Welcome to Toughgrass epistemology, where we are on a never ending journey to find out how we know what we know about Toughgrass science. My name is Travis Shaddix. Welcome. This is the member's only stream on Monday, August 12, 2024, from a beautiful Lexington, Kentucky. We woke up this morning and it was 58 or 59. All the windows are open. No clouds in the sky. It's beautiful. This is growing and we're going to talk about some Toughgrass science. Good morning. All the members, Joseph and Andrew and Chuck and Turfner, Randy Charles, Valyria. We have people from Italy, to Bulgaria, to Texas, to, I think, Georgia, to, I mean, all over the place. I love to see that. Don't forget, this is the last month that we'll be doing a Thursday. Today's evening show. Open to the public. I'm going to move that to Tuesday evening, starting in September. Good morning, Brady. Ohio. I have a five-member correctly. So Tuesday evening, we'll start in September on the public Thursday evening show, move to Tuesday evening. Tomorrow we're doing an open public stream on a comments video and it's going to be a part one of two series because the video so long is going to take me two, maybe three episodes to get through the video. Plus, mentally, I'm not strong enough to actually sit and watch an hour and a half misinformation video on soul testing, I just can't do it. I may have to, I may have to just break it up over a month or two. I don't know. It's difficult for me to, I haven't even watched the whole video. It's, it's just so mentally taxing on me to watch such a magnitude of misinformation be communicated to the public. So I'll do what I can to get through it, but it's a long video and we'll do that tomorrow morning. Date in Ohio. Turf nerd. Okay. Good to know. I didn't know that. Good morning. Okay. So we're going to get into it today. We are going to be going over an article. Now last, we've, we've been alternating. If you notice, I've been alternating. We've been going on base cat, base cat in saturation, but I've been alternating between agricultural literature for a week and turf, grass literature for a week. I didn't want to bore everybody to tears talking about corn. So you're here to talk about turf. So I did, but some, a lot of the base saturation content is on ag. So last week, I think it was last week, I can't remember, we went over some turfgrass literature, uh, sartains, some of sartains papers. I think we went over St. John's paper on putting greens on, on putting green on turfgrass. And then this week we're going to go back into ag, we're going to talk about Eckert and McLean's papers today and on Thursday, but it's in ag, but don't be too lost. The concepts are all still there, you know, the influence on the plant is still there. It may be slightly different with turfgrass, but, um, the papers are so important, we, we have to get, we have to get through them. We need to include them, but it is an agriculture and not specifically in turfgrass. So for those of you who may be listening for the first time, if you are listening first time, this will actually be on a podcast. If you're listening later, um, let me explain exactly what we're going to be talking about. So we're talking about base cat in saturation and on the screen, for those listening, I'll explain what I'm talking about, while showing you a soil test. And I want to, I want to make sure we're all on the same page as to what we're talking about, what I'm going to be discussing. This is a typical soil test. I think it's from one of the members actually of the show and I've, I've blacked out any of the information just in case he didn't want it on there. And you see the soil pH is 6.2 and the buffer pH and the phosphorous and parts per million. This M3 stands for May, like three, I mean, you may see a B or, or an O or something for Bray or for Olson or something like that. This is May, like three. There's in parts per million. You may also see it in pounds per acre and this is all valid. These are all numbers and there's all, everything's okay there. These soil test ratings, this is the interpretation and this is where we have a lot of, um, ignorance in the scientific community. We don't, we can't really interpret these values as well as what they're saying here. We can do a pretty decent job with this high, medium, low as their interpretation. I would encourage people for the most part to ignore that. I would encourage them to contact their land or institution, look at their extension publications and see what the critical minimums are for your area and your soils and your turf and so forth. Because these, these soil test ratings, I have no clue where they got those ratings from. I don't know if they used alfalfa or corn or wheat or soybeans or turf or cool season or warm season. I have no clue. And because I don't know, I don't have any confidence in those interpretations. I do have an extreme amount of confidence in these values. Say, for example, phosphorus is 50 parts per million. I have a great deal of confidence that that value is accurate, but how do we know what that means to us? Do we need to apply anything or not? This is what this interpretation provides and I just, I would encourage people to really just ignore that and like say, contact your land grant university turfgrass soil specialist and ask them, you know, what, what are the minimums for potassium on fescue and Pennsylvania or whatever, what for bluegrass in Wisconsin? I mean, you know, there are people who know that and have confidence in those interpretations, but it doesn't necessarily show up on a soil test report, okay. But today, we're going to talk about this little section over here, the cadon, the calculated cation exchange capacity and the base saturation and these ratios. Okay. So this, these percent basic saturation comes from the cation exchange capacity along with the values over here, the parts per million and they, and they, it, it, the base saturation is the percentage of cation exchange sites that are occupied by the various base cations like potassium and calcium magnesium and then they have hydrogen down here, which is not a base, but that occupies certain amount of the sites as well. And sodium and then they have potassium magnesium ratios and calcium magnesium ratios. We're going to talk a lot about that today. And as you, if you are a regular viewer of the channel, you'll know that we have already gone over many, many papers on this topic and all of them say the same thing, literally not one says anything different than what I'm about to say. Base cation saturation is invalid. There's no evidence to indicate that you should be applying nutrients based upon base cation saturation and you should be following a sufficiency level approach or a critical minimum approach with you're going to be using a soil test to apply nutrients to turfgrass. However, these still show up on soil test reports. And that's what, that's what I'm showing an example of today. This is what we're