Brussels Sprout Get A Boost from Insect Frass in Synthetic vs. Natural Fertilizer Study

Soil amendment with insect frass and exuviae affects rhizosphere bacterial community, shoot growth and carbon/nitrogen ratio of a brassicaceous plant
Plant And Soil
October 2023
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    More great news about insect poo!!!  Frass, as it's called in more astute circles, is the excrement of bugs.  Similar to worm castings, frass is full of useful nutrition, beneficial microbes, and plant growth promoting compounds.   A group of insect-centric researchers in the Netherlands wanted to see if different types of frass would affect plant growth differently.  
    In this study, three types of frass were used to grow Brussels Sprouts, which were compared to Brussels Sprouts grown with synthetic fertilizer.  To do this, the researchers grew the plants using either Meal Worm, House Cricket, or Black Soldier Fly Larvae frass, and compared it to a synthetic fertilizer with a similar nitrogen content.  The plants were let to grow for 8 weeks, and then several growth parameters were measured, and the bacterial community in the soil was assessed for who and how many were there. 
      After 8 weeks, the researchers found that the plants grown with frass performed just as well as the synthetic fertilizers, in fact, the cricket frass performed better! Even more interestingly, the microbial communities in the frass soils had a greater amount of bacteria known for their plant growth promoting capabilities.  The conclusion is: frass works as good or better than synthetic fertilizer, and has the added bonus of increasing the population of beneficial soil bacteria.  
    The shortcoming of this study is that the researchers did not cook the Brussels Sprouts with brown sugar and bacon to determine if there were differences in tasty-ness (recipe here).  Thanks to the bug-nerd Netherland scientists that think this stuff is as interesting as we do. 

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