Place-Based, Purpose-Oriented, Data-Driven

Compost tea is made through a brewing process that steeps biologically active compost in aerated water for 24 hours, creating an oxygen-rich liquid environment where microbes can proliferate. Compost tea can be described as a highly concentrated liquid compost solution comprised of trillions of self-organizing beneficial microbes, which can be applied as a fertilizer to any plant life, increasing the carbon content of the soil. Increasing soil carbon means expanding the microbial life of the soil. No regenerative process combats global warming as effectively as capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide in the soil. The contribution of microorganisms to soil health through applying compost tea provides lasting enhancements to the carbon cycle post-inoculation. The microbial community's biogeochemical and life cycle processes persistently and exponentially transform the soil to sequester carbon in the soil indefinitely.  Further, the biogeochemical functions of microbes found in compost tea have bioremediation capabilities that break down and eliminate toxicity from soil contaminated with chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Compost tea is a radical collaboration effort between man and microbe that removes pollution, toxicity, and waste from the system. 

The main benefits of compost tea are that it exponentially increases the microbial activity that builds soil and improves soil health, enhances water capture and retention, promotes biodiversity, sequesters carbon in soils, reduces greenhouse gas emissions,  and enhances plant nutrient uptake. This covers all typical issues related to fertility, pests, weeds, and yield, removing the necessity for chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides since plants nourished by healthy soil exhibit greater resistance to pests and diseases. Compost tea dispels the myth that plants need agrochemicals to grow, when what plants actually need is healthy soil. This breaks the fixes-that-fail systems archetype of continuously adding more chemical fertilizers to soils that have been depleted by chemical fertilizer use in the first place. Chemical fertilizers create a reinforcing feedback loop that exponentially depletes the soil. In contrast, compost tea creates a balancing feedback loop that exponentially regenerates the soil through microbial lifecycle population rates and biogeochemical functions. 

Compost tea is an effective, closed-loop system that converts linear material waste flows of food scraps into valuable material stocks of fertilizer. This closed-loop system is regeneratively designed as a nature-based solution to cascade the existing biomass of food scraps typically discarded in landfills and reintegrate them back into the soil where they belong. By implementing a circular design intervention that designs out pollution and cascades biomass back into the soil, compost tea decouples value creation from the depletion of the biosphere by replacing the finite material throughput of chemical fertilizers with renewable fertilizers made from already existing food scraps. This reduces the upstream material footprint of agricultural operations by decreasing the demand for the material extraction from nonrenewable NPK chemical fertilizer, which reduces the agrochemical ecological footprint by reducing the land degradation associated with mining for NPK minerals. Further, compost tea reduces the amount of land necessary to absorb the toxic waste runoff of NPK fertilizers from farms and lawns downstream. 

Compost tea is a safe alternative to the 4 billion tons of toxic chemical fertilizers used globally yearly, which contribute to upstream and downstream externalities that drive concerns for human health and environmental injustice. 

Regenerative agriculture shows remarkable benefits, with farmers reporting soil organic matter (SOM) levels rising from 1-2% to 5-8% in ten years. Each percent of soil organic matter equals 8.5 tons of carbon sequestered per acre, increasing to 25-60 tons over time through microbial biogeochemical processes. Regenerative agriculture may grow from 108 million to 1 billion acres by 2050, driven by the growth rate of organic agriculture. This could lead to a reduction of 23.2 gigatons of atmospheric CO2 through sequestration and lower emissions. By 2050, regenerative agriculture has the potential to yield a $1.9 trillion financial return on an investment of $57 billion. This demonstrates that we can effectively address the climate crisis while generating profit. For those aware of the severity of the climate crisis, regenerative agriculture offers hope. The idea that we can harness the benefits of intact ecosystems to turn this situation around feels almost miraculous, and what better place to start than your own backyard?