:45 Somebody said reason just before we were discussing the idea of rice. And they found that the outside husks, the silica on rice, might be a bit restrictive in terms of that. But you need through all intents and purposes for the moment, let's just assume this is rice—white rice or brown rice. You just add some water to it—just standard old water. It doesn't if you can, wherever you can try not to use water with chlorine or pour main—is it, Christine? Main the decor others tulle chlorine alternatives you've got here in this country. Try not to use anything with chlorine. So use dawn water or rainwater if you can. In this instance it doesn't matter much because this is going to sit some time and it'll produce a cloudy water like.

36:29 This and I'd ask you if you get a moment over lunch just to have a bit of a sniff of that. If you shake it you can see it's producing little bubbles. This is a loose-fitting lid and the concept here is the rice water actually attracts things from the atmosphere. Remember Christine said before if you put a sheet of plastic outside it'll be covered in fungi in no time at all. As I think I said to some people before, a New Zealand farmer said to me once, 'See that tree there? 95% of that came from the atmosphere. I'm only responsible for 5%. I bugger it up every time.' So most of the things in life come from the atmosphere. That's what's happening here. This stuff is much the same as you might make a sourdough or sauerkraut. This is a basic, very basic open fermentation process.

37:16 Okay, so you've captured your initial rice water, then you'd take that rice water and you mix it with milk. Cow's milk. We've used powdered milk in a hotel in Cairo once and a tin of milk once in Beijing. It doesn't seem to matter what the source. We've basically only used cow's milk. I suppose you could experiment with camels and things if you have that sort of thing available, but milk basically builds everything—builds things from humans to many other animals. So the idea is that if you introduce this water, this rice water, into this, you're going to end up with a product that's going to have a fairly broad-based width.

38:07 And what you end up with—or can I just go over that again for a moment? Everything I've ever done in this area is based on the work of a person called Being. I don't even know, never knew his first name. And he died last year. Bloe Richards, who coincidentally taught at the university in Armidale where Christine lives. Being Richards' whole hypothesis in life is that nature will deal with anything if you make the biological base broad enough. That's the way the system is designed. It will cope with anything that it made, provided you make the biological base broad enough. So in your compost pile, provided it came from a natural source, you shouldn't have any difficulty dealing with it. And indeed, look, there's lots of weird arguments we could have about other things that might be in those products, but I dare say most of the time you're going to be pretty safe with most composted inputs.

39:04 This is what happens. So for those of you who haven't done this so far, it forms a cheese. This was milk yesterday afternoon when Becky brought it in. We just put a little bit of an off-filling into it and we put it into an Eskie chiller, a cooler. We put it into a cool—you know, this thing's got a different name in every country you go to. I don't know what they are in Chinese, but I'm sure they've got a name for it. So you've got this cheese now. The cheese, as you'll see in that document that you've got, which is the second slide, yes, you'll see that's a large container that's about 40 litres that we made for this feral fish project. If you have a look at the scroll line down below where the milk is where the cheeses are big apart, you'll see it says I think it says 'Saturday,' and that compression is what's happened on just over a couple of days. So this stuff will get really, really thick. And this Jeff Chris was saying earlier that he actually is eating this stuff and he thought it was quite nice. He even mixed it with Nutella, I think, and Nutella is going to be much more dangerous than the G's, but it makes quite a good—it's a cottage cheese.

40:18 If you made it under conditions where you did it in your own kitchen there's really no reason why I can't eat it. I'm just warning that if you do let the dog eat it make sure the dogs outside because they'll sort of guts it all down and throw it up in your living room and it's very unpleasant because it smells like your grandchild just threw up down your front. If you get it on your clothes it's just a pure lactobacillus smell. In fact people have said that the lactobacillus when you pour that rice water into this mix it will actually select the lactobacillus that's written in some of the paperwork that I've seen. I can't guarantee it but I mean we're just using this process because it works not because we know what we're doing.

41:01 So what we're doing then is we're taking that liquid product. We take the cheese off, give it to the dog or the chickens and we take that liquid product and we mix it 100 to 1 with water and then we mix it 100 to 1 with water with molasses. 100 to 1 with water and a cup of molasses and that's what we end up with. This is the base inoculum product. So that's the product that you're going to be using as a base inoculant to do this latter stage, this step 4.

41:34 So what we just went through, the water to rice, rice water is step 1. If you have a look at your sheet the next ones are steps 2 and 3 where we're actually making this black Tocaccilla product and then what we're going to do after lunch is we're going to go outside. Your teams will pick up one of the six boxes down each, the two sides, three boxes down each side of the hall. Take one of those boxes out and you'll find there's a table out there marked table one to six. It doesn't really matter which tower you'll end up on but the number ones can negotiate that.

42:17 Just mentioned salt for a second. This is the only salt we could get in Hastings yesterday which promised to be a fairly balanced mix salt for horse use. But Steve bought this material which is all natural sea salt. The reason why we're using sea salt is because you're so far inland. The game we're trying is to broaden the biological base. Salt water, sea water contains every mineral nutrient and trace element and some percentage, tiny percentage. We're trying to create the opportunity for a biological base. We don't, as I said before, know exactly what's going to be in there but if we use sea water in that process we're going to get as much as we possibly can into that mix.

42:58 So that's your salt. For the same reason we're using this, which is a mixture of bone meal and blood meal which in Australia we call blood and bone. Anyway it's the same process. We're trying to broaden that biological base and you mix that with more molasses and with this bran which again is the only sort of bran. Some of you might have opportunity to have rice bran or wheat bran or oat bran, anything from the outer shell of a seed suitable. But this stuff is just something somebody's made up for horses and pelletized but it will serve the same function. We use the same thing last week at the ranch in California.

43:42 Then in your team you'll find in your box that you will have a little brown bag, burlap or hessian depending where you come from and they might be different but we want you to get about that much green waste into it. So somebody in your team has got to get around on their hands and knees in the paddock and pull grass. We're putting green material in this because we want phototrophic and photosynthetic bacteria in the mix. So again you're trying to broaden the biological base. You're trying to make it as broad as you possibly can.