Organic Gardener's Composting Part 12

_Dividing the box_ is another, simpler method. You simply remove about two-thirds of the box's contents and spread it on the garden.

Then refill the box with fresh bedding and distribute the remaining worms, castings, and food still in the box. Plenty of worms and egg coc.o.o.ns will remain to populate the box. The worms that you dumped on the garden will probably not survive there.

A better method of dividing a box prevents wasting so many worms.

All of the box's contents are pushed to one side, leaving one-third to one-half of the box empty. New bedding and fresh food are put on the "new" side. No food is given to the "old" side for a month or so. By that time virtually all the worms will have migrated to the "new" side. Then the "old" side may be emptied and refilled with fresh bedding.

People in the North may want to use a worm box primarily in winter when other composting methods are inconvenient or impossible. In this case, start feeding the bin heavily from fall through spring and then let it run without much new food until mid-summer. By that time there will be only a few worms left alive in a box of castings.

The worms may then be separated from their castings, the box recharged with bedding and the remaining worms can be fed just enough to increase rapidly so that by autumn there will again be enough to eat all your winter garbage.

Garbage Can Composting

Here's a large-capacity vermicomposting system for vegetableatarians and big families. It might even have sufficient digestive capacity for serious juice makers. You'll need two or three, 20 to 30 gallon garbage cans, metal or plastic. In two of them drill numerous half-inch diameter holes from bottom to top and in the lid as well.

The third can is used as a tidy way to hold extra dry bedding.

Begin the process with about 10 inches of moist bedding material and worms on the bottom of the first can. Add garbage on top without mixing it in and occasionally sprinkle a thin layer of fresh bedding.

Eventually the first can will be full though it will digest hundreds of gallons of garbage before that happens. When finally full, the bulk of its contents will be finished worm casts and will contain few if any worms. Most of the remaining activity will be on the surface where there is fresh food and more air. Filling the first can may take six months to a year. Then, start the second can by transferring the top few inches of the first, which contains most of the worms, into a few inches of fresh bedding on the bottom of the second can. I'd wait another month for the worms left in the initial can to finish digesting all the remaining garbage. Then, you have 25 to 30 gallons of worm casts ready to be used as compost.

Painting the inside of metal cans with ordinary enamel when they have been emptied will greatly extend their life. Really high-volume kitchens might run two vermicomposting garbage cans at once.

PART TWO

Composting For The Food Gardener

Introduction

There is a great deal of confusion in the gardening world about compost, organic matter, humus, fertilizer and their roles in soil fertility, plant health, animal health, human health and gardening success. Some authorities seem to recommend as much manure or compost as possible. Most show inadequate concern about its quality.

The slick books published by a major petrochemical corporation correctly acknowledge that soil organic matter is important but give rather vague guidelines as to how much while focusing on chemical fertilizers. Organic gardeners denigrate chemicals as though they were of the devil and like J.I. Rodale in _The Organic Front,_ advise:

"Is it practical to run a garden exclusively with the use of compost, without the aid of so-called chemical or artificial fertilizers? The answer is not only _yes,_ but in such case you will have the finest vegetables obtainable, vegetables fit to grace the table of the most exacting gourmet."

Since the 1950s a government-funded laboratory at Cornell University has cranked out seriously flawed studies "proving" that food raised with chemicals is just as or even more nutritious than organically grown food. The government's investment in "scientific research" was made to counter unsettling (to various economic interest groups) nutritional and health claims that the organic farming movement had been making. For example, in _The Living Soil,_ Lady Eve Balfour observed:

"I have lived a healthy country existence practically all my life, and for the last 25 years of it I have been actively engaged in farming. I am physically robust, and have never suffered a major illness, but until 1938 I was seldom free in winter from some form of rheumatism, and from November to April I invariably suffered from a continual succession of head colds. I started making compost by Howard's method using it first on the vegetables for home consumption.... That winter I had no colds at all and almost for the first time in my life was free from rheumatic pains even in prolonged spells of wet weather."

