The air quality in the Indian capital is becoming so bad that people are even scared to come out of their houses. If you think that it is because of the thousands of vehicles that ply the New Delhi roads, you are probably wrong.
Apparently, it is because of the large scale burning of farm residues in the neighboring states of Punjab and Haryana!
Sometimes we become so greedy that we don’t care about the consequences of our actions. We want to make money a bit too fast 😉
The farmers in these places want to produce as much as possible in as short a time as possible. So, they want to grow crops back to back.
In a matter of hours, everything will be burnt down, clearing the fields for the next sowing.
But this ‘quick solution’ is costing not only the delicate Eco-system in the farms, but also has become a major health hazard in terms of atmospheric air pollution.
As usual our Green Yogi Dr. Krishan Chandra has a solution to this problem as well. He suggests spraying his ‘magical solution’ on these crop residues and convert them into excellent manure. He estimates that just 200 Liters of his waste decomposer solution is sufficient for one acre of land.
In a matter of one month, he says, that the crop residue would get decomposed and if you mechanically turn them into the soil, it will not only increase the fertility of the soil but also improve the soil structure as well. Needless to say that the waste management problem gets automatically solved while posing no environmental hazards.
It all sounds too good to believe.
Is Dr. Krishan Chandra’s bacterial solution so powerful as a decomposer? We wanted to give a try.
We tried two experiments.
In one, we tried it on freshly cut grass and other garden weeds, stacked into a huge heap. My friend normally used to use them directly as a mulch around his plants. But that has problems, like too much of it could kill some tender plants, besides harboring pests such as termites and so on.
As an alternative, my friend sprinkled the waste decomposer solution on this heap to drench it to the extent possible. The heap was kept wet by periodic application of plain water as well. Normally, if you try the same experiment without using the bacterial solution, it would take at least a few months to decompose.
But in this new method, we found that in a matter of just one month the heap was reduced to half its volume. Most of the grass and weed wastes had turned into dark brown compost. This compost could be used directly to the plants without any harmful side effects.
But there was a catch. Any thick stems such as stalks of tall grasses or other weeds remained, without undergoing much decomposition. They too probably would have decomposed, given more time.
Dr. Chandra suggests cutting such thick residues into smaller pieces to speedup up the decomposition. But I feel that it is not a very practical solution and definitely not acceptable to the farmers who are in a great hurry to start the next crop with no extra effort.
That is the yawning gap between the theory and practice.
Dr. Chandra says that even if someone uses these partially decomposed thick residues, they won’t cause any harm. But we found that using the compost with such partially decomposed residue is cumbersome in addition to giving an uncouth look to the garden.
The other experiment we undertook was to try and decompose fallen leaves which were plenty in my friend’s garden. Even here, we found that the bacterial solution was only partially effective. It could decompose thin leaves, probably rain soaked, but thick leaves needed more time than one month that Dr. Chandra keeps talking about!
So, Dr. Chandra seems to oversell his find. The solution is useful. But not as magical as he tries to project it.
Next, we decided to give a real acid test to Dr. Chandra’s solution. I will discuss that in the next episode.
A series of weekly (every Monday 12 PM PST) talks on new ways of Gardening by Dr. King. © Dr. King 2019
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