Our team got an exclusive look at some of the latest biological trials during the Planet Earth Agronomy Research Farm Tour in Black Earth, Wis. Afterwards, we caught up with Mitchell Fiene from Planet Earth Agronomy and asked him for a checklist you should use when shopping for biologicals.
“You look at the label, and you want a high concentration of active ingredients. A lot of these products have very scientific names. It’s not necessarily important that you know what all that stuff means because you can Google it. But you want to make sure they’re high CFUs, high active ingredients. What that means is one times ten to the eighth or ninth exponent, millions or billions of microbes should be delivered in order for them to be effective in the soil. If they’re lower than that, and they’re in the thousands, they probably won’t do a good job of surviving against what’s already there in the soil. So, you get less of a functionality there.”
“Next is a little more complicated. The species of those microbes should naturally sporulate in our environment, and you can learn that just by Google searching the names. If you look at the label, and Google search them, the first sentence on Wikipedia will tell you whether they can naturally sporulate or not. If they do sporulate that means they’re more durable than the other products on the market. They can likely make it through your spray tank and survive being applied out in our environment vs. another product that might not be able to survive the spray tank mixes.”
Fiene says it’s also important to check if the product has a specific function, if it has fermentation requirements and keep an eye on its shelf life because some products have a short window of viability.
Watch the full Video of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.