This is from a report Jeb and I wrote after going on a field trip to see the Soil Doctor in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Doug Weatherbee is his name. He is a man who makes the soil richer through compost teas and getting it more in balance. This is a new way to grow things without chemicals. Even better than organic.
In the San Miguel area the soil is alkaline–meaning it has a lot of bacteria in it. Many kinds of plants need a wide variation of ratio fungi to bacteria. For corn it is 1 bacteria to 1 fungi per teaspoon of dirt. To make it 1 to 1 Doug makes a compost tea that favors fungi so his corn grows well.
In natural life the balance of nature shifts from alkaline to acidic through the years without human intervention. It goes from semi-arid to old growth forests in a matter of a thousand years.
We saw many organisms of fungi and one amoeba in the microscope.
Compost tea was becoming aerobic because of bubbling and mixing with a machine that Doug made.
Since adding the compost tea, his corn grew a lot more than the corn in the valley–even though we aren’t getting much rain.