talking about, this percentages. Okay. And by the way, the base cation saturation con artists and fraudsters, even though they are fraudsters, they are fleecing the industry, they are convincing you to believe something is true when they fact it is not true. That's the definition of a fraudster. Even they will say that base cation saturation is not valid below seven or eight, which is true. That part's true. It's not valid below seven or eight. Some of the books, well, some of their books will also say that the methodology, the base cation saturation methodology is not valid below 10. Okay. So they can't get their story straight. It's either, was it below seven or was it below eight or was it below 10? What is it below? That is no longer valid. So pick a number out of thin air, which is how the base cation saturation numbers even came up to begin with. They just picked them out of thin air because they didn't base them off their data. So give me a number. You guys argue amongst each other until you figure out some number that you agree with. Give me the number and then when you come up with a number, you should then agree to eliminate base cation saturation on all soil tests when it's below that number. So for example, if it's below seven or below eight or below 10, this test has 5.6 CEC. So if you're going to agree that it doesn't work below seven or eight or 10, then why are you putting it on a soil test to begin with? So omit it, omit it from all soil tests and omit base cation saturation values on all soil tests that you confirm or you claim that it's not valid when the CEC is below a certain number. Just omit it. We can at least agree on that. So please do that. But this is what we're going to be talking about. Okay. So having said all that, so everybody's on the same page, this is the paper we're going to be talking about today. The title of the paper is base cation saturation ratios as a basis for fertilizing and lining agronomic crops. This is number one of two papers. Growth chamber studies is the part one. This is by Eckerd McLean, they were at Ohio State. And this paper was published in 1981 in agronomy journal and on Thursday night we'll be going over part two, which is the field study component of this. They worked on the base cation saturation and these magical ratios in the growth chamber in this particular study because they wanted to tightly control the influence of one cation on the other and to be able to adjust pH and account for the pH changes as well. That's one reason why they did it in growth chamber. That's very difficult to do in the field, it can be done, but it's much more difficult in the field. So they did it in growth chambers and then they went into the field on Thursday night and we're going to see what happens in either situation. Okay. So by the way, if you want to read this paper, you want to be able to read other papers similar to this, this is a journal published through the agronomy society of America and crop science side of America and soil science side of America, you can go to one of those websites and become a member and download these and read the abstract for free. I encourage those who are interested in learning more about how to critically read literature and how to find evidence to support your position to do that. In fact, there was a member or a comment made, I can't remember now what it was, I can't remember now what it was, but I see it recently and I didn't really have a lot of knowledge on that particular area and so I went through a process of trying to find evidence in the literature and I'll probably will go over that, like how do I go about finding information, how do I vet it and how do I prioritize information to find something that I didn't know before and I may go over that but a lot of what I do is go to the tri-societies and read their literature and pull up papers and, you know, as you can tell on the channel, I do a lot of that so I encourage those to who are interested in learning more about the science to consider joining one of the tri-societies. Okay, here we go. The base cat and saturation ratio concept of soil test interpretations as developed by Bear and others in New Jersey states that an optimum soil environment for plant growth was created when the soil cut on exchange complex is satisfied in the ratio of 65% calcium, 10% magnesium, 5% potassium and 20% hydrogen. Oh, and by the way, this was in Bear 1945, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I can't ever find that Bear 45 paper, I've been looking for it for decades, long time I've been looking for that paper, I can't find it, I can find like the title or the first page and I asked the audience if you could ever come across her and know how to get a hold of it let me know and then I haven't had any luck from that perspective, but I ended up getting it. I ended up finding it, but it was in individual sections, I had to like take every individual page and stitch them together in order to get that actual paper. So I finally found the Bear 45 paper, which is the paper that started all of this mess in terms of base cat and saturation. Well, technically it was low before him, but that paper was the one that kind of put things in categories of percentages. And so I'll go over that paper eventually and explain why it's flawed. And on top of that, well, I'll leave that, I'll leave a surprise for until I go over that paper. There's some information in that paper that I don't even think the base kind of saturation people and the con artists even know, because I doubt they've read it. Anyway, okay, later after 45, later Graham in 1959 modified Bear's original concept stating that crop growth in yield would be a little affected by saturations within the ranges of 65 to 85% calcium, 6 to 12% magnesium, 2 to 5% potassium with hydrogen occupying the remaining sites. So what this is saying is that Bear said, well, it should be 65 and, you know, so forth. And then Graham came along a couple years later, about 15 years later and said, well, it doesn't need to be that exact percentage. It can be a range, you know, and he said it should be 65 to 85. And then of course William Albrecht came in and also had ranges as well. So what I would say is base kind of saturation works as long as the range is between like one in 100% calcium, as long as there's some calcium in there and one and, you know, whatever percent magnesium, 90, probably very high 75%, I mean, there's a massive, very, very, very wide range of countdown ratios that turfgrass grows within very, very well. And it has nothing to do with the ratios. It has everything to do with the quantity that is available to be taken up by the turf, not the ratio of one to the other. So what he's saying is they expanded these values to actual ranges later on. This base kind of saturation concept has become a dominant force in shaping alignment fertilizer recommendations in the United States, especially so in the north central region. Unfortunately, that's