I haven't been following the podcasts lately.
I guess there ARE some claims being made for strange benefits of compost tea that I was unaware of. So I should not bash the original authors for making up irrelevant boogeymen or making up imaginary advantages. Maybe they stressed nutrients, "hormones" and enzymes much more than I thought was balanced.
If they had simply said "some enthusiasts even invoke enzymes and hormones as magic words to glorify compost tea and make it sound exciting", I would be singing their praises.
If they had spent just one sentence instead of multiple pages to say "there just aren't many nutrients IN compost tea!" I would also be praising their wisdom and sagacity. But Becky often scolds me for trying to tell authors what they SHOULD have said. My bad.
Anyway, I agree with what you said around 80-90%, despite the argumentative tone that this post seems to be accumulating! You corrected my belief that "no one is talking about enzymes and hormones from compost tea", and I accept that.
The first article(s?) bashed the ideas about enzymes, hormones and nutrients over and over, unnecessarily to my mind, until you pointed out that indeed those strange claims ARE being made ...
... then they finally got around to the only thing that makes sense to me - increasing the variety of available micro-organisms. By that point, late in the article, my skepticism had been inflamed. If it takes them three pages to "refute" a claim I never considered plausible enough to spend time on, how many interesting things can they have to say about interesting claims?
I accept their statement that the science he read has not yet proved that compost tea can add microbial diversity, or that that is a good thing, but for reasons I mentioned, "science has not proved" doesn't count for any very big whoop with me.
If he had said that science HAS proved that compost tea CAN'T increase microbial diversity in ANY cases, I would be surprised and very interested.
However, even the link that you provided referred to "organisms" 5-10 times for every reference to "nutrients". (Well, the parts I read it did.) I would agree with that weighting!
Maybe SOME nutrients are absorbed by leaves from compost tea, but sheeze! Wouldn't a soluble chemical foliar feeding provide 20 or 50 times more nutrients?
Also, if someone is trying to extract soluble nutrients from a compost heap, they should be tunneling under the heap to collect leachate. THAT would be an interesting article! Otherwise they would have to have some clever timing, to catch those nutrients in the seconds between being solublized and being incorporated into the microbe that solublized it! Maybe right after the thermophilic phase, when the thermophiles are dying and being replaced by mesophiles, the decomposition products MIGHT accumulate enough to be detected ... but I would trust one teaspoon of Peter's plant food to provide more soluble nutrients than a cup of compost.
Some of the "nutrient" references were not "add nutrients to soil" but rather "increase availability of nutrients" which could mean soil aeration, pH, water retention, increased microbial life solublizing existing insoluble nutrients, root hair health, or other indirect ways of increasing root access to nutrients.
Searching, I only found "hormone" mentioned 3 times, near the end, under definitions of "Compost Extract" and "Compost Leachate ". "Enzyme" was only mentioned twice, int he same paragraphs.
