I looked it up and it sounds like an excellent idea. Hope my local Lowe's has it, as I want to apply to my worn-out, stressed zoysia lawn. And probably the compost.
Thanks for your question, TAB --
Sunny

Originally used as a starter in anaerobic composting the Essential Microorganisms are now being touted as a miracle cure for many things. Maybe, possibly, if your soil lacks adequate levels of organic matter this may be a place to start but if adequate levels of organic matter are not added and maintained those Essential Microorganisms will have nothing to live on and will do little to sustain the soil.

Whereas, if you add the organic matter, the microbes are probably there already. I don't mean to say that EM is completely useless in this application, I don't know, but most soil has on the order of 100 million microbes per gram already...

I tend to agree with tox........if you are adding organic matter, you are also adding microbes. Not sure it is necessarily worth it to pay extra for them :-) And a LOT extra as far as I can tell!

FWIW, most of the big commercial packaged fertilizer brands come pre-innoculated with microbes - Espoma, Dr. Earth, Fox Farms, etc. So these are doing double duty by providing both nutrients and trace minerals as well as a strong microbial population. And the prices are typical for an organic fert - between $8 and $11 for a 4# box, depending on formulation.

I started Bokashi this year (kind of a D-I-Y EM fermenting process) in the spring. Grew some of my tomatoes on top of bokashi areas. No difference that I could see. Maybe it takes years to positively affect the soil.

I inherited land with soil in very bad condition I gues, old owner has not been able to mulch for several years, and he did not hire no one to do that until he passed away, his grass became 50% weed and chinch bugs. It is in south fl and you should know rain washes away all OM all the time leaving gray sand. Mulching usually happens with sterilized commercial mulch and if it is red mulch it has chemicals in it which can kill bacteria fungi etc.

I was looking for good start to condition soil food web, and that product sound interesting.

If it's that hard to keep organic matter in the soil, it seems that's your main problem, because if the microbes you add have nothing to feed on, they're not going to thrive. I think I'd be looking for sources of inexpensive bulk compost, which comes loaded with microbes, and spend my money on that. JMHO.

Compost is one form of organic matter that can be added to soil, and if purchased can get to be very expensive. Any vegetative waste you can find, organic matter, will work but in Florida you will need a lot because the soil bacteria will be at work about year around digesting that organic matter. When in Florida I have seen "landscape" company trucks filled with organic matter going away from a house to who knows where. Perhaps that landscaper composts it and sells it back to the homeowner or perhaps it simply goes to a dump as waste, but that might be a source.
Adding any microbes to a soil with little to no food for them is a waste of your money. Those microbes need something to feed on, and more than likely if there is adequate levels of organic matter the Soil Food Web is there and adding more from some expensive source could be a waste of money.

Just a heads-up -- my Lowe's doesn't carry EM-1, so I asked my favorite greenhouse/nursery and they told me "Thrive" was about the same thing.

I've had an unopened bottle of it for years -- it's about 4 inches high and the bottle is brown glass. I have seen it at Wal-Mart in the garden chemicals section. They told me one drop/gallon. It should last a long time at that rate--
Sunny

EM1 guys telling, it is a lot of positive bacteria, which will "convenience" neutral bacteria to take their side, I ordered 32 oz and sprayed 1 oz today (dissolved in 1gal rain water) around, let's see what I get. I did 50-100 ft2 lawn st Augustine, over pine mulch and over 10x2 feet lines of umbrella shrubs.

The best way to tell is to have an identical plot that is not treated where everything else is kept the same. If you can do that you have a good chance of observing any effect.

Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

Im actually in the process of doing a side by side experiment right now. I was talking about it over in the compost threads and kind of got some responses like people were not familiar with it. I make my own lactobacillus and have used it for getting rid of odors in my worm bin and recently in my compost tumbler. It worked great in both instances! Foliar fed to my plants seems to do great also.

EM1 can be effective but it is on the expensive side and yes, like what was already stated above, there needs to be a good source nutrition for the micros to thrive once introduced.

I have a set up where I am doing wheat bran bokashi in two tubs. One with EM1 that I purchased for approx $30 and the other with my lacto serum/combined with an IMO2 mix which consists of beneficial micros harnessed form my worm bin. This was all made with things I already had around the house so there was no money spent to make it (other than what I spend on groceries).

Im testing both tubs of wheat bran to test out whether or not one is more effective than the other. The theory is that the EM1 will be superior because it will have more diverse micros, particularly Purple Non-Sulfer Bacteria (PNSB) which are pretty bad ass micros. My serum doesnt have PNSBs but my micro herd is diverse in that worm bins have a huge range indigenous to them. If I really wanted to get PNSBs, I could go down to a local pond and harness them also...

