if the tea has an effect, then it's the tea that's responsible!
do you have a process for isolating the microbial populations in a solution?

Bill

We do not have a process yet. We are just more curious which substance is responsible for the disease supression.
So you recommend to isolate bacteria and then test it on the plants? But not all the tea is the same, tea made from poop of animal cattle is probably different then tea made from paper waste.

things in nature are a whole - why try to reduce anything to it's atomic structure? the problem with modern chemical agriculture is that they try to deal in isolated components of a holistic system .... nitrogen promotes a lot of fast growth, but nitrogen alone doesn't make for healthy productive plants

if you actually mean prevention, as in avoiding disease, the tea would be changing whatever unhealthy condition might cause the problem .... if you mean curing some problem, probably the same applies, as healthy soil makes healthy plants, teas may have some contribution to make to "system health" in some situations - if you try to "make" teas that have one, or a limited number, of things, it'll have much more limited usefullness, maybe none, and it's not common that a tea will kill insects

if the tea has any effect, it's the tea that has the effect, not some isolated piece of it .... whatever you put into a worm bin, what you get out is worm poop! or maybe you don't understand that vermicompost is worm castings? if you make tea by soaking animal manure, you have manure tea .... never heard of paper tea, but you could make that too :)

Bill

Hi,

I mean prevention of a disease. Like a plant strengthener or mayby even as an antagonist. We feed our worms with potato waste, so that would be potato tea then. They live in a substrate of peat. We would like to bring it on the market (for growers as prevention, spraying it on the plants) as a plant strengthener but we are afraid that we cannot guarantee the quality of the tea, because the foodstock can sometimes change from month to month.

no it wouldn't be a 'potato tea', it would be a worm or vermicompost tea, 'potato tea' would be made from potatoes, not vermicompost - doesn't matter what you feed them, what they eat is really the decomposer organisms that are fairly "universal", and what comes out the other end has little relation to what went in, beyond the possibility that if you feed on one thing only, that happens to be high in some micro-nutrient [like say bannanas, high in potassium], the resulting compost may be higher in that one thing .... potato skins can be high in potash, the flesh and plants aren't - the may also be high in solanin, and who knows what that means

and you should be concerned about what you are selling the product for unless you have pretty extensive controlled scientific trial proof of what you want to claim .... what any tea will do for someone else will depend on their "micro-environment", not yours, and their problem is not necessarily due to the same causes as yours .... any compost tea may add to the general healthy balance of an area, but using it to correct particular deficiencies requires knowing exactly what's lacking in the target area and the best way to fix that

Bill