How can we organically reuse our waste products? For us, fermentation is a way of life. We use it to sustain our business and now we are calling on it to transform our waste products into components that easily enter the soil food web and give back to the community and to our environment. Bokashi is a way of using specialized microbes to set off a fermentation of your waste products in an anaerobic environment (sans oxygen), which in turn composts them.
The process is simpler than you may think and is something you could definitely try at home. For us, we’ll start by collecting spent grain, fruit pulp, and yeast from the brewing process and all of our kitchen scraps as well. We purchased special totes for the transport of our spent grain. The liquid byproducts of brewing, such as trub, yeast, and saturated hops, will be moved into drums for transportation.
Our kitchen scraps will be removed from their collection buckets and added to the drums. All of these plant materials will be brought to one location where we will start the Bokashi process.
The inoculation of plant material with microorganisms that will expedite decomposition happens next. This is beneficial because after the otherwise discarded material breaks down into simpler components, they become a usable source of nutrients in the soil. The process is to add alternating layers of plant waste and inoculated bran.
Our hope is to eventually create our own bokashi inoculate, but for now, the brand of bokashi inoculate that we are using is TeraKashi by Teragnaix.
We layer it with our scraps in a specialized vessel and then we seal off the vessel as to not expose it to oxygen.
This vessel can be made from a variety of things like buckets and barrels.
One can modify a 5 gallon bucket by drilling a hole towards the bottom and adding a valve, using 2-3 inch pieces of pipe or some other material. The valve is for draining the liquid that falls to the bottom.
This liquid is separated with the use of a metal screen that creates a false bottom. The false bottom acts like a strainer separating liquid from the solid material above it.
Another important component of a Bokashi container is to have a lid that seals air tight. The act of fermentation produces gases like carbon dioxide. We don’t want these gasses to be able to escape the container, so adding an airlock to the lid is essential.
In just a couple weeks from when we seal our layered containers, we will have a material that we can fold back into the soil. The process of this anerobic fermentation breaks down larger pieces of plant material and frees up the molecular bonds of minerals and other nutrients, thus making it more bioavailable to living and growing plants.
We love the idea of having options for waste management. The benefits of this method are that it is much quicker than aerobic (traditional) composting, it does not create heat, it makes the nutrients in the spent material much more available for the microbes and worms in the soil, and it gives us an alternative use for our spent grain. Most breweries give their spent materials to farmers as animal feed, this we may do too, but we want to focus on mainly giving back to the plants. To be able to transform things that are usually labeled garbage and destined for a landfill, into a densely nutritious plant food is both fascinating and rewarding to us.