On Jul 30, 4:48 am, Karsten Kruse wrote:
RichD schrieb:

Is it really
superior to petrochemical fertilizer, or is it
guilty conscience liberal feelgoodism?

No, the petrochemical producs are better. They sell better and the market
doesn't lie.

Karsten

In support of your smile: When farming, we would dump around seven
hundred tons of compost on a single one hundred acre unit. This
reduced our dependence on [incomplete] chemical fertilizers (heck, it
was winter, we had nothing else to do). The biggest "upside" was we
were not growing nutritionally hollow food. People often commented on
the better taste of things grown with compost and mineral
supplements. For example, try a garden fresh tomato with good soil,
then try one from a hot house supplier. The only reason we turned to
chemical (e.g., thousands of gallons of nitrogen pumped through the
irrigations circles) was to survive/compete on the market and, in the
end, the corn looked damn good. Still, just like us humans, plants
are more than just a little nitrogen, potassium, and ....... On a
side note, go look at the soil on many of the farms. It's dead.
FungiCIDES, pestiCIDES and so forth kill everything. Everything works
together, but we have a better way. Just like our management of the
forests (okay, maybe that didn't turn out so well and introducing
other than indigenous species only resulted in very happy beetles, or
stopping forest fires wasn't such a good ideal, or......).