too much of any good thing is usually is bad or has negative aspects of it. whether the dog pees on a tree or dump a cup of pure miracle grow on it, both will likely kill it. the differences are on what’s left behind once its diluted. if they could find a way to remove the excess salts that kill the soil life over time, we wouldnt have the affects like we see in the commercial farms. its not yet feasible to replace the fertilizer with organic but maybe we can start trying to do some of both? im seeing alot of our local farmers adding manure, moldy feed hay etc… to their fields lately. i haven’t seen that done since i was in grade school. they’re starting to realize commercial fertilizer and herbicide isnt working as good anymore. they also leave some fields to grow a N. fixing cover crop for a few years, making hay from it so the land still turns a profit yet is getting its soil improved in the meantime. makes me happy to see it. there’s hope yet!
I think personally that i am. At least im on my way more and more each day.
There was talk last year about where all the human feces go… nobody talks about that really.
Well it turns out that the USDA and EPA have been encouraging farmers to use ‘biosolids’ to grow crops/hay to feed animals that humans eat… they give it away free and encourage usage… however it turns out that it causes cancer in humans… and cancer and diseases in the animals that are fed it… however they have done it so widespread for so long that shutting it all down and exposing it would collapse the food chain… so its kind of a dirty little secret. I dont eat store bought meat so im not encouraging this harmful and impoverishing practice for the sake of corporate meat and healthcare profits and pharmaceutical sales.
My wood chips are ‘trash’ to the power companies that hire contractors to remove trees and limbs from power lines… I do use gasoline to go get them… shame.
My leaves are free to me…as im surrounded by forest and woods. If you want to say that i am stealing them from the trees… my easiest collection is in gullies and the creeks… Nature blows them far away from the trees that they fall from in time… i have observed this. I can collect a whole year of leaves in a weekend if i wait until they blow into my gullies and creeks.
I have unlimited access to free horse manure at a local show horse stable… she hates manure and loves to see me pull up. That also uses gasoline.
I let large areas of land grow wild…which supports habitat for predators that love to eat things that i dont spray for. Hoping for more snakes and birds of prey… i have a vole problem currently. My dogs are doing a decent job…but my latest advice was to buy poison bait… im hoping to avoid that. I recently noticed a Sharp Shinned Hawk… he (or she) pounced on a vole right in front of me while i was walking my rows… that was amazing.
I encourage birds… which also eat many many insects and they also spread native seeds. Alot of folks believe that they spread ‘bird flu’ but i think barbaric practices of raising poultry and feeding them chemicals and feed grown in human waste is likely a better culprit. Without birds i think we would not have any fruit or food to eat at all due to their voracious feeding on insects… but likely there is a spray for that if birds become extinct.
I do know that they are trying to feed children insects…to save the environment… they likely know something that they arent telling us… its just weird.
So for now i will compost and continue on my journey… i have no plans on eating insects myself… i dont need as much protein as most Americans do. So i grow mostly fruits and vegetables which to me personally is more wholesome and enriching than the modern American diet that encourages harm and impoverishment.
Add those $.03 to your jar and u will have a nickel that is mostly copper… which melted is worth about 8 cents. If by chance you get an old nickel made of nickel that will increase to about 13 cents. That is how you solve impoverishment… look beyond face value of things.
Happy Growing!
This is a good analogy for describing the activities you listed prior. Effectively, you are performing efficiency extraction–approaching an inefficient process and reducing that inefficiency, ie collecting ‘waste’ woodchips and using them. Even your point about protein fits this patter. Proteins are by far the most expensive nutrient macro group, and not merely in monetary terms, producing proteins, especially high quality proteins, is very difficult and requires an enormous amount of inputs. So when you say you don’t each much protein, it means you are switching from a high-resource diet to a lower-resource diet (I could quibble that it’s actually a very-high resource diet you’ve switched to, since you expend way more man-hours to feed yourself than “the system” would spend, but that’s a discussion for another day).
