The New Texas Tea
Hydrocyclones Produce 'Instant Compost'
Interview: Sabino Cortez
March 2003, Acres U.S.A.

   Sabino Cortez is an innovator, an agronomist, and a Texan through and through, with a fine appreciation of the state’s pastures, cropland and potential.
   Serendipity played a role in his developing a system for making instant compost and manure tea. A graduate of Tarleton State University at Stephenville (a branch of the Texas A&M system), he majored in plant and soil science. Later on he met Malcolm Beck at a seminar, and with that meeting were born the developments discussed in this interview.
   Before meeting Beck, Cortez had encountered the water-pressure cone, and he saw its application to agriculture’s escalating manure problem. Water under pressure could destroy pithium. Some five or six years ago Cortez joined Beck in a partnership for the purpose of using this modified manure to combat fire ants, which are a scourge all over the Southwest. The outcome of that venture, among many other topics, is covered in this interview.

ACRES U.S.A. We understand you have developed a system for getting more economic value out of manure. What have you done?

CORTEZ. I patented a process in 1992 using a hydrocyclone. The first hydrocyclones were invented around 1910. They separate by centrifugal gravity or centrifugal force, but they have no moving parts. It’s just the geometry of the cone, the shape of the cone that separates anything heavier than water out of the water. It’s done by force. In other words, by having a lot of velocity in the pump, it creates the centrifuge effect inside this cone, and so without any moving parts other than the pump it’s able to take anything that’s heavier than water and separate it out.

ACRES U.S.A. It’s a contained cyclone, then?

CORTEZ. That’s right. My experience has been with these dairies’ confined feeding operations where they’re flushing to control their manure. When you use water to flush the manure, you clean the floor well, but you also have a lot of manure in the runoff water, in your lagoons. What this hydrocyclone process does is that it takes the solids out of the water so that you are able to use the water over and over. You’re not taking the dissolved solids out of there, but you are taking all of the suspended solids out of the water. It does some unique things. It exposes each individual particle in there to 3,000 G-forces. Now, all of my experience is with dairy cows and dairy manure; I’m limited to that. A dairy cow is not that efficient a digester. It varies, but 50 to as much as 75 percent of what they’re fed goes right through them. In our case it’s alfalfa, corn, soybean meal — you have all these really good ingredients in there that went through the cow and weren’t utilized. The problem is that when the material comes out of the cow, it’s got all the digested ash on it, plus it’s got all the mucous that’s in the rumen, so you can’t tell that all that fiber is there. When you dilute the manure with water, with the cone you’re able to wash all the ash and mucous off of the solids. You’re actually recovering all the undigested grains and grass and alfalfa that were in there. Because they are exposed to such high G-forces, the materials are literally washed off. What comes out of there is not an offensive material at all. The odor is completely gone, because that tends to come from the digested ash and mucous. You’re able to recover alfalfa that’s been exposed to the bacteria in the cow’s stomach.

ACRES U.S.A. Is the material that you recover a fertilizer or a feed?

CORTEZ. Well, it’s both. If you do a protein analysis on it, the material is still 16 percent protein. And because it’s been through the rumen one time, the total digestible nutrients — TDN — has gone up. The TDN of alfalfa is actually equal to corn that’s been through the cow. The same value that makes it a potential feed also makes it an excellent fertilizer.

ACRES U.S.A. Which do you prefer?

CORTEZ. What we’re trying to do here is this: there are a lot of negative connotations to these confined feeding operations — what they call CFOs. And justifiably so — a lot of the complaints are valid. The problem is that these CFOs do exist. We can’t ignore them. It would be nice if we could go back to the way it was, but it’s not possible to dismantle them because everybody is not of the same mindset. So, what I began doing about 10 years ago was trying to figure out a way to do something positive with these operations, because they are producing an awful lot of material, a lot of manure.

ACRES U.S.A. When you take your material out of the cone, what kind of shape is it in?

CORTEZ. It looks just like tea. It’s a coarse, fibrous material; you can actually see the corn granules in there. There is a shear that goes on the corn, so all the alfalfa, hay, and grass get chopped up into equal particles, about a half-inch to quarter-inch in size. I’m told by nutritionists that it has exactly the same feed value as cotton seed.

ACRES U.S.A. And if you use it as a fertilizer?

