Bokashi composting, also spelled bocashi composting, is a new way to deal with kitchen scraps. The proponents of the system claim that it has a number of benefits not found in more traditional composting methods. In this blog post, I will have a close look at Bokashi composting and separate myth from reality.
Bokashi Composting—What is it?
From Bokashicomposting.com we have the following description: “Bokashi composting is a safe, convenient, and quick way to compost food waste in your kitchen, garage, or apartment.”
To get started, you need a special bokashi bucket that has a tight lid and a spigot at the bottom to drain off liquids (pictured above). These will run you $60 to $150, or you can make a DIY for $20. You also need the ‘special sauce’! It would not be a very good process if there was no special sauce to sell you. It is normally referred to as bokashi bran or Effective Microbes.
The process is fairly simple. Put your food scraps in the pail and sprinkle some bokashi bran on top. Squish it down tight to get the air out. Close the lid. Each time you have more scraps, add them to the pail, add bran, and squish.
After a few days, liquid starts to form in the bottom of the pail. This needs to be drained, or it will start to stink. This liquid, the ‘bokashi tea,’ can be used to fertilize your house plants or your garden plants.
After a few weeks, when the pail is full, you take the contents outside and either dig it into your garden or add it to your compost pile.
That is the basic process. If you want more details or have specific questions about the process, there is lots of info on the net.
Benefits of Bokashi Composting
I found the following benefits listed at various sites on the net.
1) You can compost dairy products and meat.
2) No strong odors
3) No nutrients lost
4) No insects or rodents
5) No turning necessary
6) No need to worry about the amount of greens and browns
7) Food scraps are inoculated with EM (Effective Microbes)
8) Produces a nutrient-rich tea for plants
9) Can be carried out on a small scale, which is perfect for apartments
10) Very quick—complete in 2 weeks
11) Saying the word ‘bokashi’ will impress friends. 🙂
This sounds like a good system, and any system that returns kitchen scraps to the soil is a good thing. So in general, I have no problem with bokashi composting. If it gets you composting—great.
But… there is always a but. Is this really a method of composting? Is this system better than the more traditional methods of composting? These are the important questions and the ones I will look at in the rest of this post.
Bokashi Composting—Is it Really Composting?
If you read the above quickly, you might have missed the statement that says, “After a few weeks, when the pail is full, you take the contents outside and either dig it into your garden or add it to your compost pile.” Does this make sense? Why would you add fully composted material back to the compost pile?
If you read the fine print, you soon understand that bokashi composting is not a composting process at all. Bokashi in Japanese means to ferment. This process is actually a fermentation process. What you are doing is turning your kitchen scraps into pickled kitchen scraps. At the end of the process, the food looks just like it did when it went into the system, except it’s pickled. An orange looks like an orange, and an apple looks like an apple.
There is no composting taking place in bokashi composting—talk about false advertising!
Knowing this fact makes the earlier statement make more sense. Once you have fermented your scraps, you then need to compost them. You can do this by adding them to a compost pile, or you can just dig them into your garden soil, where they will compost naturally.
This system is especially promoted for apartment owners—what do they do with it after fermentation? Throw it in the garbage? They could have done that before fermenting.
Now that you understand the process, it is also clear why it is so fast—only 2 weeks. It is fast because there is no composting, which is a slow process.
Bokashi composting is not composting!
Bokashi vs Traditional Composting
The benefits listed above as #2 to #6, inclusive, are really not benefits when we compare the two methods. I make compost in bins and don’t worry about greens and browns—I just add whatever I have. It is outside, so the smell does not bother me, and if a mouse comes by for a bite to eat, so what! Nutrients can be lost if it rains too much, but they are lost to the soil below the compost pile—they are not really lost since the tree roots under the compost pile use the nutrients. If I really care about nutrient loss, I can cover the compost pile to keep out the rain.
Traditional composting, if higher temperatures are reached, can even compost meat and cheese.
The difference in the two systems is the pickling process. The apparent benefits of pickling are the Effective Microbes added to soil and the bokashi tea.
For more information on traditional composting, see Compost—What is Compost? and Benefits of Composting.
For a detailed comparison of Bokashi and traditional composting see, Bokashi vs. Composting.
Effective Microbes
Dr. Higa, the person who originally developed the bokashi system, also developed a special sauce that he called ‘Effective Microbes’ (EM). All kinds of special properties have been assigned to this mixture, but nowadays lots of people sell the microbes already added to the bran. Everyone in the industry now has their own ‘secret sauce,’ i.e., Effective Microbes + bran.
