[Digestion] Digestate as fertilizer.

[Anand Karve]

Dear Jean-Luc,
feeding sugar to the soil microbes is done by the plants themselves.
The water of guttation of sorghum and safflower contains sugar. All
the plants that are infested by aphids also drop sugar on the ground
below their canopy. The leaves that fall on the ground also contain a
type of sugar (cellulose), In the case of many trees, one finds a
carpet of fruits underneath their canopy. The fruits contain sugars.
Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) leaves exude organic acids, which too fall
on the ground to feed the soil microbes. In India, in the region where
I live, literally thousands of farmers have taken up the practice of
applying sugar to the field. For every hectare,they use a mixture of
25 kg sugar, 25 kg cattle dung and 25 litres cattle urine. It is
applied once every three months. In an earlier experiment, I got the
soil from a non-irrigated and non-fertilized field analysed
consecutively for 5 years and found that in spite of growing crops on
this soil, there was no change in the soil composition over this
period. In India, the agricultural yield is positively correlated with
the rainfall and not with any other factors like the sale of
fertilizers, pesticides, hybrid seed, etc. Humus is a typical topic
raised by European agricultural scientists. Nobody talks of it in
India, most probably because our soils do not have the humus layer
that European soils have.
Yours
A.D.Karve

On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Jean-Luc Sallustro
<jean-luc.sallustro at eventure-international.com> wrote:
> Dear A  D Karve
>
> For my understanding microbes have an important role in the soil at a stage
> where endemic proto nutrient are made available for them within the humic
> clay complex.
> This deep stage of macro nutrient (organic NPK) evolution can be depleted
> for many reasons such as K sustainable sequestration, unavailability of
> macro nutrient, not enough water percolation (soil solubility) etc.
> Don't you think that one of the risks of depletion in N chain can be the
> demobilization of upper soil decomposers due to the fact that immedialty
> avalible nutrient are provided (sugar)
> Regards
> J-L Sallustro
>