Humus compost is a tool for profitable farming
Have you ever looked out at your fields in the middle of the summer and been really pleased with how green everything looked?
What if everything that was green was a weed, though — grasses and pigweed and bindweed?
I have had this happen in my own fields way too many times. It’s embarrassing. Beyond that, it’s frustrating. And, of course, the financial return on investment for such a field is not good.
Humus compost offers another way. It’s a tool to help us with profitable farming.
Humus compost is applied in two different ways: as a solid mixed with minerals or as an extract liquified into water and applied through sprayers and planters. Based on having done this since 1993, I will tell you that the liquid by itself is not as effective as the solid humus compost mixed with minerals; however, using both has a much greater impact than just one or the other. The synergistic effect is amazing.
Humus compost is actually compost with a humus protein. I would not make compost if it did not have humus in it. And what is humus? Most people think organic matter and humus are the same thing; they are not. Are wheat and bread the same thing? Well, the bread has wheat in it, but it’s no longer wheat; it’s wheat bread. The same goes with organic matter: humus came from organic matter — it was derived from it — and yet it is no longer organic matter.
When you’re sitting around the fireplace on a cold winter night, what are the sounds coming out of the fireplace — the snapping and crackling and popping? Each noise accompanies a release of energy. As a matter of fact, that’s the sun’s energy being released. It’s not organic matter being released. When the tree that grew the wood that you’re burning in your fireplace was growing, it was capturing sun energy through photosynthesis and storing it in its wood. In the fireplace, it’s releasing that energy.
Now imagine a windrow of compost. You can’t hear that snapping and popping and crackling in the compost windrow, but it’s happening. The sun energy is being released up into the air, just the same as in that fireplace. But instead of allowing that energy to be released into the air, we want to capture that sun energy and put it into humus protein.
Most people make compost by decaying organic matter until it becomes dirt and soil. That’s not what I’m interested in. I want to make a compost that becomes a valuable tool in helping farmers become more economical.
Making Humus Compost
When we make compost, we start by putting carbon-based materials into the beginning of a windrow and we thoroughly soak it with water, along with an inoculant designed to limit evaporation of the volatile compounds. On the second day we incorporate clay into the carbon along with the nitrogen-heavy materials. The clay helps capture the sun’s energy — it doesn’t allow things to volatilize; we’ve learned that we have to coat our organic matter well with clay.
Every little cell of organic matter is very small. And inside every cell there’s a whole lot of stuff that wants to evaporate. Why? Because it’s lighter than air, like a hot air balloon. One mature oak leaf has seven to ten billion cells, and every cell contains energy that came from the sun. As soon as it rots — unless you do something about it — that energy is going to escape. The clay is a negatively charged ionic material that causes the evaporative material to get sucked to it instead of to evaporate.
We then incorporate microorganisms that do not survive in the gut of an animal but that do survive out in the undisturbed forest floor. These microorganisms assemble things — instead of disassembling/decomposing them. They actually assimilate and assemble the volatile compounds into bonds of carbon called links, and from there they are able to create a carbon chain with 45 links or more — that is called a humus protein.
We do our turning based on windrow temperature readings. We apply water to make sure the organic matter starts to decay. We use mixers to make it all happen faster.
Benefits of Humus Compost
We have a client in Lancaster County who sells humus compost for $220 a ton — in an area where there’s an excess of manure. How is this possible?
This client used to have sticky red clay soil. I was walking out in his field once, and it had rained three tenths of an inch the night before, and my shoes had an inch to two worth of soil on them. Two years later, after using humus compost, he got eight and a half inches of rain, and at six inches deep his soil was granulated and nice and mellow — not sticky red clay. The reason people buy humus compost in Lancaster County instead of the excess manure is because it does things like this.
Humus compost also helps us with our mineral nutrients. Humus has a powerful magnetic attraction — it has a CEC of up to 300, compared to 15 to 30 for clay and just 1 to 5 for sand. Yet humus interacts well with the root rhizosphere and easily releases the bound-up minerals in the humus upon demand from the exudates from the root rhizosphere.
Humus compost is also extremely helpful for soils that are too tight. Many farmers have “24-hour soils” — in a 24-hour period they can go from being too wet to work to too dry. Tight soils have a base saturation that’s wildly out of balance. Humus compost can help fix this.
