Arrives
Pulp, tank vegetables, manure, straw, whatever the week brings. Photo of this plot.
Compost · bocashi · life
What enters the pile raw is cooked, fermented, consumed, and comes out a delicacy with energy for the soil.
The pile is not a sack. It is a dense ocean of life. Ingredients change with whatever the week brings. Bocashi is water: liquid that carries bacteria, yeasts and minerals to the bed. The city route lives at residuosdinamicos.com.
Cooks
Heat, moisture, air. The pile becomes an occupied building: guilds that eat and hunt.
Serves
Out comes solid delicacy for the bed and bocashi water to irrigate the life already working below.
Restrepo: the ferment is made on the farm. King: return to the field what left the table and the yard.
Who lives here
We highlight life, not an input catalog.
The pile is a dense ocean. Below: the animated guild scene. Beside it: what each one does. No borrowed microscopy.
Bacteria · cooks
Break sugars. Heat the pile.
Yeasts · ferment
Work in bocashi water.
Fungi · hyphae
Weave hard carbon into a net.
Algae · film
Wet edge, living minerals.
Nematodes · hunt
Graze bacteria. Release N.
Protozoa · the web
Amoebae, flagellates, more guilds.
Ingham: without microbial predators, compost does not release N. JADAM: the microorganisms of the place already live here; the pile raises them.
Life
Guilds
The pile is an occupied building.
Hyphae, shredding, hunting, roots coming in. The delicacy is not “fertilizer”: it is habitat ready to settle in the bed.
Odum again: sun → plant → residue → microbe → soil → again. The dump cuts the flow.
The mix changes
No fixed recipe. Roles.
What enters depends on the week: mill, yard, tank, rain, whatever the city delivers. We name roles. Examples appear when they are here. We do not invent materials we have not used.
Fresh food for whoever ferments
Soft matter that heats and feeds bacteria.
Coffee pulp
Tank vegetables
Cow manure
Fish mud
And whatever is here
Air and structure
Without dry carbon the pile packs and drowns.
Sugarcane straw
Horse bedding
Leaf litter
And whatever is here
Bone and powder
Phosphorus, calcium, ash. Not a chemical shortcut.
Fish bone ash
And whatever is here
Microbial energy
Fuel for yeasts and bacteria in liquid bocashi.
Molasses
Plant juices
And whatever is here
The list is not closed. It changes with the harvest, the mill and the route. We do not pad the site with materials we have not named on the farm.
Bocashi
Bocashi is water.
It is not an imported dry sack. It is liquid ferment: molasses, microbes and minerals traveling in water toward the bed, the leaf and the rhizosphere. The pile cooks the solid. Bocashi irrigates the life.
Carries
Bacteria, yeasts, dissolved minerals.
Arrives
At the root as wet habitat, not as dust.
Made here
On the farm. With what is here. No catalog strain.
Juices
Palmer: the plant already gathered minerals; the juice returns them.
Restrepo: bocashi on the farm, not a sack. Palmer: fermenting the plant’s juice is returning to the soil what that plant already gathered.
Rainwater · sponge
~600,000 L
On 1 hectare with 4 inches of bocashi in the soil: rainwater that layer can capture and store.
Every inch counts.
Each inch of bocashi in the soil can capture and store on the order of ~150,000 liters of rainwater per hectare.
1 ha × 1″ = 254 m³ of layer. With typical organic-media / bocashi volumetric retention (~50–70%), the order of magnitude is 100,000–200,000 L per inch. We use ~150,000 L/inch → 4″ ≈ 600,000 L.
Order of magnitude from layer geometry and organic-media / measured bocashi retention (~2 g water/g dry). Not the USDA “1% organic matter” claim, which is a different metric.
From pile to bed
Solid for structure. Water to inoculate.
Mature compost opens pores and aggregates. Liquid bocashi carries the living web to where the root is feeding. Plants do not “eat compost”: they eat what microbial predators release.
The farm in photos
You can see the pile. You can see the water. You can see the bed.
Not an abstract diagram. Photos of this plot: tanks, compost, river, terraces and living soil.
Illustration
Trophic web
Each guild a job. Nobody works alone.
Bacteria cook. Fungi weave. Nematodes hunt. Bocashi water moves the web toward the root.
Company site: residuosdinamicos.com · rcd@hierbawena.com · +507 6030-1022
Orgánica Store / Bites, March 2026, published a weighing of their operation with us. A partner’s dated figure. Not the headline of this pile.