CORTEZ. If you use it as a fertilizer, that’s where this stuff really shines. For the same reason that it has a good protein value, it has better than normal nitrogen level. It’ll average 2 to 3 percent nitrogen — and it’s available nitrogen. The serendipity effect of this thing, what I’ve been trying to develop here, is a substitute for peat moss. If you had all the money in the world to make a compost pile, you’d go out there and you’d put alfalfa, you’d put soybean meal in there, you’d put cottonseed meal, you’d put peat pulp and grated corn and filings, and you know that would make a great compost. Now, that’s normally cost prohibitive, but that’s what we’re doing. We’re taking those materials, and by recovering them with the cyclone, those are the materials we actually have going into our compost.

ACRES U.S.A. You’d be able to use that same system in handling paunch manure, would you not?

CORTEZ. Yes, absolutely. Basically it separates by specific gravity. The specific gravity of water is one, so anything that is heavier than water will come out of there, like paunch manure. It works a lot better on the fibrous materials. When you start doing poultry and hogs, you do get some separation, but they’re a little more efficient at digesting, and there’s more ash in there, so you’re not able to recover as much material. With the ruminant system, you’re able to get a lot of material back.

ACRES U.S.A. Would you use this kind of apparatus or system to make compost tea?

CORTEZ. This is one of the most efficient compost tea makers there is. The one critical thing that experts claim about compost tea is that you have to have an aerobic process, it has to be aerated. Well, one of the things about these hydrocyclones that’s been well-documented is that the water that leaves this thing is saturated with oxygen, as high as 90 percent. The aerobic bacteria thrive in this liquid, while the bad bacteria, which are cellular in nature, are smashed to bits. Also, because of the high shear that’s going on, you’re taking all of the soluble fertilizer that’s with the material, and it’s going out as a liquid — a liquid that’s highly oxygenated. It gives you a perfect broth right away, so there’s nothing to stop people from just taking their compost and putting it in some kind of a tank, running it through this process, and extracting a lot more valuable liquid out of it than they would by trying to strain it through a cloth or something like that.

ACRES U.S.A. How is that liquid used?

CORTEZ. We’ve been doing some work with farmers down in the Rio Grande Valley for about four years. It’s like everything else you read about: compost tea has fungicidal qualities, it has insecticidal qualities, it has fertilizer qualities. That’s what we keep seeing over and over. The positive thing is that we’re able to reduce the inputs a lot of these guys have to use on their high-dollar crops. In the citrus industry down there — and this is not certified organic farmers, but conventional farmers who started using the tea because it works — we were able to reduce their total spray cost from $110 an acre down to about $15 an acre, yet they still got the same fungicidal results, insecticidal control, and foliar feeding benefits.

ACRES U.S.A. Does this insecticidal control include dealing with pests such as fire ants?

CORTEZ. Malcolm Beck and I started a company about eight years ago to work on that. I knew that the big dairies out here have a form of compost tea that they are watering out of those lagoons. We have a lot of fire ants in Texas, but I noticed that everywhere they watered with compost tea or manure water, the fire ants were nowhere to be seen. Wherever the irrigation sprinkler stopped, the mounds would start. We watched that for a year or so, and it was always the same case. It was consistent everywhere we went — there weren’t any fire ants inside the areas that were being treated with the manure water. Of course on the dairies they have a lot of material, so Malcolm and I set out to make a concentrate, which is what we did. With the cones we were able to make a more viscous material. Then we found that adding molasses seemed to give the microbes more energy, and made it so we could use it in smaller concentrations. We still had an odor problem, so we hit on the idea of using orange oil. Orange oil is a food-grade item; it acts as a natural solvent. Since all insects have a waxy coating, the orange oil is abrasive to their coatings, and they dehydrate. When we put this mixture on the mounds, we’d get a quick kill because of the orange oil. In addition, as you can imagine, if you have a colony of insects and a third of the population is dead and there’s no way to move it, it’s going to create microbial activity that upsets the rest of the colony. That’s what we found over and over — it didn’t move them, it killed them. Fire ants are composters to an extent, because when they fill up that soil they are regulating the temperature to do their incubation — they’re using microbial activity to control their environment. When you put the compost tea with the molasses in there, it either introduces another form of bacteria that thrives there, or it just accelerates what they have already inoculated.

ACRES U.S.A. Then this is more effective than the old Myrez ever was?

