Successful composting depends on understanding the microbial life within your compost pile. This is where soil testing kits become invaluable tools for gardeners and farmers alike. Modern testing technology allows you to analyze your compost’s biological activity with scientific precision, ensuring you create nutrient-rich amendments for your soil.
Understanding Compost Biology
The foundation of excellent compost lies in its microbial ecosystem. Billions of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms work together to break down organic matter into valuable nutrients. These microscopic workers determine whether your compost becomes a powerhouse of plant nutrition or simply decayed organic matter with limited benefits. Bacterial populations typically dominate the early stages of composting, breaking down simple compounds like sugars and proteins. As the process continues, fungal networks develop to tackle more complex materials such as cellulose and lignin. The balance between these microbial communities directly affects the quality and effectiveness of your finished compost.
The Science of Compost Testing
Traditional methods of evaluating compost quality relied heavily on visual inspection, smell tests, and temperature monitoring. While these indicators provide useful information, they cannot reveal the true biological potential of your compost. Modern soil testing kits offer scientific analysis that goes beyond surface observations. Microbial biomass testing measures the total amount of living microorganisms in your compost sample. This measurement indicates the biological activity level and helps predict how effectively the compost will benefit your soil. The fungal-to-bacterial ratio represents another critical measurement that influences how compost affects different types of plants. Vegetables and annual crops typically prefer bacterial-dominated compost, while trees, shrubs, and perennial plants benefit from fungal-dominated amendments. Understanding these ratios helps you tailor your compost for specific garden applications.
microBIOMETER® Technology Advantages
The microBIOMETER® advanced testing platform system brings quality analysis to home composters and small-scale farmers. These tools eliminate guesswork by providing quantitative data about microbial populations in compost samples. The testing process involves extracting microorganisms from compost samples and analyzing the color intensity of the solution using specialized reagents, measurement cards, and the microBIOMETER® app. Results appear within minutes, allowing you to make immediate adjustments to your composting process if needed. This standardized approach ensures reliable results that you can track over time to monitor improvements in your composting methods.
Conclusion
Regular testing throughout the composting process helps identify optimal harvest timing. Compost that appears finished may still contain high levels of bacterial activity, indicating continued decomposition. Investing in soil testing kits transforms composting from an art into a science-based practice. Understanding the microbial life in your compost empowers you to create consistently high-quality amendments that maximize plant health and soil fertility. Modern testing technology makes this level of analysis accessible to gardeners at every skill level, building confidence in composting success.
An interview with the San Antonio Food Bank who is using microBIOMETER® in their Farm and Garden Program.
How are you using microBIOMETER®?
We are using microBIOMETER to track the soil health on our farms, gardens and compost. This test allows us to understand if we are providing an environment for our crops to thrive. Because we grow fruit trees, herbs and annual edible crops the fungal to bacterial ratio helps us identify the current soil health and help us understand what strategies we can look to implement to improve that environment over time.
How does microBIOMETER® help people understand the importance of soil biology as opposed to the historical focus on soil chemistry?
Traditional soil tests give you a window into what nutrients are or are not available within your soil. It can give you insight into how much organic matter might be present in your soil, but not how you might work to track progress on soil health, diversity or improving your soil food web on an affordable level. While knowing the nutrient breakdown is helpful information it does not help you understand if you are providing an ideal environment for those micro and macro organisms to thrive and ultimately aid your crops or plants in receiving those nutrients and so much more. The microBIOMETER® test kit has helped us better understand our complex food web and what strategies we can do to create a more balanced environment for our crops and our soil.
How did the microBIOMETER® information assist you with your project?
This test helps us to educate not only our staff on soil health strategies, but also our volunteers and anyone who attends are Teaching Garden classes. The data we collect helps us to showcase how the strategies we are employing to improve our soil health are making a difference from season to season as opposed to every two years from a traditional soil test. That enables us to make better recommendations to our community of growers about ways they can improve their soil, too.
About the San Antonio Food Bank
The San Antonio Food Bank takes pride in fighting hunger, feeding hope in our 29-county service area. We believe that no child should go to bed hungry, adults should not have to choose between a hot meal and utilities, nor a senior sacrifice medical care for the sake of a meal.
Founded in 1980, The San Antonio Food Bank has quickly grown to serve 90,000 individuals a week in one of the largest service areas in Texas. Our focus is for clients to have food for today but to also have the resources to be self-sufficient in the future.
Fighting hunger is our number one priority but we also serve to educate and provide assistance in many other ways. We achieve this through our variety of programs and resources available to families, individuals, seniors, children, and military members in need.
Our Farm and Garden Program consists of two locations and six growing spaces, including two farms and the garden at the New Braunfels Food Bank. Together these areas total more than 100 acres and provide 300,000 pounds of fresh local produce annually to our 29-county service area. We utilize 5,000 volunteers annually to assist with our operation and to provide local produce to the community.
Our Farm and Garden Program strives to provide quality, local produce to the community and to provide resources to teach those in our community how to grow food for today and in the future. In order to meet those goals, we start with our soil. By understanding our soil biology and health we get a window into what is happening at the root level and better understand the environment where our crops live and how to make improvements so we are growing healthy plants and nutritious crops. We believe everyone deserves access to nutritious fruits and vegetables.
