A brief history of agricultural humate use up till
now, or "why the petro-toxic industry hates humates and continue
to call it snake oil despite the facts." A long history of
use and hundreds of scientific studies prove humates economic
benefits to farmers and to the environment via reducing fertilizer
and pesticide use.
Back in the late 60's I was a back-to-the-lander up in the mountains
of N.W. Montana. I bought a small farm in the Flathead Valley
and moved there after running the family farm in S.E. Pennsylvania
and finishing phase one of my education with 6 years in the university
and college of agriculture. I had a little better education than
most of my classmates because during my last semesters I was also
farming 200 acres of crops and livestock using organic/biological
methods. My major in college had been entomology and applied ecology.
I applied what I learned to my own farming in terms of pest management
and helped my Amish neighbors get started with biological control
for fly and crop pest control. I had studied things like plant
physiology and botany, zoology, ecology; never "how to farm".
I had the science but my Amish neighbors taught me to farm - something
no university can do. When I hear the word "sustainable"
and the "search for sustainability" I think of the family
farm and my Amish neighbors still farming, still prospering on
the same small farms since the early 1700's. My ancestors, the
Swiss Brethren came to Pennsylvania in 1732 for religious freedom
and a farm they could own. They, along with Mennonites, Amish
and other splinter sects came from Europe to escape oppression
and have been farming successfully there ever since. It that sustainable?
Or is it sustainable enough? I do not know.
How did these farmers succeed when the lands they purchased had
all ready been abandoned by the English farmers that originally
cleared the forest, displacing the Indians who thrived by growing
maize and other crops on the fertile lands and hunting and fishing
in the lush forests. Within a few years the crops failed and the
English farmers moved west to clean another patch of forest until
there was only the great plains ahead. The German speaking immigrants
had to reclaim the land in order to farm at all. They learned
that application of local mined limestone and gypsum were very
beneficial and they exerted great effort to "remineralize"
the soil. They knew then as they know today that manure, either
green like alfalfa or clover, or animal manures were essential
to good crops along with bone meal, limestone and other natural
minerals including compost and peat, which are both source of
humic acids. You can "make" your own humic substances
via aged compost, leaf mold, muck from bogs, and even brown coal,
and they did. Just as the ancient Hawaiians did with leaves and
the Maya did with the "milpa" method and aquaculture
with raised beds which utilized muck from the surrounding canals.
The use of animal manure and compost, along with use of nitrogen
producing humus making plants like berseem clover was common.
All "truly sustainable" agricultural cultures utilized
some form of humic mater and minerals to maintain it. Hence my
interest with humus, compost, and soil fertility in general. I
was making large amounts of compost and applying it to the land.
I was doing crop rotations with alfalfa and clover and I was using
tons of lime and rock phosphate. The idea was to have the best
crop and yield to feed the best cattle or sheep. No ideology was
involved, this was how we farmed. I didn't take agronomy when
I went to the University, so I didn't know that organic methods
"didn't work". I did it, my neighbors did it, our ancestors
pioneered the methods. I used humus, lime and minerals because
by all observation and local tradition and practice this was how
you farmed.
When I was in Montana trying to make a "burned out"
ranch grow something again I started making compost out of sheep
manure and bark wastes. This produced a high grade humic spectrum
and along with humus peat from a local peat bog, I started building
the soil. I took old compacted corrals and made them into gardens
where I grew prize winning vegetables that I sold along with lambs,
wool, or anything else I could grow on that rocky hillside. I
didn't have enough compost for all the land and I needed better
pasture production for my sheep so I was trying different fertilizers
to bring back this overgrazed pasture. I had planted sainfoin
and other legumes but the soil was so compacted and depleted I
didn't get much of a stand.
Then I saw a small classified ad in the Montana Farmer-Stockman
about how humates from New Mexico could soften your soil and provide
humus, release phosphate and all those good things. I sent for
the information and got quite a bit including a small sample of
this black dirt, the scientific studies which I received from
Dr. Senn at Clemson and later via a search of the world "humate"
literature I found many field studies from E. Europe and the old
USSR. I saw enough not to dismiss this as "snake oil"
like people who had taken the courses in agronomy that I missed.
