Day 65 - Bokashi bacteria brews

Fazenda Malunga is the biggest producer of Organic lettuce in the whole of Brazil. There are 200m people here, but I don't think many of them are into Organics just yet. Still, the farm is a big operation, with about 120ha of land in total, 45ha of which is the main, original, block. As well as growing lettuce, which accounts for around half of their production, they also have tomatoes, beetroot, cucumber, coriander, okra, bell peppers, radish (plus some more, I didn't take notes, oops).Because it is an organic farm, they need to get nitrogen from somewhere. [I don't get this about the Organic movement: it's fine to mine phosphorus from the soil - rock phosphate - but mining nitrogen from the air - urea - is forbidden.] Some of this comes from leguminous green manures that are grown as every second or third crop, and the rest is comes as compost from the farm's 70 cow milking herd.So although I don’t agree with some of the principles of Organics, [or for that matter think it represents what the customer believes the are getting], we should still be able to learn from how they farm. The over-riding philosophy here is that a healthy plant will fight off disease by itself, with less need for artificial inputs. I've written before that farmers are often reactive rather than proactive, and this is made much easier by the way a lot of problems can be solved, in the short-term at least, by opening a bottle. This type of farming is the complete opposite.The main plant nutrition comes from the green manures, home made compost and bought in peat, all of which act on the soil. In addition, they use a lot of foliar sprays, and fertigation (mixing small amounts of fertiliser with irrigation water) to add trace elements. The foliar potions are Bokashi recipes, ranging from straight mineral blends to some which have molasses added to stimulate microbial life. One particular additive, called Compost Aid, is used when they have lost the bacteria off the plant leaves (I don't know what might cause this). It gives a quick boost to get the bugs back colonising the leaf surface, which doesn't allow space for too many bad ones to come in and cause problems.One of the most interesting things they were doing was living in a sealed plastic barrel, which was full of a damp sandy mixture, smelling a bit like fermenting beer. It was made by taking some of the native soils from out in the bushland, and adding extra carbohydrates as a food source. The top is then sealed and it sits around for a couple of months stewing, before being put into big tea bags and bubbled around in a water tank to extract the goodies. Now it's ready to be sprayed on to the plants.I like the idea of this - the native microbes are obviously going to be the best adapted to the local conditions. I'm not so sure about sealing the lid and making the whole thing anaerobic, as that's not a condition generally associated with healthy plants. At least not the type that we want to grow. The other problem might be that they seem to be thinking almost exclusively about bacteria, and not much about fungi. That could easily be a case of local conditions being different to ours, but if you believe Elaine Ingham, most of our soils are severely lacking in fungal biomass.After a quick carbo-loading session (rice, cassava, beans, pasta & potato on the same plate) it was off to a different farm for the afternoon. It is run by a father and son team of Japanese Brazilians, and until three years ago they were a crop-only operation. But then compaction and soil borne disease problems started to appear, and they thought it would be a good idea to experiment with some cattle and rotational pastures. But this is Brazil, and a small trial means 100ha of irrigated Mombasa grass, and 1,200 head of cattle. It's too soon to draw any conclusions from what's happening here, but it's safe to say that grass grows a bit faster here than at home: