soil biology

Andrew McGuire, an agronomist with Washington State University, wrote that bio-products are “risky because decades of experience and research have found these products fail, or fail inconsistently, or have small benefits that don’t cover their cost.

Here’s another interesting article I came across recently. Dr. Carrow wrote an article in the October 1993 issue of GCM with the title Eight questions to ask: evaluating soil and turf conditioners.

A correspondent wrote with a question about soil biology for controlling organics, adding compost tea to feed beneficial bacteria, and etc. There are two articles that I recommend as an introduction to this topic, both by David Zuberer.

I came across an interesting example as I was reading the ‘Internal Structure’ chapter in Joshua Schimel’s Writing Science. The example is a quotation from Nitrogen and Nature by Vitousek et al.

There is an interesting article about carbon by Bryan G. and Tyler J. Hopkins in Crops & Soils magazine. Here’s a quick summary, put together with a series of quotes from the article.