How to efficiently balance your soil
by Robert Rushford CEO BioIQ 1300 090 261 | 0447 886 547
BioIQ will review your farms soil tests with the objective being to balance the soil’s chemical elements and provide you with an effective Farm Plan.
Balance your Soil
Building a balanced biological soil profile will create greater organic matter, increase soil carbon, balance soil nutrients, grow better crops and pastures, and increase soil biological activity and soil species.
All these benefits will have a multiplying effect within the soil profile such as increasing natural sugars within the plant, which means less insect/ pathogenic fungal attack, reducing watering by building carbon in the soil profile, buffering seasonal changes, balancing the soils’ populations of bacteria and fungi to support the crop that is grown, plus many more benefits for you as the farmer.
The first objective of your Farm Plan is to balance out the calcium/magnesium soil ratio.
The best way of doing this is to look at the soil test results under “Percentage” in the “Adjusted CEC (Cation Exchange Capacity)”.
For a clay-based soil:
Calcium percentage needs to be 65- 68%
Magnesium needs to be 12-15%
For a sand-based soil:
Calcium percentage needs to be around 60%
Magnesium needs to be around 20%
In both cases, the CEC needs to add up as close to 80% as possible.
Most soils will initially require an amount of calcium to be applied, so without jumping to conclusions, our team will look at the available phosphorus and/or available sulphur, which will help to determine the quality of the soil profile.
Many farmers receive a recommendation by old school agronomists to use lime, dolomite, or Gypsum because the calcium is low.
However, lime (calcium carbonate) is a very hard element to breakdown and release back into the soil, unless your soil has plenty of sulphur or phosphorus in the form of an acid or lactobacillus bacteria.
Lime will certainly NOT be the best product to use
Farmers put out lime and see no or very little result because they do not have the naturally occurring acids to break the lime down for the soil to utilise.
The alternative is to use BioIQ’s B5 microbial fertiliser with abalone.
BioIQ’sB5 bacteria was used in a 5-year study by Mitta Valley Landcare and an increase in pH was achieved equivalent to approx. 1 tonne/ha of lime to clay soil – and the use of bacteria was far cheaper.
Rules for Good Soil
A good soil profile will have more calcium than phosphorus, more phosphorus than potassium, more potassium than magnesium, and more magnesium than sulphur.
BioIQ reduces the use of synthetic fertilisers in farming.
Because soil is the farmer’s greatest asset, and it needs protecting.
BioIQ's aim is to reduce the use of synthetic fertilisers whilst improving soil health, migrating farmers to something more cost-effective and sustainable in farm management. Through proprietary technology, we utilise beneficial bacteria in a variety of environmental, agricultural and land management applications.
Robert Rushford – Farm Support 1300 090261 | 0447 886 547
