Harvest What you Have
- Jun 24, 2022
- 8 min read
Updated: Jun 28, 2022
June, 2022
Great news for a persistent and pervasive problem. You likely have a major source of fertilizer, that you already paid for!
It’s likely in your soil, and you can determine how many locked nutrients that are not only inaccessible but often the source of a variety of systemic problems in crop vitality and optimum yields, by doing a “total soil digestion”, like you may have done to quantify fertilizer or manure. HCT’s WaterSOLV™ will liberate the locked-up nutrients and make them available for your vegetation, all the while restoring your soils CEC, SAR and some, and at a lower cost than sulfuric acid and gypsum, while also detoxifying sodium and chloride. YOU WILL VISUALLY SEE THE DIFFERENCE in your vegetation vitality.
Here’s what has been happening in soils, and what you can do about it.
It’s pretty simple to see what sulfuric acid does for you upon application. It contains some N so you get that push of growth, it dissolves scales and metals and causes available nutrition, reduces pH and releases bicarbonate. All is great for those chemical reactions for now, but chronically, year two results are usually less favorable. Year three results you’re asking what is wrong. Year four results you’re spending a lot of money on nutrients and resources trying to fix the scenarios. You're doing everything right, spending more, yet nothing is getting better. You wonder why you can't get water down and had no idea your yields and product grade we being compromised!
The writing was already on the wall, likely before you started using sulfuric acid and gypsum, as was depicted by actually a couple University Studies, one being that of UC Davis a University Study, titled Solubility of Salts/Solubility Equilibria. Page 15 of 29 pages states ”Salts of weak acids are soluble in strong acids ... but strong acids will not dissolve salts of strong acids”. It’s easy to prove in your operation that your soils have become saturated with drywall, calcium sulfate (a desiccant that competes for water), that has participated in complexing the vast majority of the nutrition you bought and applied. Just do a total soil digestion and you’ll more than likely see loads / lbs per acre, of calcium and iron, along with other purchased nutrition of P and K, in enormous amount, that were never consumed. Total Digestion is an analytical method used for quantifying fertilizer as well as manure. So, all this time we've been adding acid to lower pH to make available nutrition, and what was acidified, that was not consumed, became insoluble nutrition, not so dissolvable by the addition of more acid! Yup! And the proof is in the Total Digestion Soil Analysis!
What has happened is that over time the accumulation of nutrients have sealed up the soils, and sealed up soils cause a plethora of problems beginning with getting water down, but also associated to hindering available nutrition, oxygen, infiltration, pore space, flushing salts and toxins, causing water to turn even more septic while perpetuating toxic bio-exudates, as well as harboring sodium and chloride toxicity. What good is a calcium to magnesium ratio or a sodium to calcium ratio, if the only soluble product when watering is the toxic sodium and only if you can get the water in the ground?
Granted, sulfurous acid, N-pHuric, is all we had to work with until the WaterSOLV™ technology hit the industry.
Here I am harping on the only tools we had in the tool shed. Here are some facts that we and our customers have found to be shocking;
1. There is no university paper supporting the application of sulfuric acid to water, “where soils are disregarded”. The one study there is, by a host of professors, “cautions the user” that the alkalinity reduction of water by acid with disregard to soil calcium sulfate soil conditions would be of concern. So how many labs prescribed sulfuric acid and gypsum, based solely on a water analysis? From what I saw, most of them.
When these accumulated salts in the soil get so bad, the yields can be significantly compromised. How much suppression of the yields occurred over the years and how much time, money and resources were spent trying to overcome the problem without success?
2. The analytical methods of “Available Nutrition”, are found to contribute to the problem. How does lab water, or untreated source water, with your soil, 1:1 water and soil, 24 hours soak time, emulate what available nutrition is making it to your roots for uptake. There are many chemical and biological fallacies here, of which not only have we as an industry taken some steps to improve, but the international community has done as well. We site the Kinsey Albrecht method using actual treated site water. We site all the organizations found on YouTube around the world, including universities, using the treated water, but also increasing the water to soil ratio 4:1, and soak time to 72 hours. Ask yourself, just how long does a chemical rection take? Compare salt to sugar to calcium to iron in a given solution and consider the amount of solution. This is water, but it is also biology and the solubility of elements in water, to their saturation point. Example; how many spoons of sugar can you put in a glass of tea versus a pitcher of tea. This is the entire process of industrial water treatment – based on a given water product, how much water can we evaporate before one or a few of the element in the water precipitate (form scale on the heat transfer surface). Scale forms by many factors including concentration of the minerals or metals, temperature, and its relationship with bicarbonate, valence and also chloride.
Then we must factor in the other dynamics: corrosion, biology, oxygen and toxicity. This is what HCT does – we identify it analytically, we fix it with chemistry, biology and physics.
3. It has been even more challenging for growers from the analytical methods. We’ve looked at the analytical data of “Exchangeable”, perhaps with some assumptions that the amount of these elements in the soil were there and available to be used. What if you found that the amount of “exchangeable calcium was 3,400 ppm yet the total amount of calcium was 14,000 ppm? What of found the exchangeable P, K and Fe were 5, 10, 50 times more in the soil and increasing every year yet the “exchangeable analysis was not showing you that? Total soil digestion will show you this. Total digestion will show you that your soils have become drywall, impregnated with iron. Vegetation cannot thrive in these conditions.