My point here in all my rambling is that I can accomplish with my own serum for practicly chump change, the same thing that I can accomplish with EM1.

Everything I have seen about purchasing these kinds of products appears to me to be from pig in a poke sales people trying to part your money from you.

I wonder what it is like to pointlessly dump money in the ground? ;)

After 10 days, EMs impression i have, it is bio cleaning and decomposing, microbes, they cleaning surfaces and decomposing matter which is natural way to increase solar absobtion and produce "food" for plants, my mulch almost dissappeared in 10 days, it is pine mulch hardest to digest, I think, all minerals went somewhere in soil. I activated 1 more liter of EM, will spray it this weekend. All over mulch, expecting it to be converted to naturally delivered ferts, plus it probably will help lower pH since bacteria produces acid, plus some areas for Bad fungus fight.

Maybe our problem is a dirt, dust and other our tech remainings, clean them plus recycle and everything will turn alive, right away, silly, but just a thought!

Its all a matter of opinion wether it should be purchased or not. Wether it works or not is proven in fact meriting the answer of yes. All one has to do is google information regarding the specific beneficial bacteria contained in the product.

Lactobacillus - used for a WHOLE slew of different purposes. You can make it yourself rather easily.

PNSB - Good stuff all around.

Yeast - nothing new by any means.

There's probably more bacteria types, but these are the ones that I believe are the work horses.

Natural farming techniques have been around for ages...people (myself included) have just become so dependant on industrial products that natural products that we can make ourselves tend to sound like witchcraft, haha. I wont purchase another bottle of Em1 but I dont see any issue with making and using the techniques.

Pink Non sulfuric Bacteria, tell me how I get it in my mix, please, wout using EM1 tech?

I wont try to pretend that I am an expert by any stretch in this area but I will try to answer your question the best I can. Purple Non-sulfer Bacteria can be found in a number of locations that range from certain flowers to different leaves or you can also locate it in pond mud. I do remember a conversation among some Micro-bio types types about whether PNSBs could be harnessed from pond or lake algea. That conversation was way over my head and I didnt understand most of it. The end thought was that PNSBs might be in algea for a short amount of time but there are other bacteria there that might override them causing their numbers to be extremely low.

Pond mud (in the shallow end) or lakes also harbor what we are looking for. I have only conducted an experiment to harness PNSB once and it was with someone much more intelligent than I. The relative pain in the butt and the time consumption made me not jump at the chance to do it again (I dont have the patience). Once the mud is collected, one would then construct a Winogradsky column to culture the bacteria. Check these links out and they should get you pointed in a more reliable direction.

http://quest.nasa.gov/projects/astrobiology/fieldwork/lessons/Winogradsky_5_8.pdf

and

http://inst.bact.wisc.edu/inst/index.php?module=book&type=user&func=displayarticle&art_id=276

one more

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivRxB3w41I0

I hope these help to answer some of your questions.

Well, sounds like I will prefer to Pay 15 bucks for that headache, if just one ingridiend pain in the a... To obtain.

I must have missed something. I really need to save some money up, dump it in the ground, just to grow a less value worth of food?

;)

I have a good idea, why don't you just lay dollar bills out as mulch?

Well I do have a bit of good news in this regard. So far my side by side experiment is proving to be a success (or I should say that Im getting what I thought I would).

I used my own serum to mix up my wheat bran for bokashi and it has fermented the same as the mix that I did with the EM1. All of my controls are the exact same. Now all I have left to do is take them and ferment food waste and then place them into my garden with plants in them. Please dont get me wrong, I am NOT trying to sell EM1 to anyone. If you notice in my posts here, I have been simply trying to say that if one wants to go this route, there are much cheaper ways to accomplish what I hope will be the same result. If you eat rice, drink milk, use brown sugar or molasses (unlsuphered), and have a worm bin, you can make a concoction from stuff you already have that rivals anything on the EM1 market, in my opinion. As far as just applying to the ground, I dont know if that is the effective way to use the product regardless of what the advertisers might say. We need to have something there that will sustain the micro population once we put it there. Natural farming calls for mixing the serum with a bran of some sort i.e., wheat, rice, etc. then placing that mix in conctact with the ground and leaving it there for a time (covered with hay or something similar) to populate the soil and also call in some beneficial insects to do work.