Fifty years later there still exists an intensely polarized dispute about the right way to garden and farm. People who are comfortable disagreeing with Authority and that believe there is a strong connection between soil fertility and the consequent health of plants, animals, and humans living on that soil tend to side with the organic camp. People who consider themselves "practical" or scientific tend to side with the mainstream agronomists and consider chemical agriculture as the only method that can produce enough to permit industrial civilization to exist. For many years I was confused by all this. Have you been too? Or have you taken a position on this controversy and feel that you don't need more information? I once thought the organic camp had all the right answers but years of explaining soil management in gardening books made me reconsider and reconsider again questions like "why is organic matter so important in soil?" and "how much and what kind do we need?" I found these subjects still needed to have clearer answers. This book attempts to provide those answers and puts aside ideology.

A Brief History of the Organic Movement

How did all of this irresolvable controversy begin over something that should be scientifically obvious? About 1900, "experts"

increasingly encouraged farmers to use chemical fertilizers and to neglect manuring and composting as unprofitable and unnecessary. At the time this advice seemed practical because chemicals did greatly increase yields and profits while chemistry plus motorized farm machinery minus livestock greatly eased the farmer's workload, allowed the farmer to abandon the production of low-value fodder crops, and concentrate on higher value cash crops.

Perplexing new farming problems--diseases, insects and loss of seed vigor--began appearing after World War 1. These difficulties did not seem obviously connected to industrial agriculture, to abandonment of livestock, manuring, composting, and to dependence on chemistry.

The troubled farmers saw themselves as innocent victims of happenstance, needing to hire the chemical plant doctor much as sick people are encouraged by medical doctors to view themselves as victims, who are totally irresponsible for creating their condition and incapable of curing it without costly and dangerous medical intervention.

Farming had been done holistically since before Roman times. Farms inevitably included livestock, and animal manure or compost made with manure or green manures were the main sustainers of soil fertility. In 1900 productive farm soils still contained large reserves of humus from millennia of manuring. As long as humus is present in quant.i.ty, small, affordable amounts of chemicals actually do stimulate growth, increase yields, and up profits. And plant health doesn't suffer nor do diseases and insects become plagues.

However, humus is not a permanent material and is gradually decomposed. Elimination of manuring steadily reduced humus levels and consequently decreased the life in the soil. And (as will be explained a little later) nitrogen-rich fertilizers accelerate humus loss.

With the decline of organic matter, new problems with plant and animal health gradually developed while insect predation worsened and profits dropped because soils declining in humus need ever larger amounts of fertilizer to maintain yields. These changes developed gradually and erratically, and there was a long lag between the first dependence on chemicals, the resulting soil addiction, and steady increases in farm problems. A new alliance of scientific experts, universities, and agribusiness interests had self-interested reasons to identify other causes than loss of soil humus for the new problems. The increasingly troubled farmer's attention was thus fixated on fighting against plant and animal diseases and insects with newer and better chemicals.

Just as with farm animals, human health also responds to soil fertility. Industrial agriculture steadily lowered the average nutritional quality of food and gradually increased human degeneration, but these effects were masked by a statistical increase in human life span due to improved public sanitation, vaccinations, and, starting in the 1930s, the first antibiotics. As statistics, we were living longer but as individuals, we were feeling poorer. Actually, most of the statistical increase in lifespan is from children that are now surviving childhood diseases.

I contend that people who made it to seven years old a century ago had a chance more-or-less equal to ours, of surviving past seventy with a greater probability of feeling good in middle-and old age.

People have short memories and tend to think that things always were as they are in the present. Slow but continuous increases in nutritionally related diseases like tooth decay, periodontal disease, diabetes, heart disease, birth defects, mental r.e.t.a.r.dation, drug addiction or cancer are not generally seen as a "new" problem, while subtle reductions in the feeling of well-being go unnoticed.

During the 1930s a number of far-seeing individuals began to worry about the social liabilities from chemically dependent farming. Drs.

Robert McCarrison and Weston Price addressed their concerns to other health professionals. Rudolf Steiner, observing that declines in human health were preventing his disciples from achieving spiritual betterment started the gentle biodynamic farming movement. Steiner's princ.i.p.al English speaking followers, Pfeiffer and Koepf, wrote about biological farming and gardening extensively and well.

Professor William Albrecht, Chairman of the Soil Department of the University of Missouri, tried to help farmers raise healthier livestock and made unemotional but very explicit connections between soil fertility, animal, and human health. Any serious gardener or person interested in health and preventive medicine will find the books of all these unique individuals well worth reading.