Adding the microbes is important since they control the fermentation process. For example, in winemaking, special starter yeast mixtures may be added to start the process. The reason for doing this is that you want the right kind of microbes to grow quickly and outcompete the ones that will create a lot of bad odors.
There are also claims that the EM are good for the garden. There are some studies that show a benefit from the microbes, but most show no positive results.
Testing of EM tea on field-grown crops found that they did not increase yield. Similar field studies have shown the same results. Effective microbes are important to make the bokashi system work, but they don’t really add any benefit to your garden.
Note (added April 2021): More recent research indicates that even the EM microbes may not be required for making Bokashi.
Nutritious Bokashi Tea
As fermentation progresses, excess liquid drains into the bottom of the pail, and you need to remove it. It is claimed that this tea is a great source of nutrients for your plants.
How nutritious is it? Some sites say that you can use it straight or dilute it 1:100. That is a huge red flag. A fertilizer that can be effective at full strength and at a 100 dilution rate does not make sense. Some people have commented that “it’s a biology thing, not a chemistry thing, and so the dilution does not matter.” They are saying ignore the nutrients because it is the microbes that are important. I addressed that in the discussion above. The science does not support the idea that the microbes add value. Even if they did, dilution by a factor of 100 would still be important.
There is very little published about the nutrient levels in Bokashi tea, which is odd since so many websites promote it. I did find one study and analyzed it in another post called Is Bokashi Tea a Good Fertilizer?
In short, it contains very little nitrogen, high levels of P and K, and several of the micronutrients are on the low side. It also contains high levels of sodium and chloride, both of which are toxic to plants at low levels.
Bokashi tea should not be used on container plants, and even in the garden it should be diluted 1:100 before it is used to reduce any potential damage from sodium and chloride.
Real Benefits of Bokashi
I am still not sold on Bokashi. The tea has no real value, and the fermented food scraps still need to be disposed of. If you are going to dispose of them in the garden, you might as well compost instead.
In recent years a new way of handling the Bokashi ferment, called Soil Factory, has become popular. I have discussed it in detail in Soil Factory Using Bokashi Ferment. It is a way to process the scraps in the home in a few weeks. You can even use my improved Instant Soil Factory method and eliminate the two-week period. Using these methods, Bokashi makes sense for apartment owners and others with no garden.
Both bokashi composting and traditional composting provide your garden and plants with the same benefits. Bokashi just seems to be an additional extra step that is not necessary. I would not use it.
That leaves us with one benefit from the list presented above, and this one can’t be denied. Saying the word ‘bokashi’ is cool and will impress your friends.
Sorry captain. But if you have not tried Bokashi you are not the someone who could give answers to the myths of how great or how worthless the process is. You are guessing. Just like. You say other people are not providing evidence, neither are you. I have personally witnessed 55 gallons of Bokashi fermented food waste decompose into rich dark organic matter in less than 2 weeks this past spring. I also witnessed every tree on my property that had Bokashi compost on or in the soil near the tree’s dripline rebound from the brink of death to thriving in just one year all, in one of the driest, and hottest years.
Bokashi is not for everyone. But it does answer many shortcomings of traditional composting. No C:N ratios, no extra water, no turning… And the ability to store greens until one is ready to compost them. It also compliments traditional compost methods, by allowing people who don’t have an optimized compost pile to compost successfully in spite of whatever reason their pile wasnt “right.”
And as for apartment dwellers… Some people do care about the environment. Dumping food down the drain or even worst, in the trash, is not the best thing for the earth. Bokashi allows apartment dwellers to deal with food waste themselves. A huge benefit of Bokashi is how little trash I actually produce now. I take my trashcan out once a week because there is nothing rotting in there.
Have you studied the soil food web? If you understood that soil microbes feed plants, and can form a symbiotic relationship with some trees and plants, you would understand that feeding those microbes is the key to a self sustaining garden. If you want to understand Bokashi, you should study silage. It’s the same thing. You are using lacto and yeast to preserve nutritional value of something that would otherwise rot. pH is a huge factor in that process. Drop the pH and rot and odor causing microbes die off.
I use Bokashi to compost bones from meals we have for dinner. Those bones are dust in just a few months, sometimes weeks, but more importantly, the Bokashi process gives me calcium that is plant available. No more blossom end rot.. And yes, I have seen before and after affects of apply calcium rich Bokashi to my tomatoes and peppers that previously had end rot. I also ferment seaweed and bananas. Now I am making nutrient rich soil amendments for all of my plants. I have a thriving garden that I never have to apply fertilizer to.