I have all sorts of stuff going on that I am experimenting with, primarily because its something that I find interesting. I just made a water soluable calcium mix this weekend from charred eggshells and cider vinager and I also have some banana/squash/mango (the traditional mix calls for banana/squash/papaya but I didnt have access to good papaya) extract that I finished as well. I have seen this concoction used by a friend of mine and his results were very good as a foliar feed. Im rambling here...I told you guys I find this stuff interesting, haha.

Again my point is that one doesnt have to spend extra cash to get stuff that is already available all around us and even in stuff we waste. Here is a little cost analysis for what I have:

Rice - $1/lb
Brown Sugar - approx $4
milk - approx $5/gallon
molasses, unsulphered - $3
wheat bran - $8/25lbs (from feed store)
Eggshell - whatever you spend for eggs already
apple cider vinager - approx $8/gallon
banana - .89/lb
squash - $1.50/lb
mango - .90/lb

All this totals out to around $35 give or take depending on the variation in prices from different regions.

EM1 from online order - $22 plus shipping puts it at approx $30 for 1qt.

Yes the EM1 is cheaper up front but when we compare volumes, the grocery/feed store purchased products far outweigh in benefit. By the way, you can source wheat bran at the grocer. I believe that the price is something in the area of $12/lb.

This is just something that I adopted from others after seeing their results and have since used for myself. My budget for fertilizers etc. has literally dwindled down to just what I spend on my family's grocery bill. I certainly hope that this can help someone else also to both save money and also have good yeilds. Peace.

MG, I think you've made your opinion clear. If you don't have anything constructive to say, why don't you find another thread to crap on? Hopefully in a different forum.

Despite MG1's negative connations of using money as mulch, I do find it ironic that in his/her attempt for sarcasm, he/she actually brought up a vaild technique for utilizing EM. There are some people who actually opt for using paper in lieu of the various types of bran. The technique is a bit different from MG1's suggestion but still along the same lines. So there...a little positive information sprouted from well...whatever we would like to call it, haha. Here is a link to one article that I found. While I myself have never tried this route, I guess it just goes to show that there is more than one way to skin this particular cat (sorry to any cat lovers here).
http://www.wildlifegardeners.org/forum/fertilizing-soil-amendments/1292-extreme-bokashi-make-your-own-innoculant.html
Thank you MG1 for the reminder!

Haha 3DinAz! See! :)

Mg will you consider me spending my dollar bills correctly on my mulch? It is 2,50 per ft3? Should I shred these and feel better? I probably will, by EM instead of fermenting my own. First of all my own will take more attempts to get right formula, than Em s who using their labs to keep it right, but it is not a problem, problem is to keep all these bacteria in right condition for all of the time, it will take me by myself century to understand, century to implement and century to enjoy, my grandsons will scratch their ass...Ed what I targeted.

@3DinAZ - Back in September you said you would post the results of your Bokashi experiment. How well did your experiment work?

@3DinAZ - I also am wondering if you came to any conclusions with your experimentation after the last year.

I used EM formulation to treat compost that was often stinking from excess greens. The odors mostly disappeared in less than a half day. That was nearly 20 years ago. We've been composting yard and farm waste since then, using old compost coarse sifting to inoculate new windrows. If the guys forget the inoculation, the pile "tells" me within hours. We then rework the pile with old compost and the odors diminish.

I too would like to see that there is actually a beneficial effect in a controlled test such as treated and untreated lawn plots or vegetable beds. Even though the microbes can be shown to be beneficial in one setting or another, or just in the lab, the actual product needs to be tested on actual gardens. Maybe this has been done, either by the manufacturer or independent researchers.

The original EM products issued by the Japanese Kyusei Nature Farming foundation were formulated to treat waste water and compostable materials, not for direct soil or crop applications. When the Foundation ran an experimental farm in Buellton, Cal. in the early 1990's I was one of the inspectors to evaluate the operation for compliance of existing State organic law and rules and regs of the certifying group, CCOF.

Direct application of EM materials to soils showed small effects. Compost inoculated with EM microbes performed a bit better but not enough to support commercial crops on the poor sandy river terrace. The use of commercial organic fertilizer was not allowed during these trials by the Foundation. There was at least one successful field trial employing a green manure crop, sprayed with Bakashi compost, and tilled in. The following crop was impressive but not enough to justify the cost, apparently.

I am passing on these results, figuring that enough time has passed to allow me to report in general terms. Otherwise I am expected to keep such proprietary data confidential forever.

