Compost tea

Barleycorn

Member
BASE UK Member
Location
Hampshire
Playing with it, but never seem to have time. Probably leaning towards brewing microbe blends as I'm finding getting a really good compost quite difficult. Hope to get to it when we've finished drilling, slurry, fencing, etc etc!
 

Fran Loake

Member
BASE UK Member
Location
North Bucks
The idea sounds good, but it would have to be really good to warrant all the faffing around and extra passes with the sprayer if I remember rightly - at least that was my initial impression of what I've read on BFF and the like.

What benefits have been seen from users?

I have some time but didn't I read that crops will need spraying every 10 days or so? Were the water rates pretty high too?
 

Clive

Staff Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lichfield
I need to learn a lot more about it really but one of my first thoughts is how do microbes take to being pushed through a sprayer pump !
 

Barleycorn

Member
BASE UK Member
Location
Hampshire
I need to learn a lot more about it really but one of my first thoughts is how do microbes take to being pushed through a sprayer pump !

There has been a fair bit of debate on this, and at one time you were advised to use a diaphragm pump, and keep the pressure below 30 PSI. But I have seen videos of people pumping it up 60' into trees, so i think that the microbes are pretty resilient.
 

Andy Howard

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Ashford, Kent
I have researched it a lot. When you realise that Laverstoke Park, who have a large budget, there own lab and still struggle to get regular quality brews you realise what chance do I have!! Be patient, formulated microbe blends are improving all the time.
 

Clive

Staff Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lichfield
Playing with it, but never seem to have time. Probably leaning towards brewing microbe blends as I'm finding getting a really good compost quite difficult. Hope to get to it when we've finished drilling, slurry, fencing, etc etc!


where can I find out more about microbe blends ?
 

Simon C

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Essex Coast
where can I find out more about microbe blends ?

Clive, a few of us Plumbo devotees are trying some of these microbes this year. N fixing bacteria to go in with the liquid starter fertiliser, then bacillus bacteria in with the Flex Foliar Nutrition at normal fungiside timings. This is what Niel Fuller has been demonstrating at Cereals the last two or three years. He is confident that in a normal year, we won't need any fungisides at all. But these bugs are resilient to some fungicides which we can add in if it starts to go pear shaped. Andy put up a slide about his Foliar nutrition trial at the BASE AGM which showed it easily paid for itself, and the bugs are not that expensive, so very exiting if we can get it to work.
 

Clive

Staff Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lichfield
Clive, a few of us Plumbo devotees are trying some of these microbes this year. N fixing bacteria to go in with the liquid starter fertiliser, then bacillus bacteria in with the Flex Foliar Nutrition at normal fungiside timings. This is what Niel Fuller has been demonstrating at Cereals the last two or three years. He is confident that in a normal year, we won't need any fungisides at all. But these bugs are resilient to some fungicides which we can add in if it starts to go pear shaped. Andy put up a slide about his Foliar nutrition trial at the BASE AGM which showed it easily paid for itself, and the bugs are not that expensive, so very exiting if we can get it to work.


I thought Andy's slide was more about pay back from Steve T's maxi-phi nutrition programme or did I miss something there ??
 

Andy Howard

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Ashford, Kent
The main difference between Steve's and Robert's was that Steve recommended Potassium sulphate which I am not sure paid for itself. This along with the fact that Steve's had Nufol which was more expensive than Foli N meant that Plumbo cam out on top but I think if we had not used PS then the difference would be minimal.
 

Clive

Staff Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lichfield
The main difference between Steve's and Robert's was that Steve recommended Potassium sulphate which I am not sure paid for itself. This along with the fact that Steve's had Nufol which was more expensive than Foli N meant that Plumbo cam out on top but I think if we had not used PS then the difference would be minimal.


Steves recommendation being just nutrition but Plumbo being nutrition and microbes ??
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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