I only know the "scientific method" drummed into my
heard as a liberal studies biology major. So I seeded up my pots.
I had a greenhouse and my tiny bag of "clod buster".
I was an experienced high yield corn super farmer in Pennsylvania,
a crop dear to the heart of the "Pennsylvania Dutch".
I planted corn seed in pots with and without humate; a mere pinch
per pot was used. The humate treated seed was out of the ground
first and growing faster than the control in a dramatic way. I
also put a pinch of humate on tomato seedlings and saw the same
"spectacular-to-me" results. That's how it all began
for me - it worked, and that was enough for me as it had been
for my ancestors who probably know nothing about chemistry. They
did it by observation, even by tasting the soil to determine limeing
needs, smelling the soil, observing the crops and trying test
plots with different fertilizers and crop cultivars. Every farm
was a "research station", as there were no universities
or extension expert or petrochemicals back then. hhh
My first Large Alfafa Trial back in the 70's Flathead
Valley Montana
center picture shows humate on left and control right
, this was about 6 in. of regrowth after the first cutting the
control alfalfa was barely out of the ground. The humate treated
hay produced one ton more dry hay than the control and protein
was up from 16% to over 20%. Combining sulfur with the humate
or sulfursoil alone also produced large yeild increses in this
glacial silt soil. Humate realluy show up in the regrowth and
recovery of alfalfa and can be top dressed between cuttings with
other fertilizers such as potash, sulfur, zinc, boron. Humates
can be mixed with phosphate rock to increase the availibility
of the phosphate.
plot on left has #250 lb. 35% humate from New Mexico
on right 250# 16-16-16
this made me think HUMATE MUST WORK!!!
My observations showed me that humate works. I bought a semi load,
I put it on my land and sold it to other farmers and they too
saw the results on the alfalfa or potatoes or barley, on which
I always left a control strip so they to could "see"
the results. For my neighbors that was good enough, they were
of the old northern European farmer school: if it's humus and
it works, let's use it - no need to ask the "expert"
at the university. My extension agent friends though the stuff
was foo-foo dust or snake oil, whatever that is. They also didn't
believe my results at gardening and livestock raising even when
they saw it with their own eyes because it just didn't fit with
what they learned in the university, plus having never been a
farmer in their lives. It's like seeing a UFO (no I didn't - they
don't exist - there was something wrong with the camera, radar,
whatever). This is the way the extension and ag chem industry
viewed my use and sale of humate, but farmers kept using it despite
the ridicule. They knew peat and compost worked, so why not concentrated
humus millions of years old - heck the dinosaurs ate this stuff,
and that is why my steers and pigs look so good.
It is said the early Mormon settlers hauled humate to Utah to
reclaim the desert. If this is true they must have learned of
it from the Indians of the area who were avid corn and bean growers
that used the "observation" method of farming honed
to perfection over thousands of years. It is hard to believe that
the Anasazi corn and bean farmers that inhabited N.W. New Mexico
in larger number than modern man does today didn't know of the
benefit of humates. Modern corporate-farm Navajo Indians know
it works today but had forgotten about it in the ages since the
Anasazi. Controlled test plots by Dr. Keenam of the Navajo agriculture
production industry that farms thousands of acres saw large yield
increases with amounts as small as 100# per acre applied. It worked
despite bad-mouthing from the university and chemical dealer "expert'"
who said it wouldn't work.
I have seen humate from New Mexico work all over this country
in the last 25 years. I started with corn and alfalfa and now
it's coffee and macadamia nuts. It worked the first time I used
it and it worked the last time I used it. My sheep are still thriving
on a salt-humate mineral mix I provide.
