Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Soilsecrets@aol.com]

April 23, 2006

I’ve shared with many  readers the images of carrots that were grown on a heavy clay soil on the land of Elliot Hass in Taos New Mexico.  The question is often raised as to how humus works, how was the soil prepared and how does the soil improve and hold more moisture because of this protocol?

 

Real Humus is water soluble at a normal pH so when we top dress it on the landscape it easily dissolves and moves into the soil profile and no mixing is needed.  Versus the geological material often sold as humus called Humates which are not water soluble at a normal pH and therefore do not dissolve and move into the soil.  Many companies sell liquid Humic acid and claim the benefits of humus, but the issue is that these liquids are always made using a base extraction technique which requires a caustic chemical reaction between a highly alkaline material such as Potassium Hydroxide (or Sodium Hydroxide) and the Humate ore.  The drain cleaner called Drano is Sodium hydroxide!  The same thing happens to the obstruction plug of grease, hair and lint that will happen to the Humate in that it will dissolve the material into a liquid.  After the sludge is precipitated out the finished liquid is still very alkaline but is marketed   as Humic acid.  Some companies will dehydrate this liquid into a powder and sell it as a water soluble Humic acid that is the proprietary invention of some brilliant Russian Scientists, but the fact remains that it's a base extracted - high salt -  high pH - solution with a little bit of Humic acid in it.  Now if you compare this chemically derived Humic acid to the waters of the New Jersey Pine Barrens or the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia you will see a major difference!  The Okefenokee Swamp waters have an ambient pH, 3.8 to 4.2 because they are so saturated with Humic acids from the humus rich soils of the watershed.  Obviously no base extraction was done to get these Humic acids to leach into the water!  The point is that Soil Secrets is growing biologically viable humus that is the same chemically as the humus found in these soils of the Okefenokee area and therefore easily dissolve and move into the soil.  The humus is also used as a bulk carrier of the mutualistic root inhabiting mycorrhizae and helper bacteria that we grew on roots in our Greenhouse facilities in New Mexico.  The only way to grow what we can legally claim as beneficial microorganisms of plant roots is to grow them on plant roots and that's what we do! You cannot grow them in a Compost tea or a Bio Dynamic liquid as that is the wrong environment for propagating and perpetuating these types of microorganism as they are not water borne regardless of how aerobic you keep the water.

 

So, no working of the soil is needed and we have implemented the use of the dormant vesicles and endospores of the much needed fungi and bacteria that will also easily move into the soil. 

 

Finally, humus has a characteristic that gives us a huge cation exchange capacity beyond any other material we have at our disposal and it attracts and helps to hold moisture in our soils.  The research is clear that when you add a significant amount of humus to the soil along with the appropriate mutualistic microorganisms, the improvement in water/nutrient uptake along with the improved drought tolerance of the plant material is dramatic.  Nothing else that mankind has invented can compare to these benefits.  While I did not invent Humus, I did develop the technique and equipment for making large volumes of humus in a short period of time and currently can manufacture over 60 tons of it per hour.  To put that into perspective, when nature converts raw organic debris into humus the transaction is daunting.  It takes about 100,000 pounds of organic debris of leaves, twigs and other dead things to make about 10,000 pounds of what many of us call a finished or stable compost.  It then takes 10,000 pounds of this finished compost for nature to bio chemically change it into a 5 gallon pail of Humus or about 40 pounds.  In the case of the carrot patch, 40 pounds of humus saturated with the Inoculants were applied on each 1000 sq. ft. of space and provided with about 19 pounds of a pure amino acid balanced protein substance to provide 34,400 nutritional calories for the Soil Food Web and therefore provide slow release plant available nutrients which the carrot crop will need. 

 

Dr. Michael Martin Melendrez

www.soilsecrets.com