On Sat, 1 Jan 2011 12:50:03 -0800 (PST), Bob
wrote:

On Dec 31 2010, 11:37*pm, Gordon wrote:
As far as your "organic" veggies.... Can you go into some details of
the difference between nitrogen absorbed from fertilizer made from
methane gas and that absorbed from horse ****?

* * * Simple!!!! Look at the price. No fertilizer, no weeding, no
spraying, DOUBLE the price!
* Gordon


Dear Gordon and Bruce:

Dosing dirt with 20-20-20 fertilizer or for you lawn guys 20-0-0
presents its own problems.... as in turning your soil into concrete
after a few years. Dirt needs organic materials as well, as in mulch,
but thats not my main gripe. What does get me ****ed is all the
pesticides, herbicides, fungi/mold, soil conditioners, etc and other
wacky chemicals used to get a crop to market. I believe is harmful to
us over time.

First of all that really isn't true, at least not when you use the
word "mulch" which certainly seems to imply an organic substance
consisting of rotted vegetable matter - leaves, etc. I have been on
farms where nothing has been put on the soil except for animal manure
for the past hundred years and it was still happily growing a crop.

As far as "soil conditioners" that too was being done, in some cases,
certainly as far back as I can remember. You sent a sample to the
State Agriculture people and they would send back an analysis of what
you needed to plow into the ground for the next year, depending of
course if your land was especially acidic, base, or what. The main use
for this service, as I remember, was the potato farmers as potatoes
need (I believe) base soils and they plowed in ashes, I think.

The point isn't that you can't grow produce without chemicals, rather
that you can't get the same production per hectare/acre, in other
words you can't make as much money and lets face it every wants more
money.

But my point really wasn't whether you used fertilizer or not it was
whether there was any difference between fertilizing with horse manure
or with liquid nitrogen? After all the element in horse manure that
the plants use is nitrogen.

Apparently human manure is one of the best sources of nitrogen and is
used pretty much all over the Orient. In fact, in China, I recently
read that while in times past producers obtained human manure free in
return for the service of pumping out the toilet tanks in the houses
however recently the requirement had increased greatly and now it is
no longer free but is now collected by entrepreneurs and sold to the
farmers which has resulted in hard times for the farmers as cost of
production has risen while sales profits have remained the same.

As I said, human manure is very widely used, in fact so widely used in
Taiwan that it is responsible for Taiwan having the highest rate of
hepatitis in the world, at least it did some years ago.

So I asked again, is it better to fertilize with natural products or
with manufactured liquid nitrogen? The manufactured nitrogen being
largely germ free.

sniped
Cheers,

Bruce
(bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom)