Aiva visits Daymsa
Explore the incredible partnership between Aiva and Daymsa over the past 9 years, where innovation and quality meet. My journey to Zaragoza offered a firsthand look at Daymsa’s state-of-the-art facilities and their commitment to natural and organic products. From high-tech labs to vast leonardite mines, discover how Daymsa’s expertise shapes Aiva’s products.
George Hepburn
Reading time: 6 minutes
Aiva visits Daymsa
Aiva have been working with Daymsa for the last 9 years, they are the suppliers of Naturamin WSP, Sprayfix and raw materials for some of our biological products. They also own a leonardite (raw material for making humic based products) mine, one of 3 in Europe. I have been advising on and selling these types of products for 20 years in various guises, so when offered a trip to Zaragoza to visit the factory and the mine I was very keen.
Glossing over the 40 mph gusts as we were landing, the visit started with a trip to Daymsa HQ to find a bit more about the company and how it works. Most Daymsa products are natural and plant based and on occasion based on natural minerals, free from chemical treatment. Many are organic approved and they work and supply products to about 40 countries on a huge variety of crops.
The facilities we saw at Daymsa HQ were state of the art. From the offices, which were open plan with many high tech meeting rooms, the factory with modern reactors and very little mess, to the attention to detail and dedication to improvement of the staff working there. That day concluded with a visit to an olive oil and prune factory (I only ate 6!) which was very interesting, the fresh olive oil from this region was very peppery and really quite spicy to taste.
Then, on to the mine itself. It’s an old opencast coal mine and the leonardite fraction is the part of the coal that is exposed to oxygen, so a thin seam over the top of coal as it were. However the mine was vast and they have enough leonardite to go at for certainly decades. The Leonardite comes as black powder which is then processed by their huge state of the art factory – its R and D department was bigger than our whole flex factory! It is from the black powder that they make products like the humic granules we are now selling. They also mix it with fertiliser and compost to form some fantastic inputs. I make it sound simple but there is much work to get it from a powder to form a nice spreadable product, which is homogeneous and stable.
The next day was a long tech session discussing what we had seen and the new products that would fit into the Aiva portfolio. Their research and information on amino acid products was excellent, and we will definitely take a leaf from their books in the way they present their trials. A new type of Nitrogen fixer and an alternative seed dressing were the ideas that caught our eye, the only issue being Mike, our Managing Director, having to take a 1kg sample of white powder through customs!
For our final evening we were treated to a wine tasting session – two whites and two reds, with tapas in between. It was fascinating having experts point out the nuances of the wines, you have to do quite a lot of work before you can even drink them! My take away was that acid wines are tasted by the tongue, and dry wines are tasted by the roof of the mouth. Try it and see, a good excuse to buy a bottle or two of (Spanish!) wine.
Thank you Daymsa!
A huge thank you to all at Daymsa, especially Alejandro and Enrique who planned the trip and looked after us so fantastically well. Keep your eyes peeled for some new products on the portfolio when we have completed our due diligence.
