JOHN & BOB’S IMPROVES SOIL STRUCTURE

Guest Article
By Ken Day - Agronomist

I am a consulting agronomist specializing in water management, soils and plant nutrition. I'm guessing that over the last fifteen years, I've pushed a soil probe into the ground at least 90,000 times and evaluated over 15,000 soil and water analyses. After the first fifty samples, I really started to appreciate my customers who softened the soil with soil amendments.

Always in my evaluation process a major consideration is what I can do to improve soil structure. I know that by improving soil structure the ground absorbs and holds water better, provides a nicer seedbed and makes ground preparation easier on the tools and implements.

In my early years as an agronomist I hesitated to recommend soil amendments because of the prohibitive cost with limited results. For the past several years I have been recommending a product that stretches the value of other soil and water amendments. The customers who use John & Bob's Soil Optimizer are achieving results like they never knew possible. The synergism of John & Bob's specially balanced soil amendment gives my customers benefits not realized when applying just calcium, sulfur, or organic matter amendments alone.

I'm not the first person to notice the benefits of adding soluble humus to soils, like the soluble humus found in J&B's Soil Optimizer. For centuries gardeners have observed that manure and compost greatly help improve soil structure. The soluble fraction of humus in these amendments is what makes them so beneficial. However, the cost prevents most people from using them on a broad scale basis. I found out that very concentrated forms of humus are available to my large scale customers at a fraction of the cost of manure or compost. This concentrated form of humus comes from a naturally occurring ore called Humate.

Good soil structure is all about macro and micro pores. Macro pores are the voids created between soil aggregates. Micro pores are the voids between individual soil particles. Because individual soil particles are full of negative charges they tend to repel one another. Consequently, the soil particles can tend to “stand alone” leaving more micro pores than macro pores. Calcium satisfies these negative charges, forming stable aggregates and macro pores.

Automobile traffic through a city can be used to illustrate the problems of soil structure. Imagine a city with no major thoroughfares or highways. What a gridlocked nightmare! That's what a soil is like when the soil particles are not flocculated together to form aggregates. Every soil pore becomes a micro pore, just like a residential street. With proper aggregation, the soil has plenty of “major highways,” that is macro pores, where water, air and roots can move easily.

Most soil amendments either add soluble calcium to the soil, or they create calcium within the soil by some kind of reaction with soil lime (calcium carbonate) such as