Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
...
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.

likely caused by CAFO chicken litter being used as
fertilizer.

How would CAFO chicken manure differ from ordinary chicken manure?

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.


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.

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.

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

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).


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"?

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.


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.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...help-grow-bett
er-crops

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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


songbird