CORTEZ. Oh, yeah! Because you’re killing them, and you’re enhancing the soil. Malcolm always says we’re composting them to death. We did some park areas, went in and did really intense treatments, and it seems that once you get the soil healthy and get some good microbial activity going in there, the fire ants just move out. There is one area that we treated and haven’t retreated in four years, and there still aren’t any fire ants there.

ACRES U.S.A. In addition to the effect on insects and so on, what about the fertilizer value of the compost tea?

CORTEZ. It is definitely a fertilizer. Again, you get a serendipity effect. If you improve the health of the soil, that improves the health of the plant, and that more than anything else helps fight off fungi and bad bacteria. In Austin, the state capital, we persuaded this guy to put down compost on the 18 acres around the capitol building. In the past they had been paying a chemical company $5,000 a month to spray for fungicide. We got him started on the compost tea after we put the compost down, and he got his costs down to $100 a month. This is the kind of thing that can benefit all farmers and groundskeepers. It’s not just for organic farmers.

ACRES U.S.A. On the one hand, you’ve got the compost coming out of the cone, so to speak, and on the other you’ve got the compost tea coming out? So if you put the compost down on a high-school football field, for instance, would you follow it with compost tea later on?

CORTEZ. That’s what we’ve found works very well. Unfortunately, when you get some people to put compost down on a football field or some other public place because they know about the benefits, they’ll turn right back around and put fungicides on the same ground. They negate everything they’ve just done. We’re not selling NPK here, we’re selling life, and that’s the biggest mistake I see with a lot of these football fields and soccer fields and so on. They’ll see the benefits of compost on somebody’s garden or whatever, and then they’ll put it on their field, but then turn right around and use a fungicide or herbicide or other things — all of which hurts the microbial activity and has negative effects on the soil.

ACRES U.S.A. What is it in the compost tea that creates the special effects you’ve described? Enzymes?

CORTEZ. Here again, all of my work is with lactating cows. In layman’s terms, what is going on inside the rumen is biological digestion. You always hear that there is something a little bit different about dairy manure and dairy liquids, and I think it has to do with the digestive bacteria that are in the rumen. They are inoculating both the tea and the manure with these beneficial bacteria. We test the liquids and we test the solids for these deadly E. coli that everybody is looking out for, and if the wastes are properly composted we never find any in there — in either the liquids or the solids. Just the opposite: the beneficial bacillus tend to dominate the sections of bacteria that we find in there.

ACRES U.S.A. And the speed of your process means you don’t have to wait months to make compost?

CORTEZ. The process mimics composting instantly. First of all, the process stabilizes the nitrogen because a lot of the soluble nitrogen has gone out of the liquid, so it’s not too hot. Second, it mechanically destroys all of the weed seeds in there, because the weed seeds have been in water. They’ve already started incubation, and when they’re exposed to those 3,000 g-forces they are literally squashed, so you have no live seed in there. That’s why I say it mimics compost instantly — the nitrogen is stabilized, the odor is stabilized, and you’ve destroyed all the weed seeds. It will help sustain a plant but the plant won’t grow in it if you take it immediately out of the cone. You do have to compost it, but we’ve looked at it in an electron microscope, and the grass particles are actually perforated. They have little perforations going all through them, which gives the bacteria a lot more service area in which to attack the materials. Within 24 hours of leaving the cone, the material will be at 150 degrees. The composting process is really accelerated. We are able to produce a material that we can take to the field or the greenhouse within 60 days with very little mechanical effort, which is contrary to a lot of the theories out there on how you make compost. I’ve been criticized by a lot of people, but it works. I don’t see why you couldn’t take any kind of organic materials out there — grass clippings or anything — run them through the process, and get the same results. What you’re doing is exposing each individual particle to water and then separating them individually, so you have optimum moisture level at one time. If you’ve ever made any big compost piles, wetting them and getting the moisture level right is a big problem. Well, this process gives you the right moisture level instantly.

ACRES U.S.A. Your process sounds similar to that of Francis Polifka, who uses a contained tornado to send gravel and the like through a cone, and deliver a very fine powder.

CORTEZ. I’m familiar with those systems. This technology, I think, can do a lot for agriculture — both the air cyclones and the water cyclones. It’s a very cost-effective technique, and you get some super results. We used to appear at trade shows with a clear cone. When you put water in there, what happens is that the water goes in clockwise, goes into the middle, and comes out counter-clockwise. I think some of the biodynamics people make a big deal about making one rotation and then making the other rotation — well, that’s exactly what’s going on inside the hydrocyclone. The liquids and the manure are all exposed to electrons on both sides of polarity, because they’re coming in one direction and going out the other direction. All of this happens in a tenth of a second at high velocity.

