Crop Nutrition

There are any number of additions that can be added to fertilisers to get the best from them. Carbon is the most obvious and it can come from a variety of sources. One of the most written about carbon sources in recent times are Humates.

Firstly, it is important to understand organic matter and organic carbon, both of which are at the very start of everything that we do. The degradation of the organic carbon in the soil is leading universities to suggest that we have limited soil life. The top metre of the world’s soils contains three times as much carbon as the entire atmosphere, making it a major carbon sink alongside forests and oceans. Identifying how much carbon has been lost from the soil could also help us understand how much could be replenished, if soils were managed so that they took up more carbon from the atmosphere than they released.

The Humic part of the soil is the result of work done by soil microbiology. This is where the repair starts, as long as we control two factors; getting Nitrogen management under control and releasing dependance on agricultural chemicals. As the soil gets degraded, we lose valuable cohesion. The risk of erosion increases, and the soil sediments sweep into rivers and nearby regions.

As organic carbon levels begin to increase in the soil, add carbon with nutrients as an aid to rebuilding soil humus. By adding a Fulvic acid (Humate), alongside a carbon source, the amount of Nitrogen used can immediately be reduced by up to a third and yet still have the same effect.

Carbon is one of the three most important components of a soil, along with water and minerals. There are many benefits to building soil Humus, such as: better drought resistance and soil structure, nutrient buffering, Nitrogen sequestration and complexing of Phosphates. The surface area of humus allows positively and negatively charged particles to function like a soil chemical  bank, in that they retain and release soil chemical constituents, helping to buffer nutrients when they are applied in larger quantities, reducing plant stress, and root burning. 

Fulvic and Humic acid are both required in the soil and on leaves. Humic acid is the main buffering part of the equation, while Fulvic acid is a powerful natural chelating agent that slows oxidisation and converts elements into readily available, bio-available nutrients. A 1% increase in humus in the soil would yield an extra 170,000lts of water holding capacity, so a Humic rich soil is extremely important for transporting nutrients from the soil to the plant minimising, leaching and run off, while also assisting in root zone moisture retention. 

Humus allows us to grow nutritionally rich foods. That is our aim at Aiva Fertiliser. By adding products that slot into your system, we can aid fertility to support the natural process of carbon building so that organic matter then breaks down into greatly beneficial humus and plant available nutrients.

We face a future where we will see our soils degrade at an ever-increasing speed as well as receiving sharply rising input costs if the term  ‘every nutrient has a microbe behind it’  is ignored. Only by rebuilding the soil food web and soil carbon levels will we see low-cost healthy crops being produced and the future of farming being protected.

Roots continuously secrete chemicals into the soil to liberate nutrients that are attached to soil particles. Bacteria and fungi that grow around the plant roots subsequently provide a bridge between the soil and the plant. This means that the correct nutrients can be taken up in balance. Exudates, a buffet of resources for anything in the rhizosphere, help plants procure nutrients, but they are also food sources for the microbes that are an important part of the soil microbiome. Exudates have an important role in holding soil together providing a glue that bonds the soil particulates together. These beneficially influence the soil structure. Additionally, many friendly soil microbials consume harmful pathogens thus reducing the possibility of disease when the conditions make disease a possible factor. 

Here at Aiva Fertiliser, we advise you on how to start balancing the nutrients in both the soil and the plant. We can also work with you to increase organic carbon in the soil, which is the starting point for intelligent farming, letting the soil microbial life do much of the work. To aid you in rebuilding your soils and their ecology, our biological microbial consortiums perform specific jobs within the soil: from disease resistance, freeing locked up Phosphorous, capturing free Nitrogen from the atmosphere and supplying the plant required nutrients. There is another way to grow, and it is sustainable and more economic.

For strength, growth, and the key to success, crops require the gradual, controlled release of nutrients. Aiva Fertiliser uses Flex Fertilizer System technology where the liquid fertiliser contains nutrients in a form that can be taken up by the leaves and utilised by plants highly efficiently. The nutrient content is put into complex compounds using complex chemistry. This formulation results in nutrients being kept available to the plants for a longer period of time and are not lost to leaching or evaporation to the same extent as traditional fertilisers.

Aiva Fertiliser’s suite of pioneering solutions and treatments go through a rigorous product development process, including peer-reviewed research, proof of concept studies, and on farm comparisons.

Aiva Fertiliser’s manufacturing system allows salt fertilisers to be mixed in such a way that the Salt Index is reduced to almost zero. After 48 hours, the excellent absorption rates, mean that virtually all applied nutrients are inside the plant and working. This remarkable ability means that you can combine nutrients together to get maximum effects with minimum inputs. Mixing groups of nutrients is far more advantageous than singularly applied ones; studies show that plants respond better to nutrients if they are kept in balance within the leaf. When large amounts of any single nutrient is applied, they can ‘lock up’, or make less available, other necessary minerals. To avoid this, applying nutrients in multi-nutrient blends ensures that the vital nutritional balance is maintained.

Due to the reliance on one major nutrient, Nitrogen, over the recent generations we have depleted the organic matter in the soil and many of the vital micronutrients. About one fourth of the world’s total crop land is affected by degradation severe enough to restrict its productivity. Now that we can see the error of our ways, we can say categorically that all nutrients should be applied as a complete program to build and maintain a balance so that we build yields without destroying our soils. This method of growing also has the advantage of being able to grow healthy crops, needing little or no agricultural chemical fungicidal inputs.

Using nutrients in a singular fashion can often lock up other nutrients so that the plant fails to work properly. By mixing nutrients, or complexing, we can overcome these disadvantages and get much better results, often from much smaller inputs. For example, when large amounts of Nitrogen are applied alone, Mulders chart shows us that we lock up Potassium and Copper. Potassium activates most of the enzymes within the plant, helps move the sugars from the leaf to where they are needed, helps the synthesizing of proteins and balances water within the plant cells. Copper is vital for enzyme activation and aids the respiration process. Both are vital to a healthy plant and are needed as a complex before Nitrogen application. Using Aiva Fertilisers extremely efficient system, we can balance the nutrients within the plant so that all applications work and do not lock up other nutrients, giving far more effect from far smaller inputs. 

There are so many nutrient balances within a plant, all different pieces of the very same puzzle, however regularly monitoring them moves us away from high inputs to low input, healthy plants. This is a must if we want to achieve nutrient dense foods required by the population. It is time to get more for less.