Our Teaching Garden classes provide information about the importance of soil and composting as a foundation for building soil diversity and health. We utilize cover cropping on the farms and in our gardens to reduce erosion, build soil fertility, reduce weed pressure and increase organic matter. We create and utilize composting to increase the diversity of our soil, divert valuable resources from the landfill and introduce the community to the benefits of composting at home or in the community.
This article was provided to us by Scott Hortop, a retired volunteer and now student of soil, located in the Ottawa Valley, Ontario, Canada. Scott wants to use his retirement to do one important thing for the climate.
At ONfungi we own two microBIOMETER® soil testing kits which we use to determine the fungal to bacterial ratio (F:B) of the Johnson-Su fungal dominant compost (FDC). The ONfungi group makes FDC from tree leaves.
We are excited by the potential of leaf mold to:
• Reduce agricultural dependence on external inputs• Divert leaf organics from landfills• Replenish the inventory of carbon in the soil by drawing down the carbon in the atmosphere• Grow knowledge about working with mother nature to address climate change
Our first FDC bioreactor batch was started in Spring 2018. Since then, we have put up a total of 15 batches; 8 of them in fall 2021.“It took us 3 batches before we faced the fact that we needed to know whether what we were producing was actually what we hoped it was. Our enthusiasm needed to be grounded. What is the fungal bacteria (F:B) ratio in our FDC?,” says Scott Hortop, wizard of compost for the ONfungi group. “This is why we have found the microBIOMETER® to be our most useful tool.”“Dr. David Johnson’s talks have shown us eloquently how the F:B ratio is the most meaningful indicator for soil health”, Hortop explains. “As we share our fungal dominant compost (FDC) with other users, we owe them a solid measure of what they are getting. When we and others share our FDC experiments with each other at the Chico State University Registry of Johnson-Su Bioreactors, the majority of us have been unable to report F:B ratios. This has now changed. With the microBIOMETER® we can confirm that we have the right ratio of ingredients by taking a real measure of the F:B ratio.”Its All Relative – Isn’t it the change and the direction of changes that we really need to know? Of course, it might be nice to think every microbe was identified and counted under a microscope, but that precision comes at a HUGE cost and most likely doesn’t alter the conclusion. The next thing we need to do to strengthen the microbial community.
Immediacy – When you are checking in on living microbes in soil, some of whom are reproducing and dying in a matter of minutes and others taking years, the best timing for a test is here and now. In a world rich with distraction and delay, its awesome to get a result from your testing efforts immediately.
True Cost Per Data Point – For the purpose of our bioreactors, give it a think: the modest variable costs per test, the modest labour to execute a test which is just minutes beyond the time required for sample collection, the VERY efficient and effective recording of results, and the $0 sample shipping cost.
In an ONfungi citizen science trial last summer by one of our volunteers in White Lake, Ontario, 2 sunflower seeds were planted in late June into moderately degraded farmland (microBIOMETER® F:B 0.7:1; 464 µg C/g).The control seed (left) received no soil amendments. The 2nd seed (right) was planted with 50 grams (a small handful) of Johnson-Su fungal dominant compost (microBIOMETER® F:B 1.7:1; 700 µg C/g) surrounding the seed. For 8 weeks both plants received identical, adequate watering. The 8-week photo below shows the control sunflower on the left suffering from an invasion of cucumber beetles with less than ½ the height and 1/3 the stalk width compared to the sunflower on the right with FDC at its root zone. Although beetles were observed on the FDC sunflower, some disease resistance was evident.One of ONfungi’s targets this year is to do monthly tests on completed FDC material to chart the staying power and degradation curve of finished FDC, not yet put to use and in several storage modes. We are also using the microBIOMETER® to look at carbon sequestration in lawn soils.About ONfungi; ONfungi is a happy conglomeration of active volunteer folks. Their goal is to explore, through citizen science, the use of Johnson-Su fungal dominant compost (FDC) in improving soil, storing carbon, and enhancing plant health and nutrition. Learn more at ONfungi.net
With a small R & D grant awarded from the Dutch government, Jo Ploumen of the Netherlands is using microBIOMETER® to determine fungal to bacterial ratios in vermicompost filled in a Johnson-Su Bioreactor versus residence time. Jo also uses microBIOMETER® to measure microbes and F:B ratio in select soil samples as a member of a garden club. He found the differences by method of gardening; organic vs fertilizer and bare vs covered soil to be striking!
“I like microBIOMETER® as it is a cost-effective tool with a high impact, potentially,” Jo said.
Jo’s impressive resume includes studying Chemical Technology at the Technical University of Eindhoven, employment at multinational AKZO Nobel as an R & D specialist and co-founder of Pulsed Heat BV. In 2019, Jo founded Ploumen E.S. Compost to begin research based on the findings of Dr. David Johnson. Johnson is the developer of the Johnson-Su Bioreactor which delivers a compost with very unique properties.
We are honored to have Jo as a valued customer, data collector and partner on our journey to increase awareness of soil health, regenerative practices and carbon sequestration!
Photo source: Taos News