Now, here’s my counterargument: efficiency gains will always be marginal at best.
Whatever the process is, it takes certain inputs and produces a certain amount of output x, minus inefficiencies y, so you end up with x - y = x’. More efficient means a greater value for x’, but no matter what efficiency improvement you have, x’ =< x. That’s not good enough.
We didn’t leave feudalism behind by reducing the amount of hay wasted by peasants. We left feudalism behind because we invented tractors and eliminated the need for peasants at all. The amount of waste actually increased, so now we have something like y * 2, but it doesn’t matter because that’s taking away from an x * 10 (the actual numbers are way, way bigger, since modern agriculture is not ten times more productive, it is between ten times ten, and ten times ten times ten time ten times more productive).
Drastic productivity improvements are how humanity progressed from the stone age to the modern. Efficiency improvements are useful for eking out a little more from the system, but you don’t get progress unless you switch to a better system with an order of magnitude more productivity.
Why is the among of forested land around the world increasing for the first time in recorded history? Because modern agriculture finally reached the point of productivity where we have so much food we can afford to let marginal land become forests again. We can afford to have parks and national forests because we have tractors and 10-10-10 and roundup.
Now, what if we said that’s not good enough, we ought to have a majority of the earth’s land returned to nature, we ought to have all children have access to nutrient-rich diets (which, by the way, means at least as much protein as the average American eats. Turns out, high-quality protein is one of the reasons why modern people in rich countries are taller, smarter, and longer-lived than anyone else), and we ought to have access to far more variety of fruits and vegetables, grown with fewer pesticides, at lower prices, in all grocery stores so that everyone, not just those rich or lucky enough to be able to buy land can have them. Well, if we want that, then we need to reduce energy prices by at least 20x. Do that, and desalination of ocean water for agriculture becomes economical. Reduce energy prices by 100x? Well, now water is cheaper than dirt, which means you can afford to pipe it out anywhere and everywhere. Now, all farms will be fully irrigated. That’s huge. That means we can reduce the amount of land used by farms by at least half, which would basically eliminate habitat loss as a cause of extinction (you know, the #1 cause of extinction. Gone). It would mean you could grow any crop and any fruit anywhere.
Sure, pests are still somewhat of an issue, and a lot of plants can’t take advantage of the additional water. Ok, use GE.
“But that violates my religious objections.” Well, too bad buddy, we’ve been editing genomes since the first time someone planted seeds from a tree with bigger fruit, or kept the puppy from the mommy wolf that wasn’t so mean.
Will someone be harmed at some point because of GE gone wrong? Hopefully yes. Because at some point someone will screw up and GE cancer-causing chemicals into potatoes. That that’s ok, because the amount of good done by making all crops 10x more productive, and the amount of harm alleviated, will vastly outweigh the harm of some people getting cancer from those bad spuds.
Don’t believe me? It’s already happened. Artificial fertilizers and pesticides have given lots of people cancer. But far, far more people used to die of just not having food. I’ll take the small increase in cancer over the “whole populations get cut in half by massive famines on a period basis” thank you very much.
Productivity improvements bring about more good, alleviate more harm, and enrich the world far more than efficiency improvements ever could, because no matter what, even if y = 0 and there is no inefficiency at all, x * 10 > x - 0.
Compost tea delenda est.
It’s interesting you used potatoes as an example, because potatoes naturally contain cancer-causing compounds. The only GE potatoes on the market right now have been modified to produce lower levels of carcinogens.
I did not know this, that’s pretty cool
Honestly there are a thousand ways to skin this cat. You can grow plants in water and sand, not mediums known for their cation exchange capacity. But if you dial your nutrient drip the plants will be happy.
I like building soils so lots of composted manure for me. Cation exchange plus water retention plus soil biota on steroids for healthier plants. But there are plants that need more and rather than hauling manure 3+ times a year I have a big fat bag of 13-13-13 plus season long urea applications (every morning, don’t ask).
