HCT categorizes water into buckets as minerals, metals, microbes (including biology), sodium, and of course water itself but also some gasses of bicarbonates, chlorides and of significant importance oxygen as well as nitrogen. The industry also looks at other indicators and where some are implied indicators including TDS/EC, pH, SAR, CEC, base saturation and more. Lots of measurements and confusing terms that HCT has normalized and put into buckets for ease of understanding. If you’re accustomed to adding elements to the soil to react with other elements, this will be a big shift in what you have become accustomed to. If you are an advocate of pH, this will have a big change in your processes. All the information is substantiated by research and reproducible real-world applications and results. Usually, vegetation vitality is improved over 15% by growth rate and yields, water necessity reduced 15% by infiltration, costs of the program are totally offset from these, as well as reducing treatment necessities and harvesting nutrients from water and compromised soils (a bell curve). 

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In most cases HCT sees the industry has become complacent depending on pH suppression and the addition of gypsum to cause the movement of calcium into the vegetation, even in scenarios where the water has plenty of calcium and sulfate to begin with. Yet the studies that recommended this were for the Pacific Northwest where there is plenty of rain. The study also warned about the soil conditions. Soils data shows us we have ignored that aspect of the report when we do soils analyses correctly and see massive amounts of calcium and sulfate. The saturations of nutrients in our soils reduce pore space and can also create toxicity (USDA/NCRS – UC Davis). 

 

You perform water analyses that indicate the elements in the water and we assume hard water is bad, high sodium is bad, and yet we see several thousand ppm’s of calcium and sulfate in our soils are okay, and we plan to add more but with acid. Yet season to season we see the level of not only these but also the other elements building up in our soil.