true. Yeah, a lot of farmers have been duped and conned into applying all these nutrients when they don't need to. The base kind of saturation concept does possess a certain appeal on theoretical grounds. And that's the problem. It does sound interesting. It does sound sort of valid if you don't have any knowledge of how these systems work. Yeah, that does actually sound bad. I shouldn't. I should keep the calcium magnesium balanced to a certain percentage. I should keep the potassium balanced to a certain percentage that we're also going to change other things. It can sound that way if you're not versed in the literature and they make a point of that. It's shown that the percentage-based saturation of individual cation can affect its availability to plants. And he has a couple of citations for that in the '40s and the '60s. And that uptake of one cation may influence uptake of the others. This is the basis to kind of be convinced that maybe there is something here. On the practical side, however, research into the effects of varying soil cation ratios on crop yield has been limited and has generally not supported the concept of ideal ratio. Okay. And it says, in fact, bears original proposal proposals were based on lack of response of varying soil potassium to calcium potassium ratios. That's ridiculous. Hunter, who worked with bear -- and this is -- I was -- Eckerd McLean, they did some really good papers back in the '80s and -- well, the '80s, really. But I've just never thought about writing things in papers about pointing the finger at this particular company or pointing out something that would potentially antagonize another author. I've never thought about that. But a lot of that seemed to happen in the '80s. I don't know why. And here's a little bit of an example of that. Hunter who worked with bear at the inception of the base cation of saturation concept. So he's saying this particular author, Hunter, and this Hunter 43 paper has bear on it. Bear is a co-author on the Hunter 43 paper down here. So Hunter 43, Hunter Tothin Bear, 1943. Okay. So he's saying that this particular author who worked with bear found no best calcium to potassium or calcium to magnesium ratios for alfalfa. And this was in '43 before the '45 nonsense paper from bear came out. It's interesting how they just call someone out like that and say, "Well, your co-author said it didn't work." It's like, "Okay." I mean, I wouldn't say that, but maybe I should say more of that. I don't know. Giddens and Toth, in 1951, found no effects of varying soil cation ratios on the growth and Lindino clover, as long as calcium was the dominant ion on the exchange complex. And I would say that's probably true. And calcium is almost always the dominant cation in all soils of agronomic importance. Okay. It saturates everything. You're swimming in calcium, essentially. It's only when calcium is so low that it is no longer the dominant cation, and it's no longer soluble to the point that the plant is receiving all it can receive or all it needs to receive. It's only in those cases where the other cations, like magnesium, can be problematic. But that's not very common. Okay. It's almost always calcium that's the dominant cation, and they're saying, as long as it's the dominant cation, ratios don't matter. For Foy and Barber in 1958 showed no yield response in corn to varying soil potassium and magnesium ratios, despite the appearance of severe magnesium deficiency symptoms at wider ratios, and cleaning carbonyl in '72 showed no effect of varying calcium and magnesium ratios on yields of alfalfa or german millet. So they're saying it's pretty straightforward. All these authors that looked at it and nothing happened. While the studies noted above do cast doubt on the validity of ideal ratio. Now they're backing off their backpedal a little bit being respectful. That casts a little bit of doubt, but you think there's they just cited one. Two, three, four, five, five papers in one paragraph, and one of them, or two of them, actually two of them are from authors that worked with bear, and they're saying all of them showed that it didn't work. Cast a little bit of doubt. Meanwhile, there's not a single paper that shows that does work, by the way. All these papers say it doesn't work. In terms of like economic efficiency or environmental, you know, efficiency, you're going to have a decent crop. You're going to have a decent turfgrass falling. You're just going to waste a lot of nutrients and a lot of money doing it. So I said, Cass, above do cast some doubt on the validity of ideal ratio. None were symptomatic studies of all three cations in question. So now he's going to start building the case as to why they're going to do this study. And the study reported below, and one I'm going to talk about, percent based cation based saturations of potassium and magnesium were varied across different levels of each other and over different levels of soil pH. Any more familiar quantity than set cation saturation in a complete factorial design. So he's saying studies have been done, but they've never really looked at holding too steady and looking at the other or holding one steady and looking at the other two or holding two and looking at the pH. That hasn't really been done before this paper, and so they're going to do it. In so doing, the possibilities of maximum yield at one or more ratios could be ascertained. In addition, the design permitted evaluations of changes in the ratios of two elements at a constant level of the third, both short term growth chamber and long term field studies were conducted only the results of the growth chamber study reported here. And as I mentioned, the field study will be, we'll discuss that on Thursday evening. Let's get into the result. Now I'll say this on the material methods. I'm not really well versed on this paper. I've only read it a couple of times. And it's not the easiest paper to grasp the content. They summarize it at the end very nicely, so you can walk away with a take home message that you can use. But the results are a little bit scientifically worded. So I'm going to do my best to kind of make it interesting as best I can do. But I will warn you that it is not the most interesting and exciting materials and methods and results. The conclusion is succinct and useful. So bear with me. Materials and methods. The soil used was from the AP horizon of a land, landfill silt loam. Now the AP horizon is, if you're not familiar with soils, soils are categorized or judged by how they're layered, they have different layers, A horizon, B horizon, C horizon. And when someone says something like an AP horizon, it might be Greek to average person, but to a soil scientist, I know what he's talking about. He's talking about the upper layer, the A horizon, and P stands for like the plow layer. So this particular area had been farmed is what he's saying, and the soil was from the top plow layer from this location is what that means, the