Jon Storvick - 16 January 2009 10:45 AM

hehe - this is rapidly becoming Permaculture/Sustainable Agriculture & Design meets 5GW territory

Amen! Exactly where I wanted to be in 2009, give or take a wildly successful independent hip hop label.

Jon, what’s your take on EM Effective Microorganisms? 
http://www.emamerica.com/agriculture/articles/the_apnan_manual.html

I can see how the core ingredients like lactic acid and yeast are obviously beneficial, but the closed-source recipe, the mistranslation LULZ, and especially the suspect claims being made by a lot of online EM retailers make me wonder.  This could be a case of Kabbalah water, you know? 

Here’s an online thread of educated guesses about the recipe and methods:
http://www.bokashiman.com/2007/02/response-to-ben-about-making-your-own-em/

Dammit!  I just hit “back” to re-reference something you wrote and lost everything I was about to post.  Aargh.

My first instinct is be suspicious of anything that isn’t open source and/or replicable on one’s own (not to mention nondisclosure of ingredients in a bacteriological product).  In this instance, I would say stick with organic and natural methods that don’t rely on a copyrighted “recipe” - I believe there are probably alternatives to EM stuff that would work just as well, and without the risk of unwanted nastiness in the unlabeled/undisclosed ingredients.

If we re-introduce organic matter, fungi, etc to soils, I think they will likely regenerate a useful bacteria/microorganism population.  I’ll have to look more into this, though.

hehe - practice an IDEAL AGRICULTURE, etc

I can see the transcript of this appearing in an Adult Swim short.

Moving this, and a great deal of other discussions, over to here:

http://urbanevolution.org

Will catch-up there then!  Glad to see the discussion molding into procedures to act on.