How to make and analyse high quality compost: Expert panel 8

Welcome to the 8th of the monthly expert panel discussions. As I mentioned before, each month I’ll be hosting discussions and debates between some of the most prominent voices in regenerative agriculture, soil science, restoration land management and more. In this session I hosted a discussion on how to make and analyse high quality compost with my friends and colleagues at Climate Farmers, a non-profit organization working to advance regenerative agriculture in Europe. In this panel I invited three of the most experienced and influential educators in the field of compost production and biological soil amendments. This is an area where there is still a lot of contention as you’ll see in any online forum on the topic. Differences in opinion about bacterial or fungal dominant compost, hot thermophilic decomposition or cooler and slower techniques. Whether compost teas actually work or if prebiotic food is more important. This is a new and emerging field so there are new discoveries all the time, but rather than get bogged down in technicalities I organised this panel to cut through the confusion and talk about what really works and results in improvement of soil health for growers. Now one mistake that I have to own up to is that I screwed up a bit on the scheduling coordination with the speakers, and for that reason Charles Dowding and Adreinne Goldshalx didn’t show up until the end. We’ll get to hear a little bit from Charles in the last 15 minutes, but Adrienne only comes in during the Q&A portion which isn’t part of this episode. Don’t worry though, I have plans to do follow up interviews with them both so we’ll hear from them in some of the episodes coming up. Luckily Troy Hinke of Living Roots Compost Tea was a real hero and carried the discussion and all the questions I had all the way through. Don’t forget that if you want to see the video of the full event, you can check it out on the Climate Farmer’s Youtube channel through the link in the show notes for this episode. Since these discussions are longer than the regular weekly episodes, I’ll keep the intro short and jump right into the introductions for our panelists. Links https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9BQ2a952wEchjyRSZPV6-Q https://www.livingrootscomposttea.com/ https://www.instagram.com/livingrootscomposttea/?hl=en https://charlesdowding.co.uk/ https://www.instagram.com/charles_dowding/?hl=en Check out these previous episodes on soil health https://regenerativeskills.com/gabe-brown-on-how-to-restore-soil-and-ecological-health-on-a-massive-scale/ https://regenerativeskills.com/regenerating-the-biology-in-your-soil-expert-panel-4/ https://regenerativeskills.com/robert-pavlis-soil/ https://regenerativeskills.com/matt-powers-regen-soil/