If several smiling farmers offered you the choice between a drink of “brown rice coffee” or some “bacteria juice,” which would you choose?
I first tried bacteria juice during an afternoon tea break at Konohana Family, an organic community in Japan near the base of Mt. Fuji. At Konohana Family, over fifty people live cooperatively, sharing housing, cars, finances, child care and food. For fifteen years, they have been farming organically; they now have thirteen hectares of land on which they grow all of their own food, plus plenty of vegetables and rice which they sell and deliver over Japan. They were kind enough to welcome me and teach me about how they managed to create a self-sufficient, sustainable lifestyle.
It was a rainy afternoon, and the farmers inside one warehouse had taken a break from sorting carrots and pickling radishes to enjoy a snack of bean pancakes with delicious soft-boiled peanuts and bacteria juice. I drank a teacup: the liquid was sweet, brow, and amazingly good. Over the next day, I learned more about this incredible bacterial concoction. It keeps the chicks healthy, and the chicken house from smelling. It keeps the goats’ milk sweet. It keeps the people healthy. What couldn’t this magic potion do, I began to wonder?
Konohana Family bacteria, or Konohana-kin, is based on Effective Microorganisms (EM): a technology developed at a university in Okinawa during the 1970s, by agriculture professor Teruo Higa. EM is a mixture of up to 100 microorganisms — including lactic acid bacteria, yeast, and photosynthetic bacteria — that have tremendous potential for improving human and animal health, soil enhancement, waste management, and even waterway cleanup. Even odor control: after the tsunami, Thai relief workers sprayed an EM solution to control odor and stave off pathogens from the decaying bodies. Konohana’s variety is based on EM, and is a fermented liquid made from molasses, brown rice amino acid, bean curd, bamboo and loquat leaves, and pine needles.
I became more convinced about the benefits of their microorganisms when I visited Konohana’s chicken house. Unlike many chicken houses I have known in North America, this one was absolutely clean and odor-free. The chickens were unusually affable (I confess to being majorly creeped out by chickens), and as I held a tiny chick in my hands, the farmer who was showing me around urged me to feel the litter in the pen. I released the chick and bent down. “It’s warm,” he explained. The grainy mixture was indeed quite warm. He explained to me that the microbial fermentation processes were keeping the chicks warm, thus requiring no electric energy to heat the chicken house. I examined the stuff: it was faintly sweet-scented, like the bacteria juice, and certainly did not smell like dozens of chicks were living in it. The chicks live in a mixture of rice bran and fermented microbes, but they also have the Konohana-kin and brown rice amino acid mixed in with their feed; these both help to neutralize odors.
Then we went to the goat barn, where I was offered the chance to milk a goat and taste the fresh, hot liquid that spurted out. It was amazingly un-goaty. Again, the goats have the microorganisms mixed in with their food: that is apparently why they are happy and produce such sweet milk.
I was quite impressed by the power of these tiny microorganisms, but I was also wondering: if they are so wonderful and multi-purpose, why aren’t they more widely known in North America? It doesn’t seem fabulously complicated to cultivate these microbes and use them in soil and food — so why aren’t we all doing it?
In fact, effective microorganisms are in use in many Asian countries: Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, among others. The farmers here use them because they see results; they are perhaps more concerned about growing their food and raising their livestock than generating academic research. If you’re a farmer, why spend valuable time validating something that you already know works? As yet, very little academic research about EM has been translated into English.
In North America, effective microorganisms get mixed in with the health food community (especially with companies trying to market EM mixtures). There are a lot of miraculous claims about EM, made with an emotional enthusiasm that can seem fanatical at times. This, and a lack of good graphic design (health food products seem to often have cheesy snake-oil-esque graphic design), can give the microorganisms an aura of pseudoscience. Also, people trying to promote or sell EM face legal issues (like with FDA regulations, in America, as well as patent issues) that can be quite complex. Finally, North America already has a system of industrialized agriculture in place that might not welcome the microorganisms on the scene.
Incidentally, somewhere without a functioning food system has tried to welcome the microorganisms: North Korea. Information is scarce, but apparently in the late 1990s and the early part of this decade, North Korea tried to build huge microorganism factories (like the Patriotic Center for Complex Microorganism in Pyongyang) and implement a variant of EM technology on all farms. Clearly however, this didn’t fix their food crisis. You need large amounts of sugar to feed the microorganisms, and North Korea couldn’t import that sugar, so they tried using grain: but of course hungry people wonder why their grain is going to feed microorganisms instead of themselves. That, combined with the fact that it can take a few years to see the benefits to the soil, and the fact that the system was so broken in other ways (problems with the infrastructure to transport the microbial fertilizer) left the experiment without much benefit.
North Korea’s lack of a microbial famine cure notwithstanding, these microorganisms are definitely worthy of further investigation. Individuals have used EM at home in their gardens, with reportedly good results — the Japanese waste management technique called bokashi (literally, “fermented organic matter”) has many practicioners in Canada. See the City Farmer or The Compost Guy for more info.
Some of the most intriguing possibilities for effective microorganisms, though, lie not within agriculture, but within environmental management: waste management and water cleanup. Kani City in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, ran a kitchen composting program that used EM methods. They have been used to try to clean up canals in Bangkok slums, deodorize garbage dumps in Vietnam, and restore Japan’s Seto Inland Sea.
The whole issue begs an interesting examination of where our knowledge about developing methods and technologies for sustainability comes from. How does an idea that emerges from an Asian country and takes hold in the developing world become legitimized in Europe or North America? There’s nothing like an enthusiastic recommendation by Kim Jong-Il to diminish one’s farming methods in the eyes of Western gardeners or environmental planners. And the few studies done by Americans might not pass scientific muster; I haven’t located one reviewed in a peer-reviewed journal yet (please comment if you have references to better research). Should these microorganisms be dismissed because they have disappointing PR skills? My usual answer is: experiment yourself and see what results you get.
If I came across these effective microorganisms on the Internet, I would likely be sceptical enough to dismiss the idea — the presentation of information on them is often inelegant or corporate-sponsored; the studies are often inconclusive or poorly written. (The best article about them comes from Ode Magazine.) But I felt and tasted the microorganisms on a Japanese farm, so I believe they are worth looking into as a simple twenty-first century solution for a lot of challenges we face. After all, the microorganisms contributed to the sumptuous meal that the Konohana Family graciously prepared for me: homegrown rice, homemade tofu, fresh eggs from microorganism-fed chickens, and a crunchy carrot grown in EM-fed soil… there was no arguing with the quality of this meal. It was a reflection of the conditions it was grown in, edible evidence that something there was working well.
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