Lessons from an English farm: using bokashi and Johnson-Su composting

The greatest delight of travel is to see and learn things that you cannot at home. Yesterday was an instance of just such a pleasure in England, as our friend and host Karen, took me took me to visit her friends Phil and Heather Gorringe and their son Monty of Lower Blackmere farm in Herefordshire. The three of them spent two hours showing me around the farm, which was incredibly generous, given how busy they are. Thank you! I wish I had remembered to take an overall photo of my hosts and their beautiful farm; I did remember to take some "tech" photos though!

These three incredible farmers are out in the front of the regenerative farming (though with typical Brit self-effacement, they call it regen lite themselves), with composting and bokashi; a rich diversity and stacking of farm functions; and the way they raise their livestock and crops.  They have been honing some of these practices for 30 years.  There are many practices of their farm - notably the large livestock and field crops - where my knowledge lagged too far behind theirs to understand fully what they were doing, but there are three that I picked up on.  I want to share them here because they were new to me and may be new to many folks in the northeastern part of the US where I farm.  

Making/expanding their own bokashi grain.

Lower Blakemere farm makes bokashi grain for use on their farm and for Heather’s soil nutrients company Wiggly Wigglers.  As many folks know, bokashi is an anearobic composting process developed in Japan, and regarding soil health it is notable because the compost contains a powerful mix of micro-organisms (lactobacillus bacteria, phototrophic bacteria and yeast) that are particularly beneficial for the soil.

Bokashi grains are made at a commercial scale at Lower Blakemere.  For one batch they mix together the inoculant EM1, water, molasses, and about three tons of wheat bran.  The mixture should be wetted just enough that it balls when pressed together in your hand, but does not release any water.   It is then poured into large, cubic yard black plastic bags which are closed up with giant zip ties.  The bags hang out outside in the sun and all the material ferments inside it to make new bokashi grain.  Phil cut open one of the bags and allowed us to put our hands in and grab a handful. The crumbly, moist mixture had a sweet and slightly beer-like aroma.  Not a strong ferment at all. The household bokashi container that Heather let us smell earlier was much stronger, definitely like sauerkraut.  After a few weeks the fermentation is finished, the grain is laid out and dried, and put into bags to sell to folks as a garden amendment.  

But, is also used in with the livestock to improve the livestock’s deep litter and make a powerful field fertilizer - see next item!

More information about how Lower Blakemere makes their bokashi grain from their website at lowerblakemere.co.uk/making-bokashi-bran-on-lower-blakemere-farm/

And, a small-scale recipe for making bokashi grains to get the ratios of the ingredients here: thecompostess.com/2015/04/22/how-to-make-bokashi/

​Deep litter with bokashi

At Lower Blakemere I saw cattle for this first time in deep litter.  The Lower Blackmere cattle are winter-housed in large, open stalls in groups of around 5-10 on a deep bed of straw.  Monty took over the presentation here.  Every two days, he told us, they add a new 6” layer of straw (from the farm) to the litter, and every week, they also sprinkle a bag of bokashi grains in - this is in a stall that is roughly 30-40’.  As the cows poop and pee into the straw and trample it, the conditions below the immediate top layer get anaerobic and the bokashi grains start to do their magic - they decompose the straw in place as it accumulates.  When the stalls get cleaned in the Spring, instead of having really thick, stinky, and brick-like mass to get out, they have a friable, sweet smelling, pre-decomposed and biota-rich compost ready to spread on the fields.  Almost like magic!

Fungi-building compost: the Johnson-Su bioreactor.

Another thing that I learned: Phil told me is that fungi can fix nitrogen in combination with certain bacteria in the soil.  So if you can get the right fungi into your soil, you’ll have one more ally in the nitrogen-building strategy (other parts being legumes, manure, and as a last resort, ammonium sulfate).  

They use a a composting system called the Johnson-Su method after its Californian inventors.  It is aerobic, but the key is to give the compost at least 400 days because that is the time needed to get the fungi to start growing mycelium rods.  It’s another small footprint, low-tec, intelligent approach.  

Here is how it works.  Take a metal frame about one meter/yard cubed and put a similar-sized bag inside it made of a porous material.  Phil and Heather use firewood bags.  This simple contraption is the DYI bioreactor.  They fill this bag with a mix of organic stuff they have on their farm - kitchen bokashi, grass clippings, leaves, manure, some soil.. It really does not matter exactly what it is, although more variety is good;  it should be local from the farm; and should have the right mix of green and browns 1:25..  As the bags are getting filled, they insert PVC tubes about 3-4” diameter on a 12” spacing and keep filling up the cube.  The material should be pretty solid and keep its shape because after 2-3 days, the tubes are removed leaving these elongated holes in they compost cube that will allow oxygen to get to all of the material.  The compost initially heats up, and once it cools down add 40-50 earthworms, preferably from your own farm.   Keep the cube moist by sprinkling it daily but not so wet that water drips out of the bottom.

They now let it sit for 400 days (this is England, where there are not 90-120 winter days when it could be brutally cold; in a colder climate people put these cubes in hoop houses).   This is the time needed, as mentioned, for the fungal tubes/mycelium to develop.  The fungi are the critical piece because they are what are going to help fix the nitrogen.

Once finished, the compost is mixed with water (Phil said 10 kilos of compost to 1000 liters of water) to make a tea and this is spread on the fields at a rate of 10 liters per hectare.

Phil mentioned that you can’t use the usual pressure sprinklers for spreading the compost tea because the pressure would destroy the tinny microbial life, including the critical fungi.  He found a medical device for blood circulation in heart lung pattients.  Clearly, here is a neat problem for some clever engineers.  

More information about the Johson-Su composting at Lower Blakemere:.
.lowerblakemere.co.uk/our-diy-johnson-su-bioreactor/
Another in-depth article about the method from the UK Farmers `weekly`; ​www.fwi.co.uk/arable/land-preparation/soils/how-to-build-a-johnson-su-bioreactor-to-produce-your-own-on-farm-biology

Transporting these lessons to our farm

I am very excited to try some of these things are out farm.  It should be easy to start making our own bokashi grains and adding those to our own chicken and sheep deep litter systems.  And I’m all ready to make a Johnson-Su bioreactor on our farm soon after I get back from travels!  
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