Another Bio-char article

[phorbin]

[songbird]

thanks for the pointer.

songbird

[Billy]

Microbes in and around food crops do not just cause human disease. In certain cases, they do exactly the opposite, acting as sentinels of food safety and furnishing an environmentally sound alternative to massive inputs of fertilizers and pesticides. Spreading bacteria on crops became a strategy for researchers in Virginia who sprayed anti-Salmonella soil bacteria on tomato seedlings. The scientists hope the approach might prevent annual outbreaks of food poisoning from raw tomatoes grown on the East Coast. Applying fungi to cassava plants, a project of researchers in Colombia, helps the roots acquire phosphate without the need for expensive fertilizers, a boon in tropical nations where the amount of nutrient that can be obtained from the soil is particularly low.

Remember that chemical fertilizers kill off soil microorganisms, and and only about 20% is taken up by plants.

Each microorganism in the soil community is a sack of plant nutrients, which is released when the organism dies. The plant will take up these nutrients, and give back exudates which feed the microorganisms around the rhizosphere. Simultaneously, they make topsoil together.

[songbird]

Billy wrote: ...

likely caused by CAFO chicken litter being used as fertilizer.

it's not just the bacteria and fungi that build topsoil, there are many other creatures in the mix, worms, ants, termites, ...

songbird

[Billy]

How would CAFO chicken manure differ from ordinary chicken manure? I have instructions from UC Davis on growing peppers (the site has since gone 404) that calls for "Chicken manure (three to four tons per acre) is custom applied a week or more prior to listing." Perhaps "normal" commercial chicken manure is aged to make it less of a vector of pathogens. Of course the real scary is that bits of slaughter house beef end up in chicken feed, which finds its way into the litter, which then is then feed back to cattle. Kin you say "spongiform encephalopathy"?

Amen, brother, amen, but there is a direct link between the nitrogen made available to the plant by the life cycles of the bacteria, and the exudate that the plant secrets to encourage the bacteria to inhabit their rhizosphere. As important as they may be, the other soil inhabitants, including moles, gophers, grubs, worms, ect. on down the spectrum, are peripheral, to the central relationship between bacteria and plant.

[songbird]

CAFO chicken manure often has antibiotics and other feed ingredients that regular folk would not have easy access to for a food source for their chickens.

normal chicken manure around here is just scattered wherever the birds are ranging. no aging going on other than what the sun and rain would do, or if the person cultivates then the soil critters have a better run at it.

among other things. funny that in the OT i wonder how people can eat commercial chicken and then not too long after we have yet another salmonella outbreak.

well when it comes right down to it, the plant is the primary link between sunshine and the creation of carbohydrates, without the green machines our gooses are cooked...

songbird

[Billy]

Three to four tons per acre is a lot of chickens!

Without chlorophyll there'd be no goose, but chlorophyll is only an inabler. I'll see your autotrophism, and raise you an energy releasing fusion reaction (E=MC^2) which is the "sine qua non" of the electromagnetic waves (sun light) which power the chlorophyll to produce ATP.

[songbird]

mea stupido, i didn't notice that amount. yes that would be a lot of chickens or it would be fewer older chickens (thus perhaps well aged :) after all).

enabler? but still interesting that it is likely the chlorophyll organelle of a cell was like the mitochondria an original stand-alone bacteria.

songbird

[Billy]

And to think that some people only see competition in nature, when there is really much symbiotic cooperation. Take the plant and its bacteria for example, or is that the bacteria and their plant?