AP horizon. In Wayne County, Ohio, so for there's a couple of people in here from Ohio, yeah, there's at least two people. Yeah, Northwest Ohio and Dayton, Ohio in here. So this is in y'all's county or y'all's neck of the woods anyway. Okay, the low pH and base saturations of this soil resulting from extended use of sulfur in berry culture made it well suited to a cation ratio study because all adjustments and ratios can be attained by addition of the base cation. So what they're saying is that location was farmed, probably for blueberries, they use a lot of sulfur to lower the pH for that production of blueberry, or I'm assuming blueberries. And that made this particular location ideal for a base kind of saturation study because the pH is going to be very low as you'll see. So preparation, a randomized complete factorial design was used, including two levels of K, 2.5% and 5% saturation of the CEC, three magnesium levels for eight and 16% saturation of the CEC and three pH levels, five, six and seven. Each potassium magnesium and pH treatment was replicated three times. Okay, so they're hope they have, they're going to hold one constant or two constant pH and potassium and then look at magnesium where they're going to hold pH and magnesium constant and look at potassium and so forth, okay. Aliquots of soil were amended to achieve the desired ratios using reagent grade potassium chloride magnesium carbonate and calcium hydroxide. Aliquots were then remoinsed to point three bartension using a nutrient solution, providing 50 miles, I'm not going to go through all that, monium sulfate and phosphoric acid. The phosphoric acid would use to supply phosphorus because the lining had raised some pH levels to a greater extent than expected. Soil pH was determined prior to planting, okay, plant growth determination, the bags of soil material were supported in tin cans and planted with both four, with both four clusters of German millet and five clusters of alfalfa. So looking at German millet and alfalfa and the soil they pulled from the field. The growth chamber was maintained at 12 hour photo period with temperatures of 27c and light and so they're controlling light and temperature and humidity and the growth chamber. The millet was grown for 28 days at which time the tops were removed by cutting at the sand surface. Soil samples were taken from each plot using a cork borer, an analyzed exchangeable potassium magnesium, calcium and pH, additional applications of potassium chloride at 7500, well, that's all rate stuff, 7550 micrograms were made to the two and a half and 5% potassium treatments respectively to compensate for care removed from the millet harvest. Once again, another reason why I don't encourage people to do their own research is if you don't know how to do your own research, you're probably not going to count for all the variables and you're probably not going to balance all the nutrients and all the other variables out. And what you're looking at may very well be a response, but it might not be a response to the variable that you think it's from and here's an example of that where they balanced everything out to make sure that they're accounting for, you know, other potential responses from other sources than their treatment. Due to the appearance of nitrogen efficiency symptoms in the first alfalfa cutting and additional 25 micrograms nitrogen per gram soil as sodium nitrate was added to each plot, the regrowth of alfalfa was then allowed, okay, I'm not going to go through all that. Okay, chemical analysis, soil pH was measured and a one-to-one soil water suspension exchange will potassium and easement calcium were extracted using one normal ammonium acetate of pH 7. This was all normal. Like then remember, this is before MALEC 3 and there's nothing wrong with using ammonium acetate pH 7. This was a very common extra, it's still used today in some locations, so there's nothing wrong with that. They used that extractant. So let's look at the soil, so that was all the materials and methods. So before we get to that, the rest of it, they're in Ohio. They pulled soil from the plow layer in Ohio and they put them in tin cans and a growth chamber and they're growing corn and they're growing millet and they're growing alfalfa. They're going, to some of the plots, they're going to hold the potassium and magnesium constant and they're going to adjust the pH and some of them are going to hold potassium and pH constant and they're going to adjust the magnesium and they're going to see what happens to the various percentages in the base cation ratios and I'm going to see what happens to the growth. It's real simple. Okay? So let's take a look at the soil analyses. If I can get this on the screen, sometimes I can't get it all on the screen. Yeah, here we go. Okay, so this is properties of the Landville soil used in base concentration studies. So the soil pH was 3.6. Remember, this was in very production and they applied sulfur to lower that pH down for the growth of berries. This is why it made it ideal for base cation saturation study because the addition of some of these base cations would likely have an effect. The cation exchange capacity was 14. So for all the base cation saturation frosters and connoisseurs who are listening, who want to negate the results because the CEC was too low, the CEC according to your bogus claims is above your pie in the sky, fantasy number of 7, 8, or 9, or 10, whatever number you want to come up with. I wanted to point that out, okay? And they had the clay mineralogy of elite and chlorotides vermiculite and covalentite. All right, that's what the soil, that's the soil they're growing in. Now, I'm going to flip back and forth between some tables, but I'm probably going to, there's only two pages left, so we have plenty of time. But I'm going to probably go back and forth between some tables and then go read the results because I don't want to, let me think here, how do I want to do this? Let me just, let me do it the other way around. Let me read the results so I don't screw anything up and then I'll come back and explain it on the tables. Results and discussion. At a given magnesium level, the actual magnesium saturation found was inversely rated pH, and at a given pH level, the actual calcium saturation was inversely related to magnesium level. This is mainly a result of the fact that both cations were supplied as line compounds whose solubilities are pH dependent, thus as the relevant concentration of one was increased, it exerted a proportionally greater effect on the raising soil pH, reducing the solubility of the other. In the case of calcium, a portion of the effect was also due to the decreasing quantities of calcium hydroxide added at higher magnesium levels to compensate for the neutralizing power of the magnesium carbonate. This interrelating solubility effect was most marked on magnesium when pH increased from 6 to 7 and on calcium and magnesium increased from 8 to 