Recipe for Success: Brew Your Own Biofertilizer

Have you thought about switching to a biofertilizer? Full spectrum biofertilizers like “Super Magro” have simple ingredients and can prevent yield loss. Through plant nutrition, biofertilizers reduce disease, pest, and physiological stress, to maximize your crops’ performance. After brewing the base recipe, Super Magro can be tailored by adding specific mineral salts to fit your needs.

Cornell Small Farms’ own Shaun Bluethenthal, an agronomist and research farmer describes the process of how to make Super Magro biofertilizer.

Super Magro was conceived in Latin America during the 1980s by farmer Delvino Magro with support from professor Sabastiao Pinheiro of the Juquira Candiru Foundation, in Rio Do Sul, Brazil. The Super Magro formula was intentionally released without patent or intellectual property claims as an empowerment tool for independent farmers.

The base formula for Super Magro combines seven key components, which ferment over four days. The result is a nutrient-rich liquid, complete with organic and amino acids, and essential minerals in plant-available form.
Base Formula*  

•  Untreated water
•  Fresh cow dung
•  Molasses
•  Whey (or milk)
•  S. cerevisiae (yeast)
•  Wood ash
•  Rockdust

See Super Mag for complete formula and schedule
The beauty of this recipe, and biofertilizers in general, is that they harness naturally occurring microbial processes and use them to convert essential mineral ingredients into available plant nutrients. Specialized rumen-microbes, delivered via the cow dung, use the readily available sugars in the molasses to perform anaerobic fermentation. After four days of fermentation, context-specific salts can be added to the mixture. Super Magro uses nine specific salts, each of which plays critical roles in plant health, to create a broad-spectrum complement of essential minerals.
Now that you have an understanding of the mechanisms behind this type of biofertilizer production, you can tailor-make your own fertilizers specific to the needs and stages of growth of your crops.

Since the recipe is scalable and requires no outside energy source for its manufacture, it can be a great fertilizer option for small farms, homesteads, and even urban farmers. During this type of biofertilizer process, gasses expelled through the air-lock during the fermentation process have no detectable odor. Also, at the completion of a successful fermentation, the end product no longer has a raw manure smell. This bonus is especially useful for farmers and growers that have neighbors within close proximity.

In addition to its robust nutritional profile, Super Magro is also a cost-effective alternative ( > $2.50 per acre) to commercial fertilizers. Some farmers may already have many of the ingredients on hand. Even if you don’t, the ingredients are common enough that they are readily available and inexpensive.
Read more about Super Magro here. 

Happy fertilizing!