How to start an Organic Fertilizer operation?

There will be an industrial fertilizer shortage, its baked into the cake.  It's not an accident, it's part of the current attack on all of civilization.  Everyone in this Forum agrees that its not the best way to grow and that people should decentralize from, megafarms. That aside we have a problem incoming.  The previously industrial farmed land will have productivity cut tremendously in 2 steps  1. loss of industrial fertilizer  2.  poor soil health with too few inputs and too little time to regenerate. I want to help start a small scale Organic Fertilizer operation. I would like it to be a model and it will be open source, I hope people copy and improve.   It needs to be scalable. so it cant depend on kitchen scraps or other small quantity stuff.  The product needs to work as amendment so I want something more concentrated in goodness than a simple mulch.  I will make it area specific.  In my case I have a sea to access so I will include fish and bivalve and seaweed etc.  I will start my scale at a target of 5 tons for the first year so that we know we are looking for a small industrial scale..  beyond a few guys with shovels and wheelbarrows.

My question is what would be the composition of an ideal fertilizer that can be produced without major scientific processes (meaning i would need years of study and costly equipment)?   I can include basic  science,  such as biochars or kilning oyster shells or  basic ferments.   we need to do what NPK does as well as we can but want to supply more material for the soil to return to real soil... with living biome.  I am sure someone(s)  have solved this already,   so I am happy to jus copy and adjust to my region. I am in Japan,  I dont see a lot of large scale organic fertilizer ops.  I am looking to offer a simple product that can do the job ..  or a couple of options..  but it should be ready to go..  

Using biochar is  on the list.  I would add that into the mix early so it gets composted for a few months.  we have massive amounts of bamboo which can be harvested for free,  possibly even at a small profit.  I have read that things like oyster shells are more bio-available after being roasted a bit..  

The way I imagine these operations working is that we would set up relationships 1rst with local municipality (try to receive leaf/grass/tree cuttings)  work on local business for fish waste and oyster shell..  see if usable kelp is accessable or not..    So I can imagine that much of it..  but I am looking for how to get to the product part.  what's  gonna be the crucial elements and finally the recipe?   Then  we can  come up with a simple industrial process..    for now I want a production that does not require starting a livestock business,  though I am aware that that is a great direction for nutrients.


For now I imagine something like a bamboo/leaf compost with powdered biochar and possibly some powdered oyster shell  as a  base...  but I am just going with things I have used and already know..  

Thanks for discussion!

Sounds to me like you live in a nutrient rich area.  Maybe find some local fish or seafood processing businesses near you and see if you could get the waste stream.  maybe fish skin, innards,bones, scales etc...   Ground up shells of crabs and shrimp and other critters.  seaweed of most any kind.
Sounds like the making of some good stuff for the soil. I wish you luck.

When we had our homestead, I had a job where I was closely associated with the local Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber is a local organization that works to help benefit local businesses through a membership.

Quite often, prospective businesses would contact them for information and tours of businesses similar to theirs.

If your local area has something like an organization similar to this, I would suggest contacting them to see if any of their members have a fertilizer business so that you can learn how that business is running their operation.

This would help you understand how to commercial make a fish emulsion.

And how companies commercially make biochars or kilning oyster shells.

What concerns me is how to go about making sure the NPK is right.  Would a person hire a scientific lab to do an analysis of the finished product each time or is there equipment that does this?

Brendan Edwards wrote:

For now I imagine something like a bamboo/leaf compost with powdered biochar and possibly some powdered oyster shell  as a  base...  but I am just going with things I have used and already know..  

If I understand you well, you intend to use bamboo leaves in the compost. If so, be aware that bamboo leaves are hard to compost because they have too much silica. I use bamboo leaves to mulch my garden paths so they will last more than a year...  Even though I live in the tropics!

Sergio Cunha wrote:

Brendan Edwards wrote:

For now I imagine something like a bamboo/leaf compost with powdered biochar and possibly some powdered oyster shell  as a  base...  but I am just going with things I have used and already know..  

If I understand you well, you intend to use bamboo leaves in the compost. If so, be aware that bamboo leaves are hard to compost because they have too much silica. I use bamboo leaves to mulch my garden paths so they will last more than a year...  Even though I live in the tropics!