16. They're saying basically that one was having an effect on the other. It was inversely related to pH on what they say it was on magnesium and then calcium was the other way around. The title of the bare paper is the potassium needs of New Jersey soils. It's in the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 721. Like I said, I found it but I found it in pieces and I merged it together and I'm good with it now. If you're looking to shoot it my way, I found it and I'm good, but I had a lot of difficulty finding it was only recently that I figured out a way to get it. Some of those older papers, if they weren't published in scientific journals, they can be difficult to track down. Trends in potassium saturation were not so easily explained at a constant potassium level, but the percentage potassium saturation increased with increasing magnesium saturation. For example, in a 2.5% potassium treatment where no potassium was added initially, potassium was apparently fixed by the soil upon an addition of magnesium at the 4% and 8% levels and released from non-exchangeable forms in the 16% magnesium treatment. No corollaries to this effect were found in the literature. They're finding some strange things happening with potassium saturation. Things shouldn't be really happening the way they were. We've never seen this in the literature, but they're having some strange things happen and they think that it's probably a result of potassium being released from non-exchangeable forms from the 16% magnesium treatment. Sometimes strange things like that happen. You have to postulate an explanation of it. It doesn't mean that's exactly what happened. It doesn't mean that's exactly why it happened, but generally you're going to have to help the editors to accept the paper by explaining a little bit. And if it is, hey, we're unfamiliar with this anywhere in the literature, but this is what happened and this is why we think it happened, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's what you're supposed to do. When averaged over the two soil cation amendments, okay, this is where it's going to get a little hairy, so just bear with me, okay? When averaged over the other two soil cation amendments, potassium magnesium and pH had the following effects on yield, the 5% potassium was greater than the 2.5% potassium on yield. The 8% was greater than the 4%, and the 4% was equal to the 16% on magnesium, which doesn't, you know, it's all, it's just weird. And then when, when come to pH, yield was greatest at 6, and 6 was greater than 5 pH, and 5 was greater than 7 pH. 7 was the lowest yield, the treatment, treatment 14, the treatment combining the maximum yield effects of all factors in the present study, was one of the several treatments with varying ratios giving maximum yield, in other words, maximum yield had these, was a result of varying ratios, okay? Increasing the levels of soil potassium, magnesium, and calcium increase the levels of respective ions in the plant, increasing soil potassium, or calcium, reduced plant magnesium content, while increasing soil potassium and magnesium reduced calcium content. Plant uptake of potassium increased at higher soil pH levels, but was also quite high at pH 5 when the soil magnesium level is 16, so let me just explain this real quick. When potassium and calcium were applied, that resulted in a reduction of magnesium in the plant. When potassium and magnesium were applied, that reduced calcium in the plant. And the plant uptake of potassium was increased at the higher soil pH levels. Now, if I can quickly find this article, and if you remember, I wasn't prepared for this, but if you remember, on an article I went over on the soil pH diagram, see if I can find it, he just said that soil pH, potassium was greatest at the soil pH, at the increased soil pH, I found it, okay, so right here, he said that plant uptake of potassium increased at the higher soil pH levels, so pH 7, so pH 7, plant uptake of potassium was greater than at pH 6. If you remember the borrow paper, which massacred the soil pH diagram, if you remember that episode, feel free to go back and review it, but here's the paper online, now this is the article I wasn't planning on going over this, but I'm going to make sure this is clear. The borrow paper, which is from 2023 entitled the effects of pH on nutrient availability depend on both soils and plants, okay, down here on page, what is this page, 34, this was in plant and soil in 2023. He states to it, okay, exchangeable cations, potassium, magnesium, and calcium, two of these elements provide further examples for which the effects of pH on soil chemistry are opposite to the effects of plant physiology. As pH is increased, the increased negative charge on soil particles will mean that a smaller proportion of the cations is present in the soil solution phase, and the rate of movement to plant roots by diffusion will decrease. However, uptake of potassium involves export of protons, and a similar mechanism would probably apply to magnesium. Uptake of potassium is therefore favored by high pH. And then you go back to the Eckerd 81 paper, which we're just reading, it says plant uptake of potassium increased at higher soil pH. So if you have a potassium deficiency and you're at 7, you don't want to acidify the soil down to 6.5 or 6.3 or whatever magical pH you think you need to lower it to. If indeed your plant is suffering from a potassium deficiency, plant uptake of potassium is greater at 7 than at 6, for the very reason that Varro just stated, reinforced Eckerd's data, reinforced that concept. So let's look at that in the Eckerd data. So this is table three. I'm going to come back to this table several times before I close out today. If I can get this all on the screen here. This is table three, entitled Yield and Cation content of German millet as affected by various soil cation ratios. And we have the treatments over here, and you'll see where they hold potassium constant, and they vary the magnesium or they hold the magnesium constant and they vary the pH and so forth. Okay, this is how they set it up. And you'll see I've highlighted pH seven. So here it goes pH five, six and seven, and then it repeats itself five, six and seven, five, six and seven all the way down. And you'll see over here the cation content of millet. This is in mil equivalence per hundred grams, I guess this of cation content of the millet. Okay. So that's the uptake. And you'll see at five pH, it was 80 milligrams per hundred, and at seven, it was 92. It went from 80 to 78 to 92. So at seven pH, it was the greatest. On the next, that was at this was according to these treatments. When you when you increase the magnesium to eight, you see at pH of five, it was 69 grams per pot. Oh, no, 69 milligrams milligrams per hundred gram at pH six, it was 73. And then it went up to 84 at seven. Here's one where it didn't increase at pH seven hit the screen one down here. Also did not increase at pH seven, but