ACRES U.S.A. But it is a vortex?

CORTEZ. It is a vortex. We create a low-pressure center in there the same as a tornado. It’s the same thing that happens inside a tornado. We’ve all heard stories about the kinds of energy inside those tornados — straws being driven through iron posts and that kind of thing — and that’s what is going on with the fellow you mentioned. I’ve seen those kinds of things, where they take chunks of concrete and throw them into an air cyclone, and they come out just like talcum powder. I’m not smart enough to know what’s going on electronically, but we know that these rock powders and so on are beneficial to soil. By the way, our mutual friend Kay Chandler has tested the compost that comes out of the cyclone, and though it’s not very high, it does have a paramagnetic reading.

ACRES U.S.A. What strength are these materials mixed at?

CORTEZ. On the citrus orchards and on watermelons and vegetables we’re putting on a one-percent solution. Those guys have 100-gallon sprayers, and we’re putting one gallon of this mixture into 100 gallons. We’re trying to put out about 100 gallons to the acre; that’s where we get our ratio, one gallon of compost tea to 100 gallons of water, and we get our foliar feed and fungicidal control.

ACRES U.S.A. Have you brought any of this to the attention of the university?

CORTEZ. We did some work with the extension service here at one time, but you know how that works — once a fellow retires, everything kind of gets set aside. We’re doing some work now with USDA, I think that’s the most positive thing we’re doing. The USDA down here in Texas has received a pretty sizable grant to do research on organic or natural products for sustainable ag, and we’ve got some projects ongoing with them that we’re very excited about. We’re working on olives, which is a unique thing for Texas, and of course we’re working on citrus and watermelons and onions and a lot of the row crops. We’ve even treated some cotton with that one-percent solution and had some super results. We’re working on developing a system for high-input hay crops. Down here in Texas everybody uses coastal Bermuda grass, which is a very high-input product. We’ve been able to get some good results with similar rates of application — 2 and 3 percent solutions on these coastal fields have given us very good results.

ACRES U.S.A. Is this research aimed at discovering new methods, or does it validate what you already knew?

CORTEZ. Well, I guess for us it’s to validate what we already knew. For them, it’s to see how feasible it is to promote sustainable agriculture.

ACRES U.S.A. They want to see if it will wash economically, and pass muster with academia?

CORTEZ. That’s right. Unfortunately, farmers either listen to each other or to the university. You’ve got those two groups out there.

ACRES U.S.A. Where do you go from here with this process? Where does someone get the machine and so on?

CORTEZ. Since it is a patented process, we kind of control the equipment right now. What we have is what they call a process patent. We didn’t develop any new tools; we just took tools and put them together for a process, so it’s a process patent. We use production pumps and production cones, all off-the-shelf parts. It’s really a very simple system, and it’s fairly farmer- friendly. If you know your way around electricity and water pumps, you can handle it. There are no moving parts other than the pumps. We’ve got a prototype system right now that we’ve been working on for six months, and with it we’re processing 100 percent of the manure from about 5,000 dairy cows every day. We’re trying to develop a system to help manage the manure from cattle by turning it into a value-added product after running it through this system. Then we’re trying to develop a market for the liquids. We can take the liquid and start a fermentation process, and you may have to add some molasses and even some liquid fertilizers to it to get not a very high but a constant fertilizer value that the conventional farmers might be more familiar with. Then maybe we can find a home for some of these solids and liquids and address some of these situations with CFOs, because they are producing a lot of manure all across the country, and it’s a problem.

ACRES U.S.A. Certainly there has to be some way found to loop these materials back to the countryside or back to the land.

CORTEZ. To the land, that’s right. Methane digesters are popular, and they are certainly a good idea, but you still have to deal with the solids and the liquids, and that’s what we’re trying to address — a way to deal with both the liquids and the solids. And also something that won’t turn into a grant mill, something that will dollar out and not have to be sustained by some government program, which is unfortunately what happens with a lot of the methane systems. They really don’t dollar out, and ultimately they are not sustainable

For more information about Sabino Cortez’s compost teas, contact Erath Earth Inc., 16534 S. Hwy 281, Hico, Texas 76457, phone (254) 968-2331, e-mail <contact@erathearth.com>, website <www.erathearth.com>