So No, Bokashi is not the answer to anyone who wants to look at thier food waste and have it walk alone to the garden and instantly become soil organic matter and plant available nutrients. But for those who don’t want to turn a pile, figure out C:N ratios, or keep a pile at a moisture level of a rung out sponge. Bokashi helps quite a bit. I can compost using Bokashi in any size batch from 1 cup to 100+ gallons. 15$ worth of inoculant for those benefits is worth it to me. So maybe you should stick to giving advice on things that you are familiar with.
So unless a person tries something – they can’t gain knowledge about the topic?? That makes no sense. If it did we would not need schools!
I am not guessing. I am basing the information on published data. If you have different published data – show it to me. I can read it and learn from it.
I compost – but don’t care about C:N ratio. Do not add water. Do not turn. I don’t even carry the organic material to a pile. My cut and drop method is even easier than Bokashi. https://www.gardenmyths.com/composting-the-cut-and-drop-method/
I understand soil microbes very well. I never said the end product of Bokasi will not be good for the soil. Maybe you did not read my post?
Blossom End Rot is NOT a deficiency of calcium in the soil. You can read all about it here: https://www.gardenmyths.com/blossom-end-rot/
Very well articulated Ron. Couldn’t have said it better myself
I agree with most of what Ron says
For kitchen scraps:
I have done traditional composting and found it to be hard work to turn the pile and aerate regularly.
It takes long before the composting is complete and getting the ratios correct for hot composting to take place is tricky.
I now use the bokashi method which I find cheap and effective.
It does take a bit of time and effort as I innoculate bran to make my own mixture cheaply. Once the kitchen scraps are ‘pickled ‘ (in about a month ) I throw the mixture into an empty composting bin and cover with a thin layer of soil for the smell.About 4 weeks later the kitchen scraps seem to be broken down completely and the process is repeated with the next bucket of scraps.
Earthworms have moved in of there own accord and multipled profusely.Within a reasonably short time I have a compost which I use for growing vegetables.
From start to finish this method has been much quicker for me than traditional composting.
I have tried this with garden waste but that did not work as well as I dont have the means of chopping everything finely and I dont think twigs etc would get pickled anyway. So if I was going to compost garden waste I would probably use traditional composting.
I’m guilty of chronically overbuying groceries. I give my fruit and veggies scraps to my worm farm…and more recently to my newly acquired chickens, but I would love a way to dispose of meats. Have you ever put uncooked meats in the bokashi bucket? Did those bones decompose as well?
my plants, potted and garden ones, absolutely thrive on the Bokashi ‘tea’ …I put about 4 tbs in a 5l can of water.. gut feel. come and see my beautiful garden in Cape Town . The buckets, when the juice stops, are later buried/mixed into the compost , a wonderful mix
And no more rat problems ! BOKASHI IS BEST
Unless you have comparative plots, one with and one without bokashi tea, your observation does not show it works.
We just started using the bokashi method. We have made our own bran and bucket system. AT NO POINT…were we told this is composting, we have always understood it to be fermentation and that further steps were needed to make it compost. We learned it from someone who has been experimenting with various methods. He has anecdotal and historical evidence of this type of method working, other farmers have had success using this method. Since we are starting out, we will have to see if it works for ourselves. Just like other claims made in favor of bokashi, and yours that it doesn’t work, people will have to see for themselves if it is worth it.
I never said it does not work. It works to the extent that it ferments things. If that is a suitable goal – use it.
Another myth is that compost need to be fully broken down before you can use it. Plants grow just as happily in food scraps that you bury in the ground. Might not look good but the vegetables don’t mind. We make things complicated but nature takes care of it.
So called finished compost still takes years to break down completely. so even it is not fully composted yet.
You are certainly right – composting is not needed. Its main purpose is to keep the garden cleaner looking. I stopped composting years ago. Organic matter just gets dumped on the beds behind a plant to hide it.
USDA NOP rules for using compost on certified organic crops require that aerobic compost reach 130 F internal temperature and be turned at least three times to ensure that most of the material in the pile is treated. This process reduces populations of plant, animal and human pathogens.. While vegetable waste may be OK to bury or surface compost in the garden, you would not want to do that with manure or compost containing meat scraps.
Bokashi reduces the pH of treated waste creating an environment in which pathogenic bacteria cannot grow..These effects are documented in the publication https://todd-klempner.squarespace.com/s/Coliforms_03026013.pdf
I see no problem putting manure or meat scraps on the surface of the soil. Nature has been doing this for millions of years and we still use the soil.
umm… composting actually does do a few things… most notably (other than the looks which are not even important other than to us) converts proteins to nitrogen & its other components. Why does this matter? Because this process will happen in your soil whether you compost or not, but if you are cultivating plants in this material while this is happening, your plants will experience nitrogen starvation.
