[Digestion] Digestate as fertilizer.

[Anand Karve]

Dear Brent, what I am advocating is an absolutely new concept. I have
been thinking along these lines for the last forty years and I started
talking and writing about it just recently. It all started in the
nineteenseventies, when I used to work as a plant breeder. I used to
work in those days on sorghum and safflower. Both the crops are grown
in our region as unirrigated post-monsoon crops, which grow on
residual moisture stored in the soil during the monsoon. Farmers in
this region, who grow only rainfed crops never apply any chemical
fertilizers to their fields, and yet they get stable yields year after
year.. Whenever I used to go into the field early in the morning to
conduct pollinations, I found that the field was wet. In order to find
out if the water was capillary water coming up through the soil or
whether it was water of guttation dropped by the leaves, I put plastic
bags on the plants in the evening, and found that the bags contained
huge quantities of water when I checked them the next morning. I then
analysed the water and found that it contained sugar. So I conducted
studies on soil micro-organisms and found that whenever I fed the soil
with sugar solution, the microbial count went up. This showed me that
the plants were feeding sugar to the soil microbes underneath their
canopy in order to cause them to increase their numbers. The
hypothesis postulated by me is based on these findings.  There are now
literally thousands of farmers in my area of operation, who apply to
their fields about 25 kg each of sugar and cattle dung per ha, once
every three months, and nothing else. They report very high yields,
sometimes even higher than their neighbours who apply chemical
fertilizers. And even when they get slightly lower yield, they make
higher profit than their neighbours, because they have not spent
anything on chemical fertilizers.
Yours
A.D.Karve

On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 12:57 AM, bingham <bingham at zekes.com> wrote:
> Dear A.D. Karve,
>
> I am not sure I follow your point?
>
> As part of my degree we studied cotton production in the Mississippi River
> Delta region of the US,
> wheat production in the Mid West US and truck farming in California US.
>
> Many of the really old plantations and farms kept very complete production
> records.
> Unfortunately they were not very smart farmers.
> They planted the same crop for decades with out adding anything to the soil.
> There crop yields dropped miserably each year until the river would flood.
> After the soil dried out and farming could resume and the crop yields rose
> back to previous levels.
>
> The Wheat farmers in the Mid West  and the truck farmers  in California had
> similar problems but there were no floods so NPK was
> added in later years and yields returned.
>
> Old dried Samples of the wheat and produce were found stored that dated back
> 60 to 100 years.
> When the old samples of produce were analyzed and compared to modern samples
> they had marked differences in the
> amounts of  the trace minerals they contained.
>
> The old samples had higher levels of almost all trace minerals than there
> modern counterparts.
> Some of the trace minerals were totally absent in the new samples of wheat
> and vegetables.
>
> Soil samples of the areas where the food samples were taken showed the
> minerals were depleted from the soil in the root
> zone of the crops.
>
> In some deeper samples the concentrations of the trace minerals improved but
> they were unreachable by the plants.
>
> Is your point that the minerals necessary to grow the plants are replenished
> through natural chemical and biological actions
> faster than the plants remove them?
>
> I have a theory that the food we now eat is missing many of the nutrients
> that were in food eaten by our progenitors.
> As a result of the missing nutrients we are now less healthy and prone to
> exhibit a number of health problems.
>
> If the soil where your "organic manure" is obtained has been depleted of the
> trace minerals it may aide plant growth but
> not the plants nutritional value.
>
> The areas we applied AD byproducts showed improvement to the soil trace
> minerals in the plants over time.
> I did not have the time money or patients to determine why the improvement
> took place only that it does happened.
>
> It may be the result of a new bio-chemical processes beginning in the
> soil introduced from the AD or from AD byproducts
> themselves.
>
> Brent
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Anand Karve
> To: For Discussion of Anaerobic Digestion
> Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2011 8:13 PM
> Subject: Re: [Digestion] Digestate as fertilizer.
> Dear List,
>  The fact that the soil micro-organisms contribute to soil fertility is
> accepted by all agricultural scientists. Logic tells us that high calorie,
> non-composted organic matter would serve the microbes best as
> nutrition. From this point of view, we conducted experiments and found that
> plain sugar or pulped green leaves were excellent as soil amendments. The
> rates of application were 25 kg dry matter per ha. Capillary water in the
> soil always has soil minerals dissolved in it. When one applies a carbon
> source to the soil, the microbes absorb the necessary soil minerals from the
> capillary water. There is no need to add minerals through the organic
> matter. That is why even plain sugar causes soil microbes to increase their
> numbers. The concentration of minerals in the capillary water is at a
> dynamic equilibrium. If a mineral molecule is removed from the capillary
> water by a microbe, it is replaced by a molecule going into solution from
> the un-dissolved pool of minerals in the soil. We have about 30 km of
> earth's crust under our feet. New soil is being formed every day. Only 5% of
> the dry weight of plants is constituted by minerals. Therefore there is an
> unlimited supply of minerals in the soil. Don't think that it would ever get
> exhausted by agriculture. And when you apply an organic manure to the soil,
> don't calculate the NPK in it but count the nutritional calories in it.
> Yours
> A.D.Karve
>
>
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>



-- 
***
Dr. A.D. Karve
President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)

*Please change my email address in your records to: adkarve at gmail.com *