Hi Jerel!

I have seen the best FUNGAL (fast and diverse) development in static heaps I have had inoculated with the 6 Biodyn Herbs a la M. Bruce procedure with parts of horse manure and beech leaf litter and a part of spruce sawdust. This yields and incredible bacterial diversity and seems to be a good basis for the fungal development. Also the heat is not getting up so high. I tried this after an idea of Remer for worm breeding and it gave me the highest quality of produce I grew on the top I have ever reached. Incredible taste and almost “non-wiltable” lettuce. Later in the year I had Agaricus mushrooms and Amanita mushrooms fruiting in the greenhouse.

I currently run three Johnson-Su with herbal inoculation and the first with all fresh material in summer took off perfectly – never any smell, perfect temperature curve, good fungal development. The second with a smaller manure proportion and more senescent and pre-dried material had a hard time to heat and does not smell as it should – it is not a typical rotten smell, but not the clean, clear smell a balanced heap gets.

When I have been playing around with compost teas, I have seen that the fungi love to adhere to insect parts – (I have tried to lure them from soil later with grasshopper legs and basidiomycetes even sporulated on it, I think that is why crab shell work – the system lacks insects!). The problem would be to spray that material on large acreages – I just splashed the material on the ground with an old broom but you can’t do that with a tractor.

Interestingly I have seen a magenta actinomycete increase in the last years which seems to work very well for the brassicas, but I have seen it also in decaying eggfruit and other residues. I have no idea about a closer identity of this guy – being a mycologist and not having a lab for metabolic tests. I have no idea if he has been multiplying by composting or else.

I have completely failed to get good results with the IMO inoculants in compost, but I have given up on that rather fast as the herbs were more convenient and work well – while I really like the KNF foliar system.

I have found a paper that societies with EM species seem to have a higher carbon sequestration (something like double, I recall 1,7x but I am not sure) in soils compared to AM rates. This was attributed to a better nitrogen extraction by EM fungi and thus higher locked pure carbon material – but I am not really convinced by that argumentation. But obviously the existence of forest where those guys are predominant relies on a good proportion of SOM, and in the view of Ducerf, inert (fossilized = non degradable, as he puts it) and from plant origin.

Best H