there's another two where it went from 117 at pH five to 156 at pH seven or potassium uptake, 118 at pH five, 153 at pH seven for potassium uptake. So four of the six times they four of the six values that they determined between five and seven potassium uptake was greatest at pH seven, not pH six and not pH five. Okay, even though the argument is, oh, well, I'm gonna lower the pH down to six or six and a half. Well, if your potassium is not deficient, then it probably doesn't make any difference. But if you're Pat, if you're low on potassium, you're struggling to keep potassium in the plant. This is millet. This is a case for every plant, okay, every plant might not, you know, this is a big brush we're painting here. And I'm not saying it would be the case for every turf grass or every plant. But clearly here's an example along with the bar paper showing that plant uptake potassium is greatest at the higher pH is on front of five, six and seven scale. Okay. So you may be, not always, I'm not saying this is the case in every case, but you may be experienced potassium deficiencies of these lower pH's and moving it to six probably would help, but moving it to seven probably would help more. And you'll see this also in the yield. The yield when you say, oh, well, I want to have, I want to see, well, hang on a second. This was, oh, I'm sorry, the opposite is affected. This is for potassium uptake, but the opposite effect occurs on yield. So let's look at this. Here we have five, six and seven. This is grams per pot, it doesn't happen in every single combination, but it happens in a lot of them. What I'm looking at is the difference between five pH and seven pH and on this particular combination of potassium, magnesium, potassium, magnesium, the pH was essentially the same. Didn't happen five, six and seven pH or the growth was the same between five, six and seven pH. Well, look at the next one. Now statistically, they're not the same. Okay. But you're looking at a difference of about 20%, 10 grams per pot at 5 pH and 8.8 grams per pot at seven pH. So this is an example, I would argue that is statistically insignificant. But biologically, one, if you're going to say, well, I want, you can do this at lower pH is in your yields going to increase by 10%. I think most farmers would say, yeah, I'll take the increase in yield by 10%. Okay. Here's, here's the next one does not correlate the pH five is the low is 4.69, whereas the pH of seven is, is higher than that. But here's another one down here, pH five is 11 pH, seven is six. Next one's pH five, pH five is 11 grams per pot and pH seven is six. Next pH five is eight pH seven is 6.7. So there's, you know, again, four, I think four times out of the six. The greatest yield occurred at a lower pH. The greatest uptake of potassium occurred at a higher pH. Okay. So you have to ask, what, what metric are you going by? What is your priority? Very few people that I'm aware of make a living by increasing the potassium in their plant tissue. I mean, how many golfers even know what that even means? How many homeowners are going to go, Oh man, I'm looking at that turf. It looks like it needs, you know, another 0.2% potassium in the leaf tissue. They don't even know what, they don't know what that is. They just want green and no weeds. Okay. So, and this is just an example, although it's in a different plant, an example where, yes, plant uptake of an element might be greatest, but the plant production or growth, let's say the uptake of potassium might be greatest at a higher pH, but the plant uptake or growth might be perfectly fine at a lower pH. It might be greatest at the lower pH. In other words, if potassium is not deficient, then the lower pH is probably fine. Don't worry about it. But if it is deficient, don't be lower in a pH, you know, that that's sort of the way to look at this thing. Okay, back to the text, growth of millet was much reduced at pH five when soil magnesium saturation was, was raised to 16%, particularly at 2.5% potassium. They're going to talk about the connections between these. These plants showed characteristic calcium deficiencies. The soil magnesium calcium ratios of these treatments were quite wide and it is apparent that the wide ratios reduced calcium availability to critical levels in inducing the reduced growth of calcium deficiency. So they're saying that the calcium content was actually, the calcium was reduced below the critical level and it's not the ratio. Some yields were noted at soil magnesium ratios from 0.09 to 0.32 with no, I'm sorry, with lower yields also falling within this range. So both high yields and low yield, but fell within this magnesium calcium ratio range. The data indicate that high yields were possible at several ratios as long as nutrients were present in adequate amounts, which is what I've been saying for a month or more. Essentially, I don't, I don't know of any paper that says anything different. Maybe there is one, but all the literature I'm aware of says the same thing. As long as there's enough in the soil, the ratios are irrelevant. Adequate amounts evidently became inadequate when potassium magnesium calcium ratios were widely out of balance, which is what I've been saying as long as you have enough calcium in there, unless you have extremely unusual conditions where you have no calcium or you have no magnesium and these ratios are completely out of whack, then don't worry about it. This is the problem I think that the flaw and the trap that a lot of base kind of saturation con artists have fallen into, and that is as long as there's enough in the soil, you're fine, okay, and the ratio has just happened to be also in line, but if you don't have enough in the soil, which is what we would say, and from the critical level, we would say, if you don't have enough in the soil, then you're below a critical limit and you need to add some, and it just so happens that when you are that low, then the ratios are also out of whack, okay, and it reminds me of the Douglas Adam analogy of the puddle, the conscious puddle that suddenly, there's a puddle that suddenly becomes conscious, okay, there's a pothole in the road, and there's a puddle of water there, and the puddle suddenly becomes conscious, and he looks around and he goes, wow, I just, it's amazing how I fit so nice and snugly in this pothole. I was formed and my body exactly fits this pothole perfectly. It's just coincidental, it's, you know, the puddle wasn't formed, it just took the position in the shape of the hole that it was in, and it's the same thing with these ratios. It's just coincidental that the calcium magnesium ratios happen to be more in line whenever we supply sufficient amounts of calcium or magnesium, as long as they're sufficient amounts, then the ratios happen to be okay. When there's not sufficient amounts, then the ratios get out of whack and they're stuck in that mentality. They can't, they can't divorce themselves or emancipate themselves from