[font family=”impact,chicago” size=”36″ color=”157801″ textshadow=”6″ alignment=”left” weight=”bold” style=”normal” lineheight=”110″]Tea Time[/font]

Tea Time: A Eugene company’s compost tea improves growing conditions

By Rosemary Camozzi

As plant diseases continue to build resistance to chemical sprays, commercial growers and landscapers are looking for new, cost-effective ways to keep their plants healthy.

A growing number have discovered that nutrient-rich compost tea, once a solution for backyard gardeners, can be a valuable component of plant management programs.

Growing Solutions Inc., a Eugene company, is one of about 10 firms worldwide that make the mechanical systems for brewing aerated compost tea. It’s a new industry: Five years ago there were none.

“I got into this because I saw that the efficacy of standard chemical pesticides and nutrition management was failing,” said Michael Alms, founder and president of Growing Solutions. “Our mission is to provide feasible methods for people to migrate away from chemical dependency.”

About 500 of the company’s industrial-grade brewing systems – ranging in capacity from 25 gallons to 500 gallons and in price from $1,295 to $7,995 – are in use in temperate and tropical zones in more than 11 countries.

They can be found at vegetable farms, orchards, vineyards, retail garden centers, cut-flower farms, golf courses and landscaping operations. Locally, Rexius Forest By-Products, Down To Earth, Lane Forest Products, Little Red Farm Nursery and Johnson Brother’s Greenhouse own systems and make the tea for sale to the public.

The tea is made by straining compost through nutrient-rich water and adding oxygen. In addition to nutrients, the tea contains millions of healthy microorganisms that kill off harmful microscopic critters.

The tea has worked well at Bandon Dunes on the southern Oregon coast, one of the state’s most prestigious golf courses.

Troy Russell, the resort superintendent, said he manages the golf course as organically as possible.

Every three weeks or so, he sprays the greens with a solution of compost tea concocted in brewers purchased from Growing Solutions.

“We were looking for a way to suppress turf grass disease without using fungicides,” Russell said. “We’ve seen positive results from using the tea, and we haven’t used fungicides for a long time.”

Nutritional powerhouse

Put the tea in a glass and it looks remarkably like Lipton’s. But this highly oxygenated, mildly earthy mix is a nutritional powerhouse, chock full of beneficial microbes, micronutrients, and organic compounds.

“These components provide for disease suppression and provide the micronutrients that are often missing in chemical nutrition programs,” Alms said.

Alms has plenty of experience with plants. A grower of landscape ornamentals in Hawaii for 12 years, he moved back to the mainland in the mid-’90s and went to work selling greenhouse systems up and down the West Coast.

A business acquaintance who had developed a system for making aerated compost tea asked him to take it to market. Alms formed Growing Solutions in 1996 and began manufacturing and distributing the product, called the Microb-Brewer.

Eventually he decided to create his own design, and with funding from an angel investor and an unnamed local banker who Alms said went out on a limb to support him, he introduced his system under the Growing Solutions name in 2001. A local plastics manufacturer makes the tanks and stands, and the brewers are assembled in the Growing Solutions warehouse in Eugene’s Whiteaker district.

His design won a patent on July 28 of this year.

An alternative to chemcials

By all reports, the tea works as well as or better than its chemical alternatives.

“There is a body of scientifically documented information, in addition to an immense amount of anecdotal information, concerning compost tea and plant pathogen suppression,” said Vicki Bess, an adjunct professor at Arizona State University’s Department of Microbiology. She is also president and founder of BBC Laboratories Inc., an independent environmental microbiology laboratory in Tempe.

Bess has been analyzing compost tea for 12 years.

“Compost tea is an inexpensive way to get the combination of microorganisms, soluble nutrients and microbial metabolites (byproducts) in a single package,” she said.

Jeff Wilson-Charles, owner of Equinox Farm in Crow and part owner of Territorial Vineyards & Wine Co. in Eugene, puts it much more simply: “The compost tea has worked particularly well,” he said. “The plants are really healthy and so is the soil.”

Wilson-Charles has been using the tea for five years. Half of his 12-acre vineyard, which produces about 30 tons of grapes per year, has been sprayed with compost tea made in a Growing Solutions brewer. The other half is sprayed with sulfur, which is commonly used as a fungicide because it “burns” mold and mildew on contact.

His winemaker prefers working with the non-sulfured grapes because they have no chemical residues, said Wilson-Charles, who plans to forgo the sulfur next year and use only compost tea.

The tea-sprayed vines are not totally mold- and mildew-free, he said.

“With the tea, the mildew shows up, hovers, and goes away. It never builds up enough steam to take over a tea-sprayed area. In the sulfur-sprayed areas, if there’s 1 to 2 percent mold one day, there will be 10 percent the next and 40 percent the day after that.”

Steve Scheuerell, a postdoctoral research associate in the horticulture department at Oregon State University, earned his doctorate in plant pathology and has been studying the uses of compost tea since 1993. He says that most studies have focused on the more traditional nonaerated variety of tea, which also works very well but takes much longer to make and emits a nasty odor.

“Recent anecdotal claims show spectacular results out of aerated compost tea,” said Scheuerell, who uses the tea himself with good results.

Far more conventional acres than organic are being farmed with compost tea, he said, adding that farmers report better soil health, better water-holding capacity and better root growth on soil that may have been “beat up” by chemical applications.

One potential problem with the tea is that depending on the type of compost and nutrients used, there can be diverse outcomes, Scheuerell said. Growing Solutions takes care of that problem, Alms said, by selling not just the brewing tanks, but organic nutrients and specially made organic worm compost that is certified to contain no human or animal pathogens.

Alms is working to spread the word about compost tea as a member of a trade group called the Compost Tea Industry Association. He has also been instrumental in forming the Compost Tea Education & Research Foundation, made up primarily of scientists who specialize in soil microbiology and plant ecology.

One of his competitors is Bruce Elliott, president of EPM Inc. in Cottage Grove. Elliott started out making vermicompost systems and later added tea brewers, which he sells mostly to large-scale, conventionally farmed operations.

A mind-shift among farmers

Elliott sees a mind-shift happening among farmers.

“It’s not a hard sell because most of my customers are looking for alternatives to chemicals and a way to replenish microbial life in the soil,” he said.

With his business growing at 20 percent to 25 percent a year, Alms plans to cut down on direct sales by hiring more distributors. He also plans to open offices elsewhere along the West Coast and in Hawaii.

In the future, Alms would like to offer compost tea mixes that are designed for specific applications. For example, if a Yamhill County grower had powdery mildew on his vines, Alms would provide tea ingredients to create a brew tailor-made to fix the problem.

In the meantime, at Equinox Farm, Wilson-Charles said the tea has gone beyond eliminating the need for sulfur in his vineyard. “We use less fertilizer every year,” he said.