After composting has slowed down to the normal soil level, this will no longer happen.
Composting also makes phosphorus & potassium among other nutrients water soluble & available for the plants to use. Robert, if you do not know this stuff, how are you educating about composting & cultivation???
Composting does a lot of different things – the conversion of protein to nitrogen is just one.
Composting does not “make phosphorus & potassium among other nutrients water soluble”. Composting is the degradation of large molecules which releases the nutrients. The solubility of phosphorus and other nutrients depends on the chemical nature of the ions produced, but composting does not change their solubility.
I don’t understand your comments about planting in “this material” – what ever that is. No one suggests planting in raw organic matter or in compost. Decomposition by bacteria does require nitrogen, and if this process is too high, it will make it harder for plants to get their nitrogen. But this process goes on all the time in soil and plants grow just fine. It is a matter of keeping things in balance.
I do understand this very well – I am both a chemist and biochemist.
Then why don’t you do your control & experimental group flower bed or whatever you like to test Bokashi alongside a traditional compost bin?
Since Bokashi is not a composting method, but a way to speed the process up by softening the material & fermenting it, you would have to compost the material afterwards, but you will see (this is your test anyways) that it is faster & benefits in a few different ways like attracting worms…
Perhaps using the word pickling was too general for someone nitpicking every word about this, & water soluble when I should have said releasing previously used phosphorus & potassium among other nutrients…
Seriously…
The point is it makes composting faster, so go test it…
There is a HUGE amount of paper written on this process already, so I do not know how you cannot find the evidence you claim does not exist… I will link some stuff here in my next response.
Doing a proper scientific study is a lot of work and needs a lot of space.
I look forward to some proof that it makes composting faster.
Noel, I have been following this thread for two years. Robert is just not a fan of Bokashi, period. Those of us who are using it love it, and see the benefits first hand. He is just not going to come over to the light. 🙂
That is actually not quite true. I am seeing more advantage with Bokashi and am writing about them as we speak. The problem I have is finding any real data on what happens after the Bokashi material is added to soil. I do have one source that says there has been very little research in this area.
My experience is that the bokashi’d waste does decompose much faster. Our local soup kitchen has been composting waste using bokashi inocculant and then dumping it in earth-filled boxes outside of our local community greenhouse. I dumped 10 gallons of fermented waste and left it for 2.5 weeks before checking it again. outside temperatures are around 5C these days and the box had a plastic cover over it. Most of the waste, except for the bigger chunks had already decomposed after a couple of weeks. I was surprised at the heat created as well. We don’t use buckets with spigots and we make our own inocculant… It’s all very simple, and the greenhouse really needs it because the soil hasn’t been properly taken care of for years. Friends “down south”, Ottawa area, found the waste they had buried in the earth in November had completely disappeared by the time they checked again in May.
Useful anecdotal information but without numbers and controls your observations are not very convincing. Also keep in mind that we can’t see decomposition.
If you dump kitchen scraps or any uncomposted material such as grass clippings on your garden, is it true that before they provide nutrients to plants these scraps etc use up Nitrogen to help to decompose, so actually the garden plants suffer a bit for a while?
Yes and no. Yes, the bacteria and fungi that decompose organic matter need nitrogen. Grass clippings provide lots of nitrogen – brown organic matter, like wood chips, does not.
If you place this organic matter on the surface of the soil you will only loose nitrogen in the top couple of millimeters of soil. This will have no effect on plants. This is why we always recommend to put wood chips on the soil as a mulch, and don’t dig them into the soil.
I haven’t invested in Bokashi and don’t at this point intend doing so. My problem with your article is you didn’t provide any real evidence for your opinions either. In an urban setting I’d consider Bokashi if it really is faster.
Is it really faster once the fermented food waste is dumped outside?
For how long is the food waste recognisable as food once composting begins? Will fermented food waste attract vermin outside? Over the years I’ve seen rats eat peanuts from hanging bird feeders and had mice ruin potatoes that hadn’t, been harvested. I’m not convinced Bokashi waste is any less likely to attract vermin. I’d suggest that if the method speeds final composting and is unattractive to vermin it might offer more to the urban gardener than you suggest.
In this post i was commenting on the benefits others have claimed. I did not find any Bokashi proponents or companies selling the products that claimed the finished product would compost faster. If it did, you would expect them to promote this point. They don’t.