the puddle analogy. They're the puddle thinking that they were perfectly formed for this exact scenario. Meanwhile, it's just completely coincidental, it has nothing to do with it. The calcium ratios have nothing to do with it. It's the quantity that's available to be taken up that has everything to do with it. Sorry, I got off on a evolutionary tangent there on the Douglas Adams analogy. How many times can I fit that into a conversation about soil testing though, so I might as well do it right? Sorry. All right, where was that? Okay, as yields increased or decreased across potassium levels, plant magnesium calcium ratios followed the trend of widening ratios as yield increased. So as the yields increase in the ratios going much, much, it's widening greatly, increasing soil potassium level, depress calcium uptake to a greater extent than the magnesium uptake at several magnesium levels in pH five and six treatments, raising plant magnesium calcium ratios in yield. At pH seven, soil calcium levels kept magnesium uptake low. In addition of potassium reduced it further, narrowing plant magnesium calcium ratios and reducing yield. Thus, the effect of increasing soil potassium was evidently indirect operating through its influence on plant magnesium calcium ratio. They're talking about what's in the plant, not what's in the soil. In general, lining above pH six proved detrimental. Okay. So this is, they're talking about yield here. And I would talk just about growth of the plant and quality of the turf. In general, lining above pH proved detrimental as did the 16% magnesium rate of pH five. So magnesium saturations of eight percent gave the most consistently high yields. But at this magnesium level, several potassium calcium combinations worked equally well in providing high yields. So in other words, there was a high yield provided by this magnesium level, but there are high yields provided by the potassium calcium combinations as well. So in alfalfa, there was a little bit different in alfalfa. That was in millet. In alfalfa, the yield and cation and composition of the alfalfa plants from the second cutting are given in table four. In contrast to the millet plants, no soil cation interaction or present in cation showed yield effects in the following manner. You can read through that. I'm not going to confuse everybody. Root nodulation was good at pH seven, fair at pH six, and nonexistent at pH five. And if you remember, that's the exact same thing that William Albrecht misunderstood in his work with soybeans, where he's like, Oh, well, I'm applying calcium. And I see nodulation. So it must be due to the calcium saturation. Meanwhile, you looked at his own data and it shows when the pH goes down, the nodulation doesn't occur at all below. I think it was 5.5 pH. Regardless of how much calcium you applied, it was irrelevant. So in other words, even when you apply, quote unquote, sufficient calcium to balance out the base kind of saturation, if the pH is so low, it's still not going to provide nodulation. The plant is not going to result in nodulation. And it's so it's the pH that's affecting it, not the calcium saturation. And that's why William Albrecht's a lot of his data are flawed and his results and conclusions are flawed as well than many of his papers, not all. Okay, cationic contents followed expected trends with plant absorption of potassium magnesium and calcium increasing as a level of respective soil cation increased absorption of magnesium decrease with increasing in soil potassium and calcium while calcium absorption was decreased by increasing levels of soil magnesium. So all this is saying is I'm probably going to skip to the conclusions, honestly, or the last sentence here. All this is saying is they're throwing all these cations and potassium, magnesium and calcium and pH, all these other things. And what they're saying is, if you're throwing one in there, it's very likely that you're going to alter the quantity of what's the magnet, if you throw calcium in there, you're going to alter the quantity of magnesium and potassium in the soil, you may or may not influence what's going to happen in the plant, okay? But you're going to throw things out of balance out of whack, basically, okay, that shouldn't say balance, but the quantity that's available is going to change if you apply one cation. This is one reason why I say I wouldn't apply any cation anything unless you have a good reason. And just because you think it's deficient in potassium or because you think potassium is a stress element or because you think it's going to reduce stress in the plant or disease and the disease in the turf grass is not a good reason. You may in fact result in the opposite effect, greater disease, greater stress. If you're close on some of these other on cations, you may end up reducing those cations in the soil solo that you didn't have a deficiency before. Now you do because you thought you were trying to solve a problem and you ended up causing another problem. Good morning, Lush. As the German millet, or as with the German millet, no best soil cation ratio was found for the alfalfa plants in the present study. Once soil pH was raised to six or above, several potassium magnesium and calcium ratios gave maximum yield. So there wasn't just calcium magnesium should be this and magnesium potassium should be this. They said several resulted in maximum yield. You can see this in the day and this table here, yield of cation and composition of alfalfa. This is the same thing as the millet table above. You can go read through here and see all the effects and I'm just summarizing it here. So several potassium and magnesium calcium ratios gave maximum yield once the pH was above six. The data indicated that once soil nutrient levels are raised to adequate levels, the ratio of nutrient cations is not particularly important as long as one is not present in such excess as the hinder uptake of the other. So don't apply it unless you have a good reason because it's possible that it might hinder the uptake. Don't apply magnesium because, you know, it's an iron in the chlorophyll molecule so it must result in greening. Most of the turfgrass literature will not support that and if you're applying magnesium in locations where you might be on the line, right on the cliff with potassium, you might actually cause a potassium deficiency. You might result in a problem that you didn't have before. So just have a good reason if you're going to apply magnesium, if you're going to apply potassium, anything, just have a good reason to do it. That's all I'm saying. With respect to the base kind of saturation concept, several comments seem appropriate. This is the conclusion. The saturations in the present study did encompass those which have been reported as beneficial. The suggested 6 to 12 magnesium range does seem appropriate since yields of both crops tested were higher at the 8 than at the 4 percent magnesium level. However, both crops