scroll down and read the comments! 
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I think this guy in the article is missing the point while yes both compost and compost tea are beneficial the whole idea behind making tea is to exponential increase the microbial count and diversity from said compost . Can there be shitty compost tea? Absolutely perhaps one started with shitty compost to begin with ! Can good tea go bad absolutely thatās why it canāt stay lying around needs applied quickly . I can attest personally that the result ones see in the plants response is pretty damn quick. The dude quoted Dr Elaine Ingham a lady that has helped thousands of farmers/gardeners get there soil back into shape whatās one of her weapons? You guessed compost tea!
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I think the author missed the point, for sure. To me itās more about IPM than anything else, and rain doesnāt usually spray forth from my compost heap, so, duh, of course itāll help to help nature.
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Yeah agreed heās off course here
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Heās a complete moron. If thatās his profile picture Iāve met him personally. Dude canāt make sense if he tried. Heās a stubborn autistic type. I speak from personal experience on being a stubborn autistic. You know how to recognize it even in text.
Heās stuck on one point only. Heās convinced they donāt add npk and that they donāt increase microbiology, but yet he admitted that runoff from compost is good for plants SMH. Leave alone heās ignorant and it shows. Apparently when he hears compost tea heās only considering compost exclusively as a input. No worm castings, fresh plant matter, or even any of the extreme varieties out in the world like knf over in North Korea where they use human shit and local plants to brew teas. If it didnāt work they wouldnāt be doing that. They donāt apply compost at all. They canāt afford to. Maybe some plants get composted on top. For someone big about nature he is sure enjoying using compost to garden 
Yes. Yes you did discuss compost tea in this article. Worm castings are a type of compost/fertilizer combo.
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Thatās some top notch reasoning thereā¦ so thereās no scientific data on it which means you are wrong but my opinion is the right one based on no scientific dataā¦ ok thx
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this is an epic semantics problem coupled with lack of knowledge on many plus the marketingof ppl like ingram who serve to give more misinfo on the miracles of teas than good info.
now let me start off saying i use teas and grow organic, but there are two kinds basically. compost tea and nutrient teas, some use other names for the latter. a nutrient tea has things like single ingredient DTE with soluble nutes and non soluble nutes in there. teas with these products can supply pretty mush all the nutes tho it is harder to get P in high doses this way but with research you can do it. compost tea however is all about the microbes. the big thing ppl do not consider including ingram herself is throwing of the delicate ecosystem by adding too many microbes especially of unkon species could for one thing wipe out other miscrobes lessening diversity or straight up destroy the ecosystem till it reaches homeostasis again. that said compost teas are great foliarly or if you know you have depleted microbes, for example you bought pasturized store bought soil, in this case a nice compost tea at the start will be good. in essence foliar with compost teas and feed with nutrient tes. you really dont even want to foliar the nutrient tea because the plant would rather take nutes thru leaves and thus root ggrowth slows down via foliar feeding.
hope this cleared some thing sup for ppl on both sides of this agrgument. these nuances are why this discussion never goes away. most ppl dont see the biig picture
** the confusion is ppl call it all compost tea so when taken literally and studied there is little benefit as a water/feeding mechanism. the ppl who use DTE etc know it has nutes but also call it compost tea. if ppl would distinguish between the two we can end this debate all over the internet
TL;DR
compost tea for microbes mainly for foliar spraying and prepping pasturized soils
nutrient tea using things like DTE single ingredient in it for feeding and nutrients, donāt foliar this tea
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Glad im not alone on this āhes a moronā conclusion. its almost like the dude just wants to troll organic gardeners for some reason. maybe his mom made him make compost tea as a child and hes never gotten over itā¦
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If your soil is lacking, a āteaā is a great way to get nutrients into the soil quickly without having to wait for the additives to decompose. Good luck trying to get alfalfa into your soil without using a tea if you have rabbits around. Just dump some on the soil surface with the expectation of watering it in and all youāll end up with is fat rabbits and no alfalfa.
Hereās another vote for āheās a moronā.
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Donāt like to debate much but Ingham is the real deal studied at Co was Cheif scientist at the Rodale institute has businesses literally across the globe the lady definitely knows hers shit and and has the credentials to back it up .