I never use any product without research. I use several methods of composting, but abandoned traditional bin or pile composting years ago. I sheet compost garden waste and use bokashi for indoor waste. Bokashi is not a “fertilizer”. It is a fermentation process that fosters beneficial microbes. I think of it as a “pro- or pre-biotic” for the garden and for the worm bin. It is not true that the anaerobic microbes all die out when they are introduced to the garden. They are facultative anaerobes, not obligate anaerobes.
I have fed “finished” bokashi to worm bins, which produces a very good quality vermicompost. I have also used the bin process to refine it – layering the 5-gallons of “finished” bokashi with 1 cubic foot of compost-based potting media (compost, aged pine bark, expanded shale, angular sand, dried molasses, and mycorrhizal fungi) and fallen tree leaves. It produces a wonderfully rich mix in a relatively short period of time.
No method of composting should be considered “the” method. All methods of home waste management are on the table and contribute to the reduction of municipal waste excess.
I do not use bokashi leachate in the garden – diluted or not. It goes into the blackwater system, where it does no harm, and may do some good.
There is no evidence that bokashi fosters beneficial microbes. If you have such evidence, please provide a link.
It is possible that the microbes are facultative anaerobes, but I have not seen a report that analyzed the microbes formed in bokashi so I don’t know that for a fact. If you have a reference I would certainly like to look at it. Even if they do not die in soil, there is no scientific evidence that adding bacteria to soil add any value. This is also the big claim for compost tea, and yet research does not show a consistent value for adding the microbes.
Dr.Elaine Ingham The Soil Food Web
Do YOUR research She did hers!!
Actually much of her position on the soil food web are not accepted principals of science. She makes many claims for which there is no supporting science. You can read my posts on Teaming With Microbes to understand this better
I started a bokashi bucket purely because I had rats in my compost and I read that vermin dont like the smell of bokashi. Since I have been putting my scraps in the bokashi then the compost heep I can now put all my scraps in the compost. The result is no smelly bin and no rats in the compost. Ill wait and see if my garden improves but sweet smelling compost no rats and no smelly rubbish I’m already a winner.
Interesting about the rats.
I live in the arctic where there is very little soil to speak of. I have been composting using bokashi for almost two years. My experience with “regular” composting outside was unsuccessful – too dry, too cold, very short season, I don’t know. However, for the last (almost) two years, I have been filling 5 gallon buckets (layered with fermented bran or sawdust) allowing it to ferment, and then layering the fermented bucket contents in Rubbermaid bins, layered with earth. In my first year, I used purchased, bagged, garden soil brought up to Baffin by sealift. Since the actual composting cannot be done outside, all the composting is done inside our house. No odour. In early March, for example, I sifted my December compost to separate out the big chunks and used the remaining compost in my indoor plants. That is a quick turnaround. I have found that we can compost all of our family food waste (5 gallon bucket every two weeks that is then fermented two weeks and then mixed with soil and layered in a Rubbermaid bin in the house). So, the bokashi system is the bee’s knees, really, the only way that our household can compost our food waste and then USE that compost to grow food. So, in the past two summers, in a small greenhouse and a number of cold frames, with ALL the compost we produced the past winters, we grew all the greens we needed. Considering the high price of flown-in produce, our home grown food was a great cost savings – and surely fresher than the store bought stuff. We can only grow cold hardy greens outdoors in cold frames but the compost not only produces nutrients but also soil “bulk”. I rely on that”bulk” to be able to fill those cold frames and the beds in the greenhouse. A bag of soil cost me amost $40 in 2015. So, last fall, I excavated soil from the cold frames to store for bokashi-ing during the winter… And so goes this great circle of producing compost (from ALL of our food waste) through the year and producing food from it during out short summers. Bokashi is THE system for our situation here in the arctic.
Lovely story – thanks for posting. Bokashi certainly is useful in your situation.
I have not been to Baffin, but have canoed in the arctic (Coppermine and Horton Rivers).
I am so pleased to hear how Bokashi Composting has been such a benefit to your family. We have many clients up in Nunavut that echo your experiences. It really makes a case for people who want to compost during the winter months but can’t any other way. Thank you for sharing that
I live in a severe climate also – the high desert in New Mexico. 3 inches of rain per year. Traditional methods of composting take years in my experience. I also just tried food scraps in a plastic bin with soil over top and planted right into it. Worked okay but it attracted bugs, spiders, packrats as it decomposed under the vegetables the entire summer. Bokashi is a step forward.