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Compost Brings Life to Your Soil
All plants need a living micro-environment to grow and thrive. However, even the richest of soils become depleted of nutrients and living organic matter through the natural uptake of nutrients by plants and the leaching of nutrients through rain, wind and erosion. Adding compost improves soil physical structure, chemical efficiency and biological health.
Improving Physical Structure: Adding compost makes soil more crumbly and workable. Consequently, problems resulting from soil compaction such as poor aeration, difficulty cultivating and poor drainage are significantly relieved. With improved soil structure, porosity and density, vegetation develops strong healthy root systems essential to protecting soil from wind and water erosion and reducing the plants’ overall stress from season to season.
Compost acts as a thirsty sponge holding water within the soil. That means fewer runoff problems, less susceptibility to drought and reduced irrigation requirements.
Chemical Efficiency: Compost can raise and lower soil’s pH, providing just the right acid/alkaline balance for a variety of plants. It also buffers the pH, stabilizing it against change. Compost improves the cation exchange capacity of soil. This increases its ability to hold nutrients, thereby increasing its fertility and maximizing its usage of fertilizer, often allowing for reduced applications.
Biological Health: Because nutrients are released by microbial action as soil temperatures rise, plants benefit from a built-in “time release” feature that matches their increased nutrient demands as warm weather accelerates growth. The result is higher yields from the same soil.
Research has also shown that increased populations of certain microbes may suppress the incidence of specific plant diseases.
Balanced Carbon/Nitrogen Ratio: Plants need adequate carbon dioxide if they are to use nitrogen efficiently. Simply adding nitrogen to soil, without supplementary carbon in the form of organic matter, can result in disappointing yields or even accelerated depletion of available humus as it is rapidly used up to create carbon dioxide. Compost supplies organic matter in a balanced blend with nitrogen -- about 15 to 1 – so plants can thrive.
Creating a Premium Compost
How is it that an age-old process like composting can help create so many benefits?
The secret lies in natures’ powerful engine of decomposition: microorganisms. These actinomycetes, bacteria, protozoa and fungi literally devour the raw materials, raising the temperature within the heap and excreting clean organic matter.
In nature this may take years to accomplish, but composts like EKO are created using techniques that speed up nature’s process without losing its benefits. Just about any organic material can be composted. Processed sewage sludge (often referred to as biosolids), manure, agricultural and yard trimmings and municipal leaf collections are among the commonly used ingredients in compost. Of these, biosolids are perhaps the richest source of soil nutrients.
Composting has emerged as an economical way to turn this by-product of sewage processing, known as biosolids, into an enormous national asset. Long before biosolids reach the compost row, they have met EPA’s strict PSRP (Process to Significantly Reduce Pathogens) guidelines. In fact, compost made with biosolids is frequently lower in heavy metals than commercial fertilizers.
Along with biosolids, good compost requires some form of bulking agent to give it the proper carbon/nitrogen ratio. These can include wood cellulose, or just about any kind of plant material. Depending on the way the ingredients are handled, composts can vary dramatically in their final form. EKO’s proprietary process ensures a clean, vital compost.
Under EKO’s controlled conditions, windrows or aerated piles of organic materials are allowed to heat up using the thermophilic action of microorganisms. Reaching temperatures between 131 degrees F and 165 degrees F, the raw materials are literally “digested”. Proper moisture and oxygen levels are necessary at this stage to produce the best compost.
Pathogens (including harmful bacteria, viruses and weed seeds) are destroyed and pesticides residues are broken down. Because each batch will vary in composition, EKO compost is always critically monitored and documented during the process.
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