Re: Soil Moisture Meter for compost piles required

[owner-sowacs@aqua.ccwr.ac.za]

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In my opinion it would be better to monitor the water potential rather then
water content. The reason for this is that the water content could be
fairly uniform through a pile of compost but depending on packing parts of
the system could be saturated. Hence anaerobic. Also when a tensiometer is
used to monitor the water potential it will not be effected by salinity.
Surprisingly the work done here on compost indicates that the salinity
effects are quite large in compost. Whether it is due to organic acids or
salts in the animal urine used to make compost is not fully understood by
me.