What sort of time scale you think it would take to use chipped bamboo in possibly more agressive compost (hotter more GM fungus or something)  1 thing that seems common in bamboo areas here is dark soil with micro rhizome,  but these have had time to develop. The reclaimed areas seem to produce nicely..  but ya  there is no fresh bamboo refuse.  Silica in that rfesh form resists decomp?  perhaps,  but it seems to work well after

I am planting a couple long rows of Comfrey (Blocking 14).  i intend to harvest it using an electric pushmower a couple times each year, after it gets established. Using some ideas from JADAM, I will put it into a large barrel with water and a handful of leaf mold.  Let it sit for a couple months and use as liquid fertilizer.  

Dennis Bangham wrote:I am planting a couple long rows of Comfrey (Blocking 14).  i intend to harvest it using an electric pushmower a couple times each year, after it gets established. Using some ideas from JADAM, I will put it into a large barrel with water and a handful of leaf mold.  Let it sit for a couple months and use as liquid fertilizer.  

why comfrey in particular?

I was checking out JADAM,  guy I know was using it..   he ended up needing standard NPK to kickstart things.  I think it works well though..  do you have some experience with that?

Comfrey has deep roots and extracts a lot of nutrients from below.  They are fast at recovering and people use them in chop and drop as a green manure.
I am still learning about JADAM and am setting up the capability to do it for around 150 fruit trees, vines and bushes.

I like this topic and hope to kick start it back into the discussion. I found a Dynamic Accumulator Database from USDA.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19S3wsjXU6VPzmbklZLVxKt6DCyZIPjCYw6zRrVg7M4Y/edit?gid=662104531#gid=662104531

I know Alfalfa has a good amount of Nitrogen and Beets have a lot of NPK.
I am thinking of experimenting with a 50 lb bag of alfalfa pellets and a 50 lb bag of shredded beet pulp.  
Soak them in an IBC tote and pour around the base of my fruit trees.

Brendan Edwards wrote:I was checking out JADAM,  guy I know was using it..   he ended up needing standard NPK to kickstart things.  I think it works well though..  do you have some experience with that?

We use JADAM & KNF techniques to power the market garden system on our farm and have lots of experience using these techniques. If and when we find ourselves in post-apocalyptic world, JADAM & KNF techniques will be essential tools in the growers toolbox for growing annuals and for the reasons you've stated in your original post.

JADAM requires a base fertilizer in the beginning, which is usually compost or manure applied before planting. Then the liquid fertilizers and microorganism solutions are applied in a maintenance fertigation program until harvest. There's also natural pesticide and anti fungal sprays recipes you can make, but we haven't needed them since our permaculture farm is a diverse eco-system and the market garden is just one part of it.

As you get larger scale, it gets harder and harder to have enough compost to use as a base fertilizer. While our compost systems are getting more and more advanced and they are generating more output, it's still not enough to cover the 6,000 sqft of annual bed space for Spring, Summer, and Fall crops. So we acquired a pelletizing machine and created our own pelletized fertilizer from the raw wool our sheep flock produces. So our base fertilizer is raw wool and a little compost. Combine that with an aggressive covercropping program, worm castings from a large vermicompost operation, and biochar, and that's all we've needed to grow in the sandy gravel we have here in New Hampshire.

The key idea here is that in the future we'll all need to utilize the sources of organic material we have around us. In your case, there could potentially be loads of organic sources of fertility from the sea. KNF has a wonderful recipe for fermenting fish down to liquid amino acids. Oystershell can be combined with vinegar to make calcium acetate, a magic potion for people growing in acidic soils. Kelp has all the minerals of the sea. Bamboo leaves and other organic waste can be fed to compost worms, producing another fertilizer in the form of worm castings.

It could be you start off as a compost operation that specializes in different high-qualilty compost 'blends'. You could mix in different products from the sea to get different results. In addition you could sell liquid plantfoods.

Hopefully, this gives you some ideas.

I’m hoping to learn ferment/ammendments small scale in my yard before rolling out to my community. Does anyone know if out of date tinned sardines etc can be used to start a compost ferment?

I am following Dr. Redhawk's guidance by adding Clover, Tillage Radish, Rape Seed and a couple other. After reading the dynamic accumulator (above) I went and bought sugar beets (2lbs for $5) and spread them around my older trees and will make JADAM Liquid Fertilizer out of Sugar Beet Pulp for around my seedlings.
The sugar beets will help add to the bacteria and fungal growth.  Plus I can harvest some to eat.
I also add a couple types of turnip and mustard as green mulch and let them reseed. I have to give some greens away to friends and force them to be healthy.

Tina Gee wrote:I’m hoping to learn ferment/ammendments small scale in my yard before rolling out to my community. Does anyone know if out of date tinned sardines etc can be used to start a compost ferment?

Look into JADAM there is a recipe for using fish.