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Anaerobic composting/Bokashi benefits for a working farm? Pathogens, "storing" crop residues

 
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I'm trying to get my head around Bokashi, and understand what the system offers that other waste management/nutrient cycling systems don't.

The benefits for those living in inner-cities and with a low volume of food waste are quite obvious.

I work at a small market garden, and am wondering if there might be a role anaerobic fermentation might play at a larger scale. There are a couple of difficulties with market gardening compositing that I think anaerobic fermentation might help address:

  • We have an ongoing stream of crop residues, but usually not enough all at once to build a larger compost pile. Perhaps bokashi is a way to "hold" or store their nutrients, innoculate with beneficials, until there is a large enough mass to create a thermophillic pile (thermophillic is important for us as we need to reliably kill pathogens and weed seeds)
  • We do get diseased crops sometimes. Perhaps the fermentation process can out-compete those pathogens? But I am concerned it may in fact breed some of those pathogens - Elaine Ingham talks a lot about pathogens often being anaerobic micro-organisms



  • I'm wondering if those who are more clued up about this stuff might have some insight?
     
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    Hello Jon! While I am certainly not an expert, I have tried out Bokashi as a way of storing future compost, indoors, in air-tight bottles, for transport to a future location. I have some bottles that have been sealed for a year and a half now, and I did an experiment where I recreated what I put into that bottle - allowing for me to bury a one month old Bokashi product and a year and a half old Bokashi product in the same area. Both broke down at approximately the same rate and seemed to have the same consistency/smell.

    From what I have heard/read, the Bokashi process creates a very high pressure and high acidity environment, which kills off any weed seeds and bacterial pathogens. Things like chemicals and other contaminants will still remain.

    I am planning to try an experiment in the future where I fill a bottle with the most diseased plant I can find, and one bottle with a mix of various weedy plants, both those that spread by rhizomes as well as by hardy seeds. I will take the first bottle and mix it into an area where I plant the same type of plant that got the disease, and I will take the second bottle and mix it into an area where I know the soil has not been contaminated by weed seeds, and see if anything comes up.
     
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