06/04/08 BioAg

BioAg. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. More and more people are looking for ways to increase yield that is safe and effective. One way is to amend the soil with humate products. Dr Robert Faust, President of BioAg explains. FAUST: Our goal has always been the same, to provide alternatives to toxic technology, to promote biological agriculture. In that regard we have worked with hundreds of farmers all over the world over the years trying to get them into either sustainable or organic. The other part is soil improvements. Faust asks the question of why are yields going down as more fertilizers are being applied and what can they do to change that. BioAg does that with humate, fulvic and humic products. Not familiar with those terms? FAUST: Humic substances are the end product of the decomposition of organic matter by specific micro-organisms. Humic substances include humic acid, fulvic acid. It's the difference between the earth and the moon. It's the living bridge between the dead minerals of soil and the living plant root. It's responsible for the release of solubalization of nutrients like phosphate and potash and has a lot to do with feeding the soil food web, keeping fungal dominance going in the soil. According to Faust the best case scenario for growing products is a couple of years of growing and then a couple thousand years of sagebrush. In other words, letting the land regenerate itself. Another upside of the use of humic acids is pest control. FAUST: We found that where we used humic acid product raw, very crude raw product from New Mexico. We put it on a seed potato crop, where we applied it had vigorous growth, dark blue-green color and where we didn't use it, it was slightly shorter potatoes, lighter color but what was significant was tremendous amount of leaf feeding damage by insect damage. But right to the row where we used these humic acid products there wasn't any insect damage. BioAg offers several different products for producers. The first is a soluble granular product that is mixed with regular fertilizers FAUST: And then we have liquid products which are really the active components in these so-called humic acids. So we have learned to extract the part that's got the bang in it which isn't very much of this whole matrix of humate which look a little like coal. It has a very strong anti-drought, anti-insect, increased sugars. For more information visit their website at www.bioag.com. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.