Don and Talitha Lourie, formerly of Springdale, Arkansas — now Nicholasville, Kentucky.
Thank you for your interest in our Johnson–Su style soil inoculant. In December 2019 we built our first two Johnson–Su bioreactors in our garden in Northwest Arkansas. We were impressed with the research results of Dr. David Johnson at New Mexico State University, and excited to see what it would do for our garden, lawn, and our little three-acre plot of land. We followed his instructions very carefully.
For comparison, we checked some mushroom compost sold locally and found it had been sterilized before sale — meaning no micro-life, so its value was only in the nutrients locked in the organic matter. Compost from garden centers is usually just a little better. The real value is in the biology, not the nutrients.
Built from concrete reinforcement wire mesh — a cylinder 4 feet in diameter and 6 feet tall, set on a wood pallet and lined with landscape fabric. Before filling, we installed six perforated 4-inch plastic pipes, then packed in 110 five-gallon buckets of chopped, wet leaves. Wetting the leaves took the most time; lifting heavy buckets up a stepladder all day was work. We kept the piles moist and out of the sun and watched them shrink from 6 feet tall to just over 4 feet in the first year.
We added composting worms to help break down the organic matter and add nutrients — African Nightcrawlers in the outside bins, Red Wigglers in the inside finishing bin. After 18 months composting outside, some material is fed to the inside worms, then the finished products are mixed together.
We couldn't wait any longer, so we took our first samples after 9 months of composting just to see how it would perform in the garden. We made an extract and sprayed it all over the yard and garden. One surprising result: our pepper plants endured 4 frosts and were still setting fruit well into October. It took a 24°F frost to finally kill them — we later learned vermicast biology can give plants roughly 4 degrees of frost protection.
We built larger piles using 100% chopped yard leaves. As the months pass, the air brings a multitude of additional bacteria and fungi from around the world. It's common at 18 months of composting to see over 150 species of fungi and over 700 species of bacteria.
We dismantled the piles and sent a sample to Earthfort Lab in Corvallis, Oregon. The results were surprising and impressive: 14 billion fungi and 7 billion bacteria per gram, with high diversity — a fungal-to-bacterial ratio of 5.26:1. We posted the results to the Johnson–Su Facebook group, and farmers and gardeners started asking for product. We'd originally only intended to use the compost on our own property.
We've since relocated to North Central Kentucky and set up here to make more, ready to ship from Nicholasville. See our most recent lab results for the current batch.
The value of this type of compost is not the nutrient content but the diversity of the micro-life. Research shows the higher the number of species, the better they work together to feed plants and build soil carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Recent research calls this concept — different species working together — quorum sensing. The more diversity, the better they work.
Decades of commercial fertilizer use have reduced once-rich soils to dirt with very little life to support plants. Many farmers are now finding they can eliminate 80–90% of purchased fertilizer when they apply the Johnson–Su inoculant at just 1–2 pounds per acre, applied with water as described in How to Use.
This material is special, but it works best in a program of limited or no-till farming with cover crops — it's vital that soil stay covered most of the year. The only way to build organic matter is living plants. A healthy soil with good plant diversity can build organic matter at up to ½ percent per year, and this inoculant gives a superior environment for plants to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into soil organic matter.
Farmers applying the inoculant at seed planting report yields close to what they got using many more pounds of fertilizer — while the soil micro-life keeps building organic matter season over season. We're excited to help with your home garden or agricultural enterprise. Get in touch with any questions.