Way back when I first started composting I made many mistakes, such as adding to much of a Nitrogen source or too much water, and found that that produced a stinky, wet mess. I learned, fairly quickly, to balance the inputs so I did not have a stinky mess but a working compost pile that had no objectionable odor, without purchasing costly additives that really do very little to help if the materials put in are in balance.

It's been about a year since I first started making my own EM1. It's easy and very inexpensive to make. I have found that it does a very good job of reducing the smell of my garbage compost.
I'm using a 30 gallon drum which I have made to tumble compost. I find it convenient to have a place to throw away meat and dinner scrapes, so while I may use it as compost in the garden my main objective is waste disposal. Recently I tossed in 4 pounds of raw fish. EM1 was very effective at preventing the compost from smelling. The contents of my compost look dark and has the smell of any other compost.

I'm guessing it is a good source of beneficial bacteria in the garden, but I have not used the compost yet so I can't really comment on that.

I have also made IMO, but have yet to incorporate this into my garden. You can view the video I made about that at http://youtu.be/5nG6iOWhzJs

Here is a link that might be useful: IMO-1 Frass 2013 10 12

Thanks for the direct observations, marshall and Bob.

Re: reducing smell in compost-gone-amok, I wonder if it actually supresses processes that give off N in gaseous forms, or just suppresses odors? In other words, are you still losing N from a pile with too many greens but it just doesn't smell as bad?

kimmer, I have been composting for 45 years, so barely remember the early mistakes. There are times when the mix of green and browns, their quantities and textures and the weather are not optimum. We produce about a thousand cubic yards of waste a year to be composted to be processed in an area of 60 by 100 feet. We also collect and send to County facilities another 600 cu.yds of coarse and undesirable yard and wood waste.

I have been making compost since the early 1960's and still remember those early mistakes and what I did to correct them. I do, however, know many people with 1 years experience 30 times.

What?

Bob, are you making true EM-1, replete with PNSBs? If so, what do you use as your source for the phototrophic bacteria?

marshall, thanks for the info. As you point out, EM may not be cost effective, but I'm thinking of using it as a way to recycle all the food disposed by a few restaurants in my area (including meats, cheeses, etc.). I would then be getting some nice pickled compost for next to nothing.

In going through a lot of sites on the web, I continually find LAB or IM labelled as EMs, so it's hard to make much headway in figuring things out. Bokashi popularity seems to be soaring; however, a lot of the information is slightly incorrect. But I suppose that's always the nature of the beast.

I just received Nature Farming and Microbial Applications, so I may take a gander at that when I have a chance, though I don't imagine it will enlighten me as to just how homemade EMs compare to a commercial EM-1 and if I really can use worm castings to add PNSBs to the mix. :) I also may check out Better Bokashi and see if that gives a solid overview.

Bokashi is an anaerobic process, unlike vermicomposting that requires oxygen and good drainage to function properly.

I saw on a couple forums that people had mentioned being able cultivate PNSBs from worm castings. I don't know if that applies to the majority of PNSBs or just a few. In any case, the one I'm most interested in for harvesting and culturing to inoculate a more em-1-like serum would be Rhodopseudomonas palustris, whose versatility allows it to be found in aerobic and anaerobic conditions.

"The presence of photosynthetic bacteria along with the heterotrophic bacteria have been reported in various aquatic environments like Indian tropical waters (Vasavi et al., 2007), salt marshes (Bergstein et al., 1993), industrial effluents (Ramasamy et al., 1990; Merugu et al., 2008), sea water (Kobayashi,1982), sewage (Kobayashi et al., 1995), waste water (Sunita and Mitra, 1993 and Vasavi et al., 2007), hot water springs (Demchick et al., 1990), earthworm casts (Vasavi et al., 2007), paddy fields (Sasikala et al., 2004), ocean waters and aquaculture (Kappler et al.,2005), brackish lagoon (Anthony et al., 2006), and black sea (Overmann and Manske, 2006)." (PDF of Biotechnological Applications Of Purple Non Sulphur Phototrophic Bacteria: A Minireview)

Maybe I won't be able to find it in a worm bin with Eisenia fetida, though... I'd just hit up a swamp, but all the swamps 'round here are frozen at the moment. Well, I don't know too much about this stuff right now anyway, so maybe I'll just do more reading and just use commercial EM-1 or LAB to compost my bokashi to feed to my worms (or freeze) for now. By the time springs rolls round, maybe I'll know enough to culture and add a few PNSBs.

Btw, any good studies out there comparing the efficacy of EM-1 vs LAB for bokashi? (Only thing I seem to remember is that the PNSBs in the EM-1 consume the CO2 the LAB creates so maybe that's something significant...)