North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["ADAMSON, Karl" <Karl.Adamson@apvma.gov.au>]

Jim Fruth wrote:
The exact wording of his reply was, "..............because the average
person is to stupid to know anything about micronutrients."    I've been
on a crusade ever since to get gardeners and orchardists to start using
private soil testing laboratories.

Hi Ya Jim,
I used to be in the business of soil testing.  People's stupidity aside,
the real reason Universities don't do micronutrient testing is that the
machines used to do the job (called  inductively couple plasma
spectrophotometers) are very expensive to run.  Unless you are running
hundreds of samples per day it is not economically viable to start them
up for just a few samples.  I have no idea about the USA but here in
Australia I don't know many Universities that even have an ICP machine
as they are also very expensive to buy let alone run.  The Universities
here get private labs to do this testing for them also.

The other option which is cheap and effective is to use a flame
spectrophotometer (invented by us Aussies) but then you can only analyse
one element at a time, then break down the machine and rebuild it for
the next element.  Although it is free to hire Grad students, they
rarely have the attention span for such mundane work.

Karl
Canberra, Australia