I doubt that the writings and lectures of any of the above individuals would have sparked a bitter controversy like the intensely ideological struggle that developed between the organic gardening and farming movement and the agribusiness establishment.

This was the doing of two energetic and highly puritanical men: Sir Albert Howard and his American disciple, J.I. Rodale.

Howard's criticism was correctly based on observations of improved animal and human health as a result of using compost to build soil fertility. Probably concluding that the average farmer's weak ethical condition would be unable to resist the apparently profitable allures of chemicals unless their moral sense was outraged, Howard undertook an almost religious crusade against the evils of chemical fertilizers. Notice the powerful emotional loading carried in this brief excerpt from Howard's _Soil and Health:_

"Artificial fertilizers lead to artificial nutrition, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women."

Do you want to be "artificial?" Rodale's contentious _Organic Front _makes readers feel morally deficient if they do not agree about the vital importance of recycling organic matter.

"The Chinese do not use chemical fertilizers. They return to the land every bit of organic matter they can find. In China if you burned over a field or a pile of vegetable rubbish you would be severely punished. There are many fantastic stories as to the lengths the Chinese will go to get human excremental matter. A traveler told me that while he was on the toilet in a Shanghai hotel two men were waiting outside to rush in and make way with the stuff."

Perhaps you too should be severely punished for wasting your personal organic matter.

Rodale began proselytizing for the organic movement about 1942. With an intensity unique to ideologues, he attacked chemical companies, attacked chemical fertilizers, attacked chemical pesticides, and attacked the scientific agricultural establishment. With a limited technical education behind him, the well-meaning Rodale occasionally made overstatements, wrote oversimplification as science, and uttered scientific absurdities as fact. And he attacked, attacked, attacked all along a broad organic front. So the objects of his attacks defended, defended, defended.

A great deal of confusion was generated from the contradictions between Rodale's self-righteous and sometimes scientifically vague positions and the amused defenses of the smug scientific community.

Donald Hopkins' _Chemicals, Humus and the Soil_ is the best, most humane, and emotionally generous defense against the extremism of Rodale. Hopkins makes hash of many organic principles while still upholding the vital role of humus. Anyone who thinks of themselves as a supporter of organic farming and gardening should first dig up this old, out-of-print book, and come to terms with Hopkins'

arguments.

Organic versus establishment hostilities continued unabated for many years. After his father's death, Rodale's son and heir to the publis.h.i.+ng empire, Robert, began to realize that there was a sensible middle ground. However, I suppose Robert Rodale perceived communicating a less ideological message as a problem: most of the readers of _Organic Gardening and Farming _magazine and the buyers of organic gardening books published by Rodale Press weren't open to ambiguity.

I view organic gardeners largely as examples of American Puritanism who want to possess an clear, simple system of capital "T" truth, that brooks no exceptions and has no complications or gray areas.

"Organic" as a movement had come to be defined by Rodale publications as growing food by using an approved list of substances that were considered good and virtuous while shunning another list that seemed to be considered 'of the devil,' similar to kosher and non-kosher food in the orthodox Jewish religion. And like other puritans, the organic faithful could consider themselves superior humans.

But other agricultural reformers have understood that there _are_ gray areas--that chemicals are not all bad or all good and that other sane and holistic standards can be applied to decide what is the best way to go about raising crops. These people began to discuss new agricultural methods like Integrated Pest Management [IPM] or Low Input Sustainable Agriculture [LISA], systems that allowed a minimal use of chemistry without abandoning the focus on soil organic matter's vital importance.

My guess is that some years back, Bob Rodale came to see the truth of this, giving him a problem--he did not want to threaten a major source of political and financial support. So he split off the "farming" from _Organic Gardening and Farming _magazine and started two new publications, one called _The New Farm_ where safely away from less educated unsophisticated eyes he could discuss minor alterations in the organic faith without upsetting the readers of _Organic Gardening._

Today's Confusions

I have offered this brief interpretation of the organic gardening and farming movement primarily for the those gardeners who, like me, learned their basics from Rodale Press. Those who do not now cast this heretical book down in disgust but finish it will come away with a broader, more scientific understanding of the vital role of organic matter, some certainty about how much compost you really need to make and use, and the role that both compost and fertilizers can have in creating and maintaining the level of soil fertility needed to grow a great vegetable garden.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Humus and Soil Productivity