responded differently to variations in soil potassium saturations within grams 2 to 5 percent range. As millet yields increased while those of alfalfa generally decreased with increased potassium, the millet grew best at calcium saturations below the minimum of 65 percent calcium saturation. While alfalfa yields were maximum below and within the recommended range for calcium. So in other words, maximum yields occurring all over the place relative to these ratios and relative to the calcium saturation or relative to the magnitude, there's many, many ratios and combinations of cations that resulted in maximum yield. It wasn't just this percentage range of base kind of saturation. There were maximum yields that existed within those ranges and there were minimum yields that existed within those ranges. The conclusion is that there is no ideal base kind of saturation ratio or range for crops on the whole. Instead, the individual nutrient cations should be supplied in adequate but not excessive amounts depending on the response of the crop in question. And that summarizes more succinctly than I could ever do. So, as long as you're applying a sufficient but not excessive amount of whatever you're applying nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, as long as you're applying sufficient but not excessive depending on your response that you're wanting to have, as long as you're doing that, you're fine. It's when you're applying elements that you don't have a good reason for. You want to see the grass greener or you want to see more density or more growth and you're applying an element that won't result in that or very unlikely would result in that. That's a bad reason. Not just because you're wasting money in the case of nitrogen and phosphorus because you're an increasing environmental risk but because you could actually cause an unintended consequence and cause a nutrient deficiency from some other element, okay? That's the take-home message and I mean, my position on these things didn't appear out of thin air. It's a result of reading all this literature for decades, okay? And when there comes a time when base kind of saturation, someone publishes something and they go, oh, somehow we were all wrong and this paper shows that following these ratios is indeed wise, that's fine, include it in the scientific literature and we'll read it. Just to understand, you have a monumental task ahead of you because you have a mountain of refuting evidence to overcome. You might have one paper, I've never seen it, but let's say it did come out, okay, no problem, include it, I'll read it and consider it based upon its validity and how it was conducted and so forth. But just one paper does not easily move a scientist's office position. One paper is included but you have 10, 15, 20, there's probably 40 or more papers on this topic that all say they doesn't work and you have one paper that says it does work, you have to wait it, okay? That's all I'm saying. So please do yourself a service and avoid base kind of saturation, avoid buying products and applying products on base kind of saturation, this really isn't going to change any time soon, okay? We're talking about agriculture but we've talked about turf as well and we're going to go back to turf in a week or two on base kind of saturation, it's all the same. It's all focus, focus, it's a grift, it's a con and it's a way to get to convince you that you need to apply a nutrient when in fact you don't need to apply the nutrient at all. We don't make any money on calcium. There's no money on calcium, that's not true, there's no money, I agree there's probably not a lot of money in calcium at all, it's commodity but it's still a grift unless you're just giving it to them for free, you're still profiting by, you know, fraudulently presenting a case to buy a product and apply it, that's the definition of a quack, okay, a con artist. Valerio Murley has a question I think, does base kind of saturation has some, is it similar to sodium absorption ratio? Also sodium absorption ratio is just a ratio and does not say how many sodiums in the solution, yeah. So sodium absorption ratio, you may have heard me say, you may have heard me mention with saturated paste, even with base kind of saturation, it doesn't, it doesn't work but with saturated paste, pH and salinity are valuable for when saturated paste and there is some sodium related content that can be pulled out of there and the same thing goes for, I wouldn't call it base kind of saturation but I would say the saturation of the exchange site, I guess that's what you'd call it, with sodium is useful when categorizing a soil as soda or not soda. So if you're going to, if you're looking at a problem or an issue and you're trying to diagnose it and you're asking yourself, well, do I actually have a sodium problem and you do a soil test and you see your sodium is at X percent level, let's say, well, you have a very high level of sodium, you could use the sodium absorption ratio to help diagnose that soil as indeed being soda, I want to say it's above 12%, maybe it's above 15%, I haven't looked at those in a while, I'm not a soda soil specialist. But yes, that is a valid useful metric simply, but it's used simply to diagnose the soil as being soda. So if it were soda, but it had a very low salt content, then it would be, if it had a high sodium absorption ratio or exchangeable sodium percentage and no salt, then it would be a soda soil. But if it had a very high sodium absorption ratio and a very high salt, then it would be a saline soda soil, there's all, and a pH was above 8.5, there's criteria to diagnose the soil as soda, and the sodium absorption ratio is one of those criteria. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't poo poo the sodium absorption ratio, but it's useful for diagnosing soda soils, okay? Good question, Valeria. Thank you. I know you asked that or emailed me on that, I can't remember where and I forgot. So thank you for putting in the chat today. Okay, guys, tomorrow is the video we're going to go over in the morning at 10 a.m. It's an extremely long video. It's an hour and 40 minutes. I have not watched the whole thing. I watched about 20 or 30 minutes. I'm just going to watch it and comment on it. I can almost assure you, I can almost guarantee you we're only going to go for an hour or thereabouts tomorrow because it's going to take me an incredibly long time. I suspect to get through the video because mentally I'm just not strong enough to handle that much misinformation shot at me all at once. But I'll do what I can, okay? Tomorrow morning at 10 a.m., open to the public. Thanks for showing up, guys. Thank you to the members. Thank you all, all of you for supporting the channel. I really appreciate it. It may not seem a lot to you, but it means a lot to me to have this much support on the channel to support what it is that I do. Thanks so much, guys. I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks.