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lol
well you could always water in all the rabbit pooā¦excellent fertilizer
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Iām employing this method with rabbit poo right in my worm bins I think Iām going to like working with rabbit do-do in the garden this year!
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Personally, I find the extra work making teas to be a ballache. As I have access to around 5 tons of collected leaf mulch, some of which is like black gold right now, I have been adding as much of that as I can.
My goal is to feed fungal activity. Having recently taken on a second plot which was overgrown, now it is cleared it looks plain that the whole plot just needs feeding. Most of it was covered in plastic, which is now gone. When wet the soil is shiny, when dry it is like rock. It needs a bunch of organic material to rot down into it and help aeration. It does not help that 2ft down there is a solid layer of clay. Might have to plant something with deep roots for that.
I have looked at videos about teas etc and decided that I will just work on soil improvement, then IMO teas become unnecessary. I would not call them counterproductive though, unless you let them get too old and they start to produce stuff toxic to the life in your soil.
Stuff rots, plants grow. Sometimes people make simple things too complicated and then they stop being fun.
This sounds fun 
Makes me miss my chickens. They would have easily cleared all the weeds and grass from my plot in no time.
EDIT :
Wasnāt she instrumental in coming up with āno digā or āno tillā? I recall her talking about being one of the first people to ask āWhy is dirt not soil?ā
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I hear daikon radish is a great deep clay buster!
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Not sure if she coined the termā no-tillā but it aligns with ideology of very little disturbance to soil cause if itās done to great extent fungi is damaged as well as a lot of microbiology and soil structure as well
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ik who she is, i read her books, but she doesnāt use her knowledge to educate very well, she overstates allot, she has an agenda directly related to the institute you mentioned as well as selling books, running soilfoodweb and she doesnt distinguish the terms enough if at all. ppl like her have contributed greatly to the confusion and itās for money and an organic agenda. her education and job has nothing to do with anything im saying and tbh it probably is more a problem than a good, just look at phylos lol, allot of well educated scientist there to, but we see what investors and money do right, they corrupt.
many ppl use their great knowledge and education for political agendas and to further their bubiness profits to a far greater extent than they give back. ppl even deliberately give vague or misleading advice or straight up lie. elaine has her issues for sure, but it doesnāt invalidate everythign she says, i think i was clear on that, but if she was doing her job as an educator and even a writer then this debate wouldnt exist. her books have polarized more than helped and its for the reasons i lay out. if your writing books on soil biology and even some organic growers are not on your side them imo you are doing something very wrong
of course this is all my subjective opinios so ne need to debate as you sayā¦ stay stoned brotha 
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did you guys know rabbit poo is one of if not the only poo you dont need to ācookā? its the perfect fertilizer. you can actually grow crops in straight rabbit poo. so whoever said they put it in their worm bin there is no need for that. just apply the poop bro it is rdy to go. its a cold fert
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Itās all good I knew that prior to implementing poo Iām using it as more of a food source for the little worm homies more than anything and Iām excited to try this new for me ācold manureā
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All this guy is saying is that there is a pronounced dearth of scientific studies supporting perceived benefits of compost tea. He is undoubtedly correct in this regard.
It strikes me as sort of sad that myopic cannabis growers feel the need to call him a moron.
I realized many years ago that many ganja growers have quite a parochial view of growing their sacred plant. IME, cannabis is one of the easiest plants to grow successfully.
I was curious about compost tea, never having used it, so I spent some time looking into the topic. One thing that I was surprised to find was that the compost teas are not advisable to use on any food crops. Human pathogens (potentially with foliar spray). Yikes. I will stick to using straight compost, which I have been doing for more than a few decades.
I came across this quote from 1871 which I find to be somewhat relevant.
Charles Dudley Warner (My summer in A Garden, 1871), āI have seen gardens which were all experiment, given over to every new thing, and which produced little or nothing to the owners, except the pleasure of expectation.ā
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this is why you stop foliar in flower. you dont wanna smoke shitā¦literally
and i agree with what your saying but as i eluded to in my other post above i think even the few studies that were done didnāt distinguish between a nute tea and compost tea by calling both compost tea. this lead to seemingly conflicting studies depending on the tea recipe used and doubling the issues was many misunderstood results based off that nuance i think
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