One of cultural practices in organic farming is to spray vegetable crops with compost tea. It is believed that compost tea would provide plant nutrients, stimulate growth (via growth hormones in the tea), and suppress diseases. How strong is such evidence?
First of all, you have to investigate the numbers of plant nutrients and hormones present in the compost. Then you will identify that compost have ability to suppress disease. if yes which type of disease? diseases caused by fungal pathogens or bacteria? then you will conclude something.
Hi Dr Hi Nguyen, I completely agree with @ Prof. Hani Antoun; He very rightly supported it with evidences in given links. Yes it positively works with plant growth and suppressing diseases in Vegetable cultivation. Thanks
Hi Nguyen,
I have investigated using the leachate from Vermicast for controlling Botrytis Induced Fruit Abortion in Persimmons. I never published the paper but I have now uploaded it to my publications on this website. I think you would be surprised at how promising this organic alternative is?
See Link
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271833416_The_Efficacy_of_Applied_Beneficial_Micro-organisms_for_the_Control_of_Botrytis_Induced_Fruit_Abortion_in_Persimmons_%282003%29
Best wishes Philip Barlow
Technical Report The Efficacy of Applied Beneficial Micro-organisms for the C...
Hi Nguyen
My knowledge is limited in this field I therefore stand corrected, but with my little knowledge, what I understand is that the compost tea doesn't have that many nutrients (it can however help make unavailable nutrients available in the soil once it has been applied), in fact I do not think you can apply it in the soil as the source of nutrients on its own, its primary purpose is to restore the aerobic food web in soils. It contains beneficial microorganisms, in the correct ratios, along with the nutrients that these organisms need, to the soil, resulting in the establishment of a functioning food web in the soil. Therefore, because of the increased activity in the soil (decomposition and increase in beneficial microbes) the answer to your question is yes,you would expect an increase in plant growth due to more nutrients being made available for the plant in the soil especially N. And also any pathogens that were present before tea addition would be out competed by the increased soil biota added from the tea. This however highly depends on the type of organisms that were in the tea.
Hope my 2c helps and answers your question!
My dear, to date several researched has been conducted over tea waste compost (TWC) but not the water extract from TWC. I think both of them may have the same result. However, this needs a further study. In a study performed by Mastouri et al.(2009) on lettuce, for example, growth, dry matter accumulation, and head weight significantly increased in TWC amended media. Plee see the attachment.
Hi. I've been looking into disease suppression via composts and compost teas and whilst there have been many papers produced over the years there seems to be a lack of consistency in results. There seems to be very few papers on experiments carried out at the field scale level - I'm particularly interested in potato late blight and potato cyst nematode control but have seen nothing
that would persuade me to advise a farmer to use anything but 'conventional' pesticides. If you look at late blight for example, you would need a consistent tea with reasonable rainfastness to provide protection for at least a few days otherwise the farmer would have to apply too regularly causing compaction problems. And if the tea didn't work on an occassion? Then, with blight, it could be that the crop would be devestated in avery short time.
It should be noted that it is not the same vermicompost leachate (VL) or Worm-Bed Leachate (WBL) with vermicompost tea. There are more evidences with VL with respect plant nutrients, stimulate growth and suppress diseases for example we report the evaluation of Worm-Bed Leachate as an Antifungal Agent against Pathogenic Fungus, Colletotrichum gloeosporioides
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