Across the board of agronomy and throughout the world, these conditions exist to some degree, categorically; mineralization, metallization (it’s really a word), bio-toxicity, sodium/chloride toxicity and lack of oxygen. Shift the treatment program the direction the soils require, then once remediated, sustain the soil through the treatment of the water. The results are stunning across the board as well.
Call to Action
1. Water Analysis – Irrigation Suitability (include micro nutrient metals)
2. Water Bac T Analysis – Total Aerobic bacteria
3. Available Soil Nutrition Analysis – Legacy Method
4. Total Soil Analysis – Legacy Method (Total Soil Digestion)
The combination of all 4 provide us insight to the biological treatment necessities. Details can be provided.
June 5, 2021 – HCT, LLC
Gypsum, Drywall, Plaster Paris
used as a fertilizer
The main constituent in many forms of plaster, blackboard/sidewalk chalk, and drywall
Gypsum also crystallizes as translucent crystals of selenite
Gypsum became known as plaster of Paris
Because the quarries of the Montmartre district of Paris have long furnished burnt gypsum (calcined gypsum) used for various purposes, this dehydrated gypsum became known as plaster of Paris. Upon adding water, after a few tens of minutes, plaster of Paris becomes regular gypsum (dihydrate) again, causing the material to harden or "set" in ways that are useful for casting and construction.
Gypsum was known in Old English as spærstān, "spear stone", referring to its crystalline projections. (Thus, the word spar in mineralogy is by way of comparison to gypsum, referring to any non-ore mineral or crystal that forms in spearlike projections). In the mid-18th century, the German clergyman and agriculturalist Johann Friderich Mayer investigated and publicized gypsum's use as a fertilizer. Gypsum may act as a source of sulfur for plant growth, and in the early 19th century, it was regarded as an almost miraculous fertilizer. American farmers were so anxious to acquire it that a lively smuggling trade with Nova Scotia evolved, resulting in the so-called "Plaster War" of 1820. In the 19th century, it was also known as lime sulfate or sulfate of lime.
When gypsum dehydrate severely, anhydrite is formed. If water is reintroduced, gypsum can and will reform – including as the four crystalline varieties, selenite, satin spar, desert rose and gypsum flower.
Gypsum is moderately water-soluble (~2.0–2.5 g/l at 25 °C) and, in contrast to most other salts, it exhibits retrograde solubility,
The structure of gypsum consists of layers of calcium (Ca2+) and sulfate (SO4 2-) ions tightly bound together. These layers are bonded by sheets of anion water molecules via weaker hydrogen bonding, which gives the crystal perfect cleavage along the sheets (in the {010} plane).
Gypsum also precipitates onto brackish water membranes, a phenomenon known as mineral salt scaling, such as during brackish water desalination of water with high concentrations of calcium and sulfate. Scaling decreases membrane life and productivity. This is one of the main obstacles in brackish water membrane desalination processes, such as reverse osmosis or nanofiltration. Other forms of scaling, such as calcite scaling, depending on the water source, can also be important considerations in distillation, as well as in heat exchangers, where either the salt solubility or concentration can change rapidly.
A new study has suggested that the formation of gypsum starts as tiny crystals of a mineral called bassanite (CaSO4·0.5H2O). This process occurs via a three-stage pathway:
1. homogeneous nucleation of nanocrystalline bassanite;
2. self-assembly of bassanite into aggregates, and
3. transformation of bassanite into gypsum.
Why would we ever add gypsum if we have soils saturated with calcium and sulfur or sulfate?
Why would we ever add gypsum and or acid to our soils from a water analysis alone?
There is NO scientific research that promotes this. The research that promotes gypsum addition is based on water quality, and cautions one to consider its impact on soil conditions.
Still founded on peroxide, but very different because it does a whole-lot-more.
Still a disinfectant so to speak in the agronomy world. I prefer to refer to it as a biocide. Two totally different items/terms.
It sequesters water minerals and metals, meaning the elements in the water will never complex or bond – available nutrition from all water source minerals and metals.
It should affect soils dramatically with respect to soil cake and some available nutrition. What I mean is it’s not that great at “fixing” soils like what one does with sulfuric and gypsum. It does not have the power to dissolve the complexes in soil.
We detoxify the sodium and the chloride. Nobody else does this. No phosphoric acid or other things needed to deal with the Na or Cl.
Our use rate is 1/2 to 2.5 ppm – that’s just 1/2 to 2.5 gallons per million gallons of water. Sold in pails, drums and totes.
Enhanced product growth is visually stunning, due to the detoxification of Na and Cl, and the acetates it adds to the soils forming, all forming readily hydratable and re-hydratable nutrition from the water and the soils.
HCT WaterSOLV™ Curative requires 1/9th the amount of acid to sulfurous acid, this product is more than effective at the 1 to 2.5 ppm use rate. The use rate is based on customized testing and biology.
OMRI or NON-OMRI pricing available.
Contact us at info@hctllc.com for a long list of diverse references from long time and recent customers.
Comments