You can watch a webinar (linked below) which opens a refreshing new concept in soil health: Every nutrient transfer of crop growth relies on the flow of carbon-containing compounds. Ease the flow, raise the yield.
Feb. 10, 2018 By Jerry Carlson — The “flow” message comes from Dr. Jennifer Moore-Kucera, soil health team leader at USDA’s West Region Soil Health group. She’s based in Portland, Oregon and leads soil health projects in 13 western states of the relatively new Soil Health Division of NRCS, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).
No-Till Farmer just posted her webinar, “Unlock the Secrets in the Soil.” It’s sponsored on the No-Till farmer site by Black Earth humates, a firm that markets humic products with high carbon content. It’s free on YouTube, at the link in this paragraph.
What quickened my pulse was Dr. Moore-Kucera’s emphasis on the internal metabolic flow of carbon compounds. Flow from soil into roots. Flow from leaves to root exudates. Flow from photosynthesis to finished grain or fruit. Suddenly the epiphany awakened: That’s what WakeUP does. It eases, amplifies, accelerates flow into and within plant phloem systems via ionic “pumping.” That could help explain why — as farmers showed us to our surprise — that in-furrow nutrients and biostimulants perform more rapidly and effectively when tank-mixed with three ounces of WakeUP Spring.
We’ve known for a decade that our foliar formulation, WakeUP Summer, accelerates absorption and translocation of leaf-applied products. But speeding root absorption and the flow of carbon compounds, which Dr. Kucera call the “common currency” of life, was a fresh concept.
This makes sense. WakeUP is not your ordinary phosphate surfactant or “sticker” just for foliar mixes. Its tiny, negatively charged colloidal particles look like a liquid. But when blended with water, they convert water from a sticky, dipolar-charged liquid with high surface tension into negatively charged clusters of water molecules — micelles — which flow like slippery ball bearings. Each micelle is negatively charged, repelling other micelles. But the negative exterior of each micelle gently chelates, or clings, to carbon-containing compounds, nutrient elements and any other positively charged element dissolved in the solution you apply. The change is visible: Water turns “milky” when you add WakeUP. Those micelles reflect light.
When absorbed into the root or leaf with WakeUP’s colloidal micelles, internal flow of nutrients bonded with micelles is easier and faster through plant vascular systems. Thus, WakeUP helps natural plant functions flow more readily.
This flow-ability is especially important through the tiny sieve tubes at joints of crops, and through the microtubules which transfer nutrients through cell walls directly into cell metabolism. WakeUP, made entirely from plant-based oils, sugars and alcohols, is recognized by crop metabolism as nutritionally “friendly” and eventually becomes an energy source itself.
Here’s a second exciting aspect of this “Secrets in the Soil” presentation: It’s an indicator that the mighty research wheels of USDA are accelerating into the underground realm of microbiology.
That trend had a slow start among the academic and research agronomists. At the AgriEnergy Resources seminar Thursday, microbiologist Michael Bomford of the Kwantien PolyTechnic University in British Columbia told me in an interview, “Many of my academic colleagues in ag sciences still don’t want to investigate the role that microbial life has in crop health and nutrition.”
If you’d like more information about increasing nutrient flow with WakeUP, call or email us at Renewable Farming.