Our Founder and Owner of both Trees That Please and Soil Secrets Michael Melendrez is in big demand as a soil health teacher. He covers how the dynamics of soil really works, covering everything you need to know to understand how plants get water and nutrition out of the soil, why you should not use soil acidifiers on alkaline soil, and how we can use a Pre-Biotic combined with a Pro-Biotic approach to building healthy soil. Last week he was in Alamogordo New Mexico talking to Master Gardeners and a large crowd of Southern New Mexicans. Next week he will be talking in Yuma Arizona and in the Imperial Valley of California, teaching professional farm agronomists how we can fix farm soil using biomimicry doing the same Pre-Biotic Pro-Biotic process. Some of the largest independent ag fertilizer company's in North America are now using Michael's Soil Secrets products to accomplish the job of fixing the natural process of soil.
I was recently asked to provide a simplified explanation on the importance of Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC) values. My Response: CEC is the ability of a soil to hold onto plant nutrients. The finer the particle size the higher CEC value, generally speaking. For example sand particles are course and visible to the naked eye, where as clay particles are fine and are not visible to the naked eye. So clay will have a higher CEC value than sand. It is obvious to most of us that sand cannot hold onto water or nutrients as well as a soil with a finer texture. Therefore, soils rich in Clay and Loam size particles are universally recognized as being better for farming - CEC explains this. The numerical value for CEC represents how much nutrition can be held by a given amount of soil. For example one pound of a clay loam soil with a CEC value of 20 will hold 4 times as many nutrients as a sandy soil with a CEC value of 5. 20/4 = 5 . It's all about math, for example Nitrogen in