What is Calcium’s Role in Soil Fertility?
14 Feb 252m 14s

Kelly Garrett and Mike Evans are in the field testing a highly soluble dry calcium product, to improve soil balance without affecting pH. Working with Kinsey Lab, they identified a need for 500-1,000 lbs of calcium per acre to correct a nutritional imbalance in their drip-irrigated fields. They aim to enhance plant-available calcium levels, treating it as a fertility input rather than just a soil amendment.

00:00:00 Hi, this is Kelly Garrett. I'm here with Mike Evans. We're out here in the field today. Josh is spreading Bio Cow. Yep. 00:00:06 Behind us, uh, it's a new product that we're trying, Evans founded in Eastern Iowa. We've been working with the Kinsey lab, trying to get more 00:00:14 with the balance of our soil balance with our plant concept Here. I'm gonna let Mike Evans tell you what Bio Cow is. 00:00:20 Um, bio Cow is a, um, a unique, uh, calcium source. It's actually one of the highest soluble calcium sources we found in a dry. 00:00:28 Um, so that's why we're out here trialing on this specific farm. This is one of the drip irrigated farms 00:00:32 that we have here at Kelly's Farm. When we did all the testing for Kinzie to balance the soil, we needed roughly anywhere from 500 to a thousand pounds 00:00:40 of calcium out here to get it to where we feel we need to. So we're out here applying 500 pounds. 00:00:45 We'll leave some check strips. The goal is here to get that soluble calcium up so we have a more plant available source than, 00:00:51 than a typical ag line. It's important to me that everybody realize we're out here putting this calcium on. 00:00:56 We're not trying to affect the pH. That is not what we are after. And this is something that we've been working on 00:01:02 for a while, things like that. And this, this next part is, uh, hard for people to accept. pH is irrelevant. And yes, you heard that right. 00:01:10 pH is irrelevant. pH moves because we have a nutritional imbalance. So pH is not the definition of the problem 00:01:18 or the cause of the problem. pH is a symptom, and it's a symptom of a nutritional imbalance. 00:01:23 Our nutritional imbalance here is calcium, and we need to start thinking about calcium as fertility, not as calcium as a soil amendment. 00:01:30 So we are short calcium here. I will tell you that I believe calcium is probably our number one nutrient deficient product 00:01:37 across most of agriculture. Uh, especially it is on our farm. It's calcium is a difficult element to work with. 00:01:44 And so we're constantly looking for new sources of calcium. You know, we work with the Aquid product, 00:01:48 liberate ca, things like that. But we're trying to get more pounds into the soil to balance the soil. 00:01:54 This is a potential solution we've come up with. We don't know if it's a solution yet until we try it. This is the first research trial we've done with it. 00:02:00 But again, you know, check out extreme Ag and, uh, I'll say it one more time. pH is irrelevant. 59 00:02:06.175 --> 00:02:08.845

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