AdAgrA 2014 Conference

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Soil Health

Whitmar McConnell

1- Many Voices and the Model Soil

2- The Three Legged Stool Part 1, Chemistry

3- The Three Legged Stool Part 2, Physics

4- The Three Legged Stool Part 3, Biology

5- Environmental Influences, the Other Part of the Growing System

Shawn Speidel

6- Good Information, Good Decisions, Good Outcomes

7- Choosing the Right Resources, The End Matters

Father in heaven, thank you for the nourishment that we enjoyed at lunch.

Just pray you would continue to nourish us at every level, not just physical, but spiritual and emotionally, socially, mentally.

We just ask your continued presence in our discussion today in Jesus' name.

Okay, I want to be sure you got a couple of things and then I'm going to back up a little bit and go over some of it a little bit more.

Yeah, let me get the, try to get this up again.

Do you all understand the concept of the cation exchange capacity?

In other words, that a soil has a certain capacity to hold fertility, to hold nutrients.

And I brought the buckets and I put them out here just to kind of, you know, to help you to see.

If you have a 5 gallon capacity and you fill it with 5 quarts you're not full are you you got a 5 quart and you try to put a 5 gallon you try to fill it with 5 gallons that won't gallons, that won't work either, right?

So it's through the colloidal exchange system that nutrients are actually made available to the plant to grow.

And the point is here is we want a balanced level of those mineral nutrients.

We're looking at the mineral part of it right now, of this overall ideal soil.

We're looking at the mineral part, and we have to understand how the soil actually works to provide those mineral nutrients to the plant.

This is the dust of the earth, by the way, the earth elements that are provided in the very beginning that God formed man from.

So we have to know how that works, which is the cation exchange system.

That's a pretty well understood, as far as – It's a well-documented, well-established model.

It's just not commonly used for reasons that I shared before.

But we have to know what the – and so what it's talking about, of course, we said was the cations that have the positive charge to them which are the alkaline elements, the calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium.

But we need to know not only how big the bucket is or what the capacity is, but then we need to know how much of that bucket should be filled with each of those things.

Now I put on there, let me put those numbers up again.

I erased them because I wanted to add other stuff there.

You want the bucket to be filled all the way, so 100% of the bucket full.

If you add those numbers up, do they add up to 100?

Now, the reason they don't is because there's other microcations that are part of that bucket, And they're part of the saturation of those colloids in the soil.

And they include things like iron, manganese, zinc, copper.

And they're actually measured, When you're doing a soil test, these major cations are measured in pounds.

It's called the Ideal Soil by Michael Astera.

Now I know Bob Jorgensen has some copies of this here.

It's probably the most distilled down version of understanding this model that we're talking about.

And it could be gotten off of Amazon, Acres USA has it, and Bob Jorgensen, I'm sure, can get it for you.

So if you don't get all of this I mean there's a he goes into a more detailed step-by-step explanation and how they come up with the numbers that they come up with and if you want to understand the whole process and everything So this is probably a really good book to have.

There's a lot of different books you can have, but as far as getting the basics on it, this is probably the best book that's out there.

And I don't agree with everything philosophically in the book.

He doesn't come from the same perspective, but the model that he applies is the correct 1 and he's trying to explain in here.

So they don't add up to 100% because you have to add, and this is where it gets tricky if you're trying to find a lab to do this analysis for you, is because not all labs actually measure all of these things.

And so you'll have a lab that says they do CEC for you, and they may only measure calcium, magnesium, or potassium.

They leave out sodium a lot of the times, and they'll leave out what's called the other bases and that includes those micro cations that I was telling you about, the iron and manganese, zinc and copper.

And in the rest of the bucket, there's a certain percentage of acidity or hydrogen ions, even though they're a cation, a positively charged ion, they actually are acid forming.

There's a certain percentage of that acidity you want in the soil, and So there's going to be a certain percentage of hydrogen.

And when you add all those things up, that adds to 100% of the bucket.

You don't want the bucket 100% full with these.

You want a little bit of the acidity there, because that's how the soil actually works to provide the cation nutrients to the plant.

And we haven't talked about the anions yet, and we are.

I want to put up these other micro cations here, and then we're going to see how those others relate to it.

Now We need to get to a little bit of what these nutritional elements actually do.

But when we get down to the microcations here, they're measured in parts per million because they're not pounds.

The type of quantities that there are pounds of it.

I mean the quantities that you have are the major cations there.

And so they generally on a soil test be measured in parts per million.

And the simplest way to find out how many pounds that is, you multiply it by 2.

And you'll have how many pounds they're actually talking about.

On iron, depending on the CEC of the soil, you're shooting for around 300 parts per million.

And I'll write these out as soon as I go down through them.

On manganese, you want to be about half to two-thirds of iron, which would be between 150 and 200 parts per million.

Now the numbers I'm sharing with you, if you went out and talked to an organic certifier, they'd have a heart attack when we get into these because they're not going to shoot for 1.

They may be used in a different analysis, and so the numbers may look different.

But they generally don't shoot for anywhere near the levels that I'm sharing with you.

But if you want the soil to really thrive, once you get those major cations in the balance that they need to be in.

The micro-cations need to be brought up to levels that most people are not used to bringing them up to.

Now what we're talking about is what they do is they have extraction methods to kind of mimic the ability of the biology of the root of the plant to be able to exchange those off of those exchange sites, those colloidal exchange sites.

They have to put an acid out in order to be able to transfer it.

What they really do is they breathe out CO2, carbon dioxide, it breathes out of the roots.

The CO2 combines with water and you get carbonate.

And then the carbonate, the hydrogen ion goes to the colloid in exchange for the others.

This chemistry, I probably shouldn't even have shared that.

It's the way the plant root actually does it, by breathing out, giving out carbon dioxide.

There's other dynamics that are going on in order to get what they want.

They want a specific, they might want a specific element in specific quantities.

And so they have this ability to interact with the soil chemistry and the soil biology to get what they want out of the soil in an exchange system?

Now, we didn't talk about that, but what they normally do is if you want 6, so I put the 60 to 70 or 10 to 20, you'll take the percentage you actually want there, and you take the exchange capacity.

So it's how many units of exchange capacity there are, and you'll multiply, well, there's a, we didn't do the milli equivalence thing, this is the chemistry they used to calculate it, but each element has a different atomic weight, and their equivalence, the numbers they use are equivalence to hydrogen.

In other words, the number you would use for calcium is 400, the number for magnesium is 240, the number for potassium is 780, and the number for sodium is 460.

And what you do is you multiply the exchange capacity or how big the bucket is by the milli equivalent number, depending on which 1 it is, and then you multiply it by the percentage you want there.

So let's just take calcium, for example, and we want a 60% calcium on a cation exchange soil of 10.

As an exchange capacity of 10, you would multiply that times 400, you get 4, 000, and then you'd multiply that by 60% so what does that work out to 2, 400 pounds?

It's actually a number that measures based on atomic weights, an equivalent of the equivalent amount of calcium to 1 gram of hydrogen in a hundred grams of soil.

And so The equivalent of calcium, hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1.

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Series

Soil Health

3- The Three Legged Stool Part 2, Physics

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Other Teachings in Series

1- Many Voices and the Model Soil

58m

2- The Three Legged Stool Part 1, Chemistry

54m

3- The Three Legged Stool Part 2, Physics

1h

4- The Three Legged Stool Part 3, Biology

43m

5- Environmental Influences, the Other Part of the Growing System

1h

6- Good Information, Good Decisions, Good Outcomes

1h

7- Choosing the Right Resources, The End Matters

53m

Sound Doctrine