0-0-60

[Bluestem]

The dictionary definition of potassium makes it sound ok in an organic program. Its was suggested I needed to add 0-0-60 to a hay field. Any thoughts on 0-0-60 from the Farm store?

[CaptainCompostAL]

Here's my 2 cents on the topic: Any fertilizer or soil amendment that has a NPK rating whose 3 numbers sum to a number bigger than 20, ain't really organic or natural. The only exception that I can think of is natural rock phosphate that has a NPK = 0-22-0.

NPK is a measure of the available, soluble NPK percentages in a product, not the real total NPK percentages in the product. All true natural or organic products, like compost or bone meal or seaweed, contain far more insoluble major nutrients plus micronutrients, that can only be used by growing plants as the soil microbes and earthworms digest it, and release it to the plants' roots and/or foliage.

[Bluestem]

Thank you Captain. Your 2 cents was worth much more. In the last year I have been dealing with chemical farmers and there suppliers more than I like. You gave me a different train of thought needed to continue the arguement. I sometimes get the feeling chem suppliers are getting nervous. Hopefully for a good reason.

[Robert D Bard]

The best thing is to increase the organic matter and all will improve. I use humates (dry and kinda of like coal ground up real fine), phosphate from the earth - not super phosphate from chemicals - loaded with trace minerals, potassium also mined from the earth. We also add lava sand with a little ammonia sulfate to increase the sulfur and unlock trace minerals in the soil. With this mix you don't need lime as this will correct ph but if you want to speed it up a little, add calcium to this dry mix. you can put 25 lbs of lime per acre in this mixture. It also never hurts to spray with molasses, and "bugs in a jug". Liquid fish would be big help in this liquid mixture also.
Bob Bard

[Bluestem]

Thanks Robert for the info. The ammonia sulfate would help with nitrogen and sulfur. But is it considered organic? It was also suggested I use K-Mag, which as far as I could tell could be considered organic. Any thoughts on this?

[CaptainCompostAL]

I don't think ammonium sulfate is on the certified organic list.

K-Mag is a naturally-occuring mineral that consists of potassium, magnesium and sulfur. All three nutrients are in the highly-available, water-soluble, sulfate form.


http://www.kmag.com/

[imacutecowgirl]

I used to work for a large Feed and Fertilizer Company. The 0-0-60 that we had was not organic. What are you looking to do with your ground and what kind of grass is it? Is it coastal?

This is what we did to our coastal fields but I am not sure if it readily available to the public. We had the good luck to get tanker loads of Milk that had something wrong with it, ie. too high in protein or meds etc. So, what we would do is mix in Dry Molasses with the Milk. We then hooked up a "sprinkler system" across the back of the tanker and drove like mad across the fields!

We had the best stand of coastal ever off that place!!! I also later put out cotton seed meal and molasses. You can use Soybean Meal, Corn Meal and Alfalfa Meal. It is a little more than you'd pay for NPK fertilizer but it is worth it!