When minerals are applied by themselves — without humus compost — there are certain limitations growers should be aware of. First of all, many minerals are attracted to other minerals, and they tie each other up and become unavailable to plants. Imagine a bunch of magnets sitting on a table, not quite touching each other. What happens when you bump the table? All of those magnets snap together. This is what happens when you add certain minerals to your fields. How do you know, when you put out phosphorus or potassium or lime or gypsum, that that does not happen with the minerals in your soil?
That is the dilemma. I call it the paradox of minerals. There are also losses of minerals due to evaporation and leaching. We would like to prevent these losses.
It’s very difficult to apply minerals so as to make a long-term change. A question I often get is, “Why am I putting all of these minerals out there year after year and nothing changes? In fact, the levels either remain the same or even go lower. Do you believe that balancing the base saturation, such as Dr. Albrecht taught, is either economical or effective?”
My answer is, “It depends.” If you can utilize a carbon-based mineral system, where the minerals are attached to long-chain carbons first — as with humus compost — it absolutely pays big dividends. This is based on thousands of examples on farms in the U.S., Australia, New Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, etc.
Minerals are magnetic in nature — it doesn’t matter whether it’s potassium sulfate, elemental sulfur, potassium chloride, brown rock phosphate, etc. Every mineral has a positive and a negative end to it, and given the opportunity to attach to another magnetic positive and negative, it will. That’s why a lot of people are frustrated about applying fertilizers — because they really want to see good results, but their minerals are just being tied up and aren’t available to the plants.
However, if a mineral is adequately coated with humus, it will not be attracted to other things in the soil that want to bind to it.
Utilizing humus, our goal is to see a permanent change in the base saturation mineral balance. I’m not discounting the need for minerals. I’m saying that humus compost is a tool to make your minerals more effective.
The compost we make is full of humus protein. A lot of people ask me what’s in it: “How much nitrogen? How much phosphorus? How much potassium?” It’s not what’s in it in terms of content — it’s what it functionally does in the soil. That is what I am concerned about. It’s about nutrient cycling, not nutrient content; it’s about what it will do to the soil, not how much it will add in terms of nutrients. We use humus compost as a tool to coat minerals with and as a tool to elongate the rootlet in the rhizosphere. We make a liquid extract out of it. We use this product as a tool for the farmer to become more economical. When we blend minerals in with humus compost, we can balance our base saturation ratios, and there are long-term benefits — we get those ratios to stay there.
An Economical Tool
Here’s an example. In the late eighties I did a research project with a soil that was at a pH of 8.3, and my goal was to get it down to 7.7. I applied two tons of gypsum for five years — a total of 10 tons. At the end of five years, the pH of the soil averaged 7.6. I had achieved my goal. At the end of that five years, however, I had started making humus compost. On another part of that field that I had not treated — that was still pH 8.3 — I mixed up 1,500 pounds of gypsum and 2,000 pounds of humus compost and applied half of that mix in the fall and half in April of the next year. By that summer, the pH had gone from 8.3 down to 7.3. Three years later, the pH was around 7.6; the area where I had applied 10 tons of gypsum had risen from 7.6 to 7.9.
So, how economical is humus compost? In this example, it meant that I only had to apply 15 percent as much to achieve a better and longer-lasting benefit. Humus compost is an incredible tool.
Humus compost also prevents plants from taking in an excess of nutrients. Plants become healthy and optimize their growth when they can dictate in advance to microbes the nutrients they need. This prevents plants from taking in excess nutrients. The number one reason for plant disease is one or more nutrients being present in excess. By having the plant dictate its needs to microbes via its exudates — via the liquid coming out of the root — you can lower your fertilizer needs.
When the plant is in charge of and can direct its own growth, the plant will grow with much less water and fertilizer. We have documented between 60 and 80 percent less water being required in a healthy plant versus an unhealthy one. When a plant is out of balance, it is going to require more water. That automatically dilutes the energy and then requires more fertilizer. That gets you into a no-win situation.
In summary, humus protein is sun energy, captured and built into it. It is accomplished by utilizing a special process of capturing the sun energy that normally escapes from decomposing organic matter (often taking from four to six weeks) and then building those compounds into a protein substance (often taking from six to eight weeks, for an average total process of ten to twelve weeks.) The final humus compost really enhances soil structure, enables one to economically balance soils and allows the plants to direct their own growth, resulting in healthier and more nutrient-dense crops and produce!
Edwin Blosser is the founder of Midwest Bio-Systems. He has attended nearly every Acres U.S.A. conference since 1986. This article is an edited transcription of his presentation from last year’s conference.
