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Organics, A Growing Market - Humic and Fulvic Acid
By Luis Bartolo, Maximum Yield Magazine
In this issue we are going to talk about humic and fulvic acid and the role they play in the organic and horticultural market. Nowadays both humic and fulvic acids are being used by a lot of growers (organic as well as hydro growers) for their benefits. We hope you will enjoy this article and derive the necessary useful information from it.
Historic background of humic acids
What is Humic acid?
Humic acid is that fraction of humic substances that is not soluble in water under acid condition (below pH 2) but soluble at a greater pH. It is the collective name for the acid radical found in humic matter.
Liquid humic acid is a suspension, based on potassium-humates, which can be applied successfully in many areas of plant production as a plant growth stimulant and soil conditioner. The origin: through extraction the potassium humates are isolated from leanardite and are dissolved in water. This produces an aqueous suspension with a high content of humic acids, potassium, iron and a large number of trace elements ready for uptake by plants.
The Role of Humic Acids
Horticultural/Organic growers have recognized the value of regular additions of organic matter to the soil since prehistoric times. However, the chemistry and function of the organic matter has been a subject of controversy since men began their postulating about it in the I8th century. Until the time of Liebig, it was supposed that humus was used directly by plants, but after Liebig, it shows plant growth depends upon inorganic compounds. Many soil scientists hold the view that organic matter is useful for fertility only as it is broken down with the release of its constituent nutrient elements into inorganic forms.
At the present time most soil scientists hold a more moderate view and at least recognize that humus influences soil fertility through its effect on the water-holding capacity of the soil. Also, since plants have been shown to absorb and translocate the complex organic molecules of systemic insecticides, they can no longer discredit the idea that plants may be able to absorb the soluble forms of humus.
What can Humic substances/acids do?
• Aid plant tissues requiring free oxygen for aerobic respiration, and thus provide metabolic energy to all higher plants.
• Combine with sunlight and photosynthesis to furnish metabolic energy.
• When used as a dilute solution for foliar spray, cause plants to experience a notable uptake of oxygen, thus increasing plant growth.
• Not only assist plant respiration, but also increase the production and productivity of microorganisms.
• Assist plant respiration; they can serve as hydrogen acceptors for various plant root storage tissue.
• Produce energy involving photosynthesis, enhancing this process which includes the biochemical manufacture of complex organic materials, especially carbohydrates from carbon dioxide, water, trace minerals, and inorganic salts, along with sunlight energy for chlorophyll production.
• Increase the chlorophyll content in plant leaves when the plant is provided with root nutrient or foliar spray.
• Directly influence the development of enzymes and the net enzyme synthesis.
• Contain auxins; auxins are involved in the chelating of iron for the plant, improving growth, health, and nutrient intensity of the plant, especially the development of the root system of the plant.
What is fulvic acid?
Fulvic Acid is the most plant-active of the Humic Acid compounds, offering physical, chemical and biological benefits. Natural buffering, chelating and extremely high ion-exchange properties make mineral elements easier for plants to absorb. This results in increased plant vitality, resistance to environmental stress and improved crop quality and yields.
Benefits of fulvic acids:
Fulvic acid is especially active in dissolving minerals and metals when solutions are in water. The metallic minerals simply dissolve into ionic form, and disappear into the fulvic structure becoming bio-chemically reactive and mobile. The fulvic acid actually transforms these minerals and metals into elaborate fulvic acid molecular complexes that have vastly different characteristics from their previous metallic mineral form. Fulvic acid is nature's way of "chelating" metallic minerals, turning them into readily absorbable bio-available form. Fulvic acid also has the unique ability to weather and dissolve silica that it comes in contact with.
Fulvic acid enhances the availability of nutrients and makes them more readily absorbable, allowing minerals to regenerate and prolong time of essential nutrients. It prepares minerals to react with cells and allows minerals to inter-react with one another, breaking them down into the simplest ionic form, chelated by the fulvic acid electrolytes.
Fulvic acid readily complexes with minerals and metals, making them available to plant roots and easily absorbable through cell walls. It makes minerals such as iron, which are not usually very mobile, easily transported through plant structures. Fulvic acids dissolve and transpose vitamins, coenzymes, auxins, hormones, and natural antibiotics that are generally found throughout the soil, making them available.
These substances are effective in stimulating even more vigorous and healthy growth, producing certain bacteria, fungi, and actinomyceles in decomposing vegetation in the soil. It has been determined that all known vitamins can be present in healthy soil.
Plants manufacture many of their own vitamins, yet these from the soil further supplement the plant. Upon ingestion, animals and humans easily absorb these nutrients, due to the fact that they are in the perfect natural plant form as nature intended. Fulvic acid can often transport many times its weight in dissolved mineral elements.
Fulvic acid complexes have the ability to bio-react with one another, and also inter-react with cells to synthesize or transmute new mineral compounds. The transmutation of vegetal silica and magnesium to form calcium in animal and human bones is a typical example of new synthesis of minerals.
Fulvic acid has the ability to store complex vitamins in its structure, where they are presented to the cell in combination with complexed minerals. In this perfect, natural condition, they can be catalysed and utilized by the cell. In the absence of adequate trace minerals, vitamins are unable to perform their proper function.
It is apparent that there is very little that man-made intervention can do to aid or detract from Mother Nature's complexities. We are of an age where profit and abundance may be the foremost motivation for farming of many plants, yet if you take the view that if it is not broke, do not fix it, you can see that everything is there for success in growing, all that is needed is the natural resources, a little faith and allowing the natural elements to do their magic. We can see the results still, as our ancestors did, maybe without the odd sacrifice of a cow, but the future is actually in our past in this respect. There is nothing scientists can do that will make better what is already a perfect blend once all the elements are present.
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