In particular raspberries are voracious eaters, mine are ever bearing and will push raspberries until first frost. If I don’t feed them all season long the leaves start turning yellow and have anemic growth the next season. So I need both; the high cation carrying capacity to hold the nutrients, and the concentrated fertilizer to replenish it efficiently.
If using compost tea makes you happy it will make your plants happy. Heck it will keep them from a number of foliar diseases. There are many things I do that are not the most efficient way but that makes me happy.
Back to the topic of weed…
I dont need math… i have Willie. And Willie is very efficient.
Willie Nelson — ‘There are more old drunks than there are old doctors.’
Toby Keith - ‘I’ll never smoke weed with Willie again’.
Willie Nelson is 90 years old.
Therefore weed has been worth the effort for Willie.
TLDR I make compost or weed tea to drown those aggressive zombie weeds which will reroot and recur even if left on top of mulch to dry out. My only problem is having only one bucket and so being afraid the zombies on top haven’t yet received the double tap of no dirt AND no air for a long time. And bumping into the bucket and splashing some of that stink on me when it is overfull from rain. I’m organic (not certifiably) and rarely buy amendments beyond mulch compost or dirt- if I do they’re organic. NPK is 3 things, missing are a lot of others not provided so well by only miracle grow as with compost. And urine (dilute please) will give plants that green boost miracle gro does. But also importantly to me is the carbon footprint- chem factories and miles on the road hauling it vs me dumping local pee or kitchen scraps or neighbors’ discarded pine straw dirt leaves and grass clippings. But then I’m growing million $ strawberries and tomatoes not making a living from my garden. And BTW when I get a discarded dead plant on my mulch collecting rounds I use that dirt as well as the beads of slow release fertilizer in my garden beds or transplanting pots. So I get a bit of miracle grow remnants I’m sure. Compost tea? mulch or start with compost in the planting area and water the area!
[quote=“JennMm, post:48, topic:54839”]
And bumping into the bucket and splashing some of that stink on me when it is overfull from rain.
[/quote] @JennMm you need at least one more bucket. 
I am also a fan of stinky weed tea. Or maybe we should say soup! Ha. I load up buckets with wild blackberries, horsetails, and dandelion tap roots. Cap it with some water and some urine and leave it in the sun 3 weeks. I pour it off into my raised beds the next rain. Nothing chunky, just thick anaerobic soup. Makes my plants pray. Anaerobic soup makes great dissolved organic matter. It is less work than hauling it all the way up the road for the city. Less work than driving for the bag of 10-10-10.
I think the point of aerobic teas is less for the nutrients and more for the microbes. To flood fusarium or powdery mildew, or other fungus and viral infections with more beneficial microbes. Or dilute them with competition. It crowds out the bad ones. Aerobic teas of yeast, lactobacillus, and trichoderma easily grow unnaturally dense with a little compost, and a dash of sugar, or milk. This is a technique that cannabis growers endorse all the time.
Think immune system instead of digestive tract. 
Honestly, even after insect damage. They are huge vectors of infection.
I was curious about compost tea because a local farmer I greatly admire swears by it to suppress brown rot in his apricots. He has a separate fertilization program—the compost tea doesn’t factor into it. I was actually surprised to learn (from this thread) that many see compost tea as fertilizer primarily.
Anyway, I decided to look at the research (I am a data wonk, can’t help it). I did not get very far (distractions), but I did easily find evidence for compost tea’s ability to suppress disease. I’ll link the first paper here in case it’s of interest.
One thought that intrigues me (no real evidence in mind here, just musing) is the potential for compost tea (well aerated, so as to provide a diversity in microorganisms) to work as a broad-spectrum defense for a wide swathe of diseases, wider than any one commercial spray. This would be a benefit to those of us who may not know what is currently threatening (or likely to threaten) our plants on the microscopic level.