The problem with the humate image over the years has been from
"overselling" by uneducated and generally uninformed
investor-promoter types or flat-out scamers. These dubious types
gave the "expert" some ammunition to use on humates
in general, by selling low grade, diluted or infective humate-like
materials. There was no quality control or knowledge of why the
stuff even worked and the application rates were guesses. All
humates are different, just like soils are different. It is the
low molecular weight fulvic acids that provide the catalyst effect
on cell wall permeability, which provides general increase in
activity for all types of cells: plant, animal or microbial. Humate
had a bad image which was ruthlessly exploited by the "anti-humate"
special interests. When quality control got better and legitimate
producers got in to the act things started changing. When farmers
found out they could reduce their fertilizer cost, and even reduce
the herbicide by using liquid humic concentrate in the spray mix,
the petrochemical industry kept up the attack, as this could cost
them millions every years if the truth was known.
Humates gained recognition in a big way in Europe, even Central
America before the U.S. gave it any credibility. There are hundreds
of scientific studies from Europe and Asia about humic acids/humate
and thousands of tons are shipped from the U.S. to those areas
now. The big ag-chem industry has decided it may be better to
switch than fight and are now starting to offer liquid humic acid
products, not really ready to embrace the dusty, messy natural
humate long used by organic farmers and other fringe types of
which I was doubtlessly included by the ag establishment. That
is why I went a different direction and now it is starting to
become widely accepted.
Most farmers still don't know the truth about humate. It is just
hard to image how only 100# per acre can increase yields up to
100%. The reasons for the increase are complex and involve stimulation
the soil biota and the plant at a cellular level. The chemistry
of humate is very complex and can not really be broken down; it
is a mixture of organic acids, of different weights, and is a
complex state of matter broken down to fragments of DNA and RNA,
the basic cytokinnins of the world into which all high plants
evolved with. Humic acids aren't plant stimulants, but they are
needed by plants for normal growth, and normal growth means humic/fulvic
acids. All higher green plants evolved with humic acids being
present. In algae grown in sterile nutrient media, growth and
pigment content is greatly increased by 40 or 50 ppm humic acids.
This is the normal state, as algae and higher plants evolved and
prospered not in a sterile test tube with NPK but in a world full
of complex molecules and microbes. Humic substances are required
by plants for normal functioning, and normal function is health
and vigor. When humic substances are not there to catalyze microbes
and plant cells, growth is slowed and pests become a problem.
Resistance to many diseases and pests break down and we have the
"pesticide treadmill".
The benefit of a good high grade humate is that you can satisfy
the plants needs by seasonal application of as low as 50# per
acre of high-grade humate from New Mexico. This would take 15-20
tons of compost per acre to achieve the same amount of the right
humic molecules. It's an economic situation of producing, handling
and applying large amounts of compost versus a bag of humate for
$15 or $30 per acre or so. Humates are a viable humus substitute
and activator of the soil system just like a good topdress application
of compost sets off the soil life. I have observed that the use
of humus, compost or humate brings up the population of earthworms,
so the whole system is involved, not a single-factor thing. That
is why the chemical people don't like humate - you can't pin it
down to one single effect like putting on some chemical. It does
so much, increasing the organic matter almost unexplainably unless
you know the effect of fungus and soil algae on increasing organic
matter. Lichens, algae and fungi are what produce the basic humic
acids that help convert a sterile lava flow into a forest with
hundred foot trees within a hundred years or so. I see this effect
of humics everyday when I go out in the lush rain forest on my
land.
This is what humic acids do. It is a lesson known well by the
ancients and proven by time. As far as I am concerned along with
thousand of other farmers, humates work and would benefit all.
Knowledge is the key to this and that is what I intended to offer
in my humate information pak - the scientific studies and theory
and a chance for you to do your own "equally scientific study"
and find out for yourself instead of believing special interests
that don't care about your success. Humates work. Find out for
yourself. It is the "secret" many large organic and
conventional growers hold close as their edge over the competition.
There is much pressure to keep it all secret, but my idea is to
bring it all out and let the farmers decide for themselves like
we always have done. Let's get away from these chemicals that
are really ruining our ground, our water and ultimately our health
and the stability of the ecosystem.
Humisolve-USA™is your most practical
and economical humus/humic acids source on the planet!