The first time I had to do a public speaking engagement for Bio Green®, I felt like a kid trying to explain gasoline to a petroleum engineer. I thought that I had entered a room full of people who knew their industry well, but after only a few minutes into my power point presentation, I realized that no one knew what I was talking about. It wasn’t that they were lost. They just hadn’t been presented with this type of soil and fertility science before. Now, to be fair, I was 27 years old and had just truly begun to unlock the vastness of everything that these products have shown me over the last ten years. So when I was asked, “Hey, what about Phosphorus?” I had to think quickly, because people weren’t going to like the answer.

The truth was, I only had a feeling about phosphorus, I didn’t really know why we could grow healthy turf and plants without it. All I knew was that it was possible and soil tests proved it. So I launched into this long-winded explanation of how certain amino acids duplicate the role of phosphorus by providing energy for cell division. They bought it. Interestingly enough, the amino acid supplementation found in certain sea kelp does just that… score 1 for the big guy. There was still an unanswered question… where is this Phosphorus coming from? The answer was under my feet the whole time.

If you don’t know; Phosphorus is essential to all life, it is one of the pillars that life stands upon along with carbon. It is a building block of both DNA and RNA. Without phosphorus, we could not survive. But does that mean we need more phosphorus? No… not really. In or around 160 BC, a farmer named Cato began writing down his random notations of farming. This included tillage, crop rotation, nutrient supplementation, irrigation, cover crops and so on. It is the first book ever written for and about farming. Along with all of these practices, Cato talked about where he sourced his nutrients. Nitrogen from Manure, potash (actually it was just ash) from the burning of land and sea plants, and phosphorus from bones.

So that’s it. Healthy soil contains billions of organisms per gram. Roots tend to make up as much subsoil bio mass as what is growing. What else does one really need? The presence of Phos is there whether you add it or not. The key is culturing and multiplying subsoil life to be born, live, and die to leave behind all of the nutrients and elements of which they are made. A plant can only take up so much and it is still argued if they actually do uptake Phos. It is possible that the plant is able to mirror the Phos in the soil if the environment is correct. If you look at a plant, the actual amount of Phos in the bio mass is 0.1%. This is a far cry from the amount that is being applied year over year. To be fair, let’s look at this the way that the “university gurus” have calculated Phos for lawns…

I have a lawn (for this example) and a mower with a bag, because why would I ever want to see any grass clippings on my bare feet? So every week, I mow my lawn and remove 100 lbs. of grass clippings. I then take this bag of clippings, put it into a non-biodegradable bag and send it to the county dump. It’s good to be the king. Does this sound like something you’ve encountered? I know it’s silly, but let’s look at the impact. If the “king” removes 100 lbs. of clippings per week, dry weight, he is removing 1/10th of one pound of phosphorus weekly. Over the course of an average year, he will mow 24-48 (depending on growing season) times and remove 2-4 lbs. of phosphorus.

You can now see how Phos rates are calculated by the “higher-ups.” I really want you to think about this… did I actually remove any phosphorus in the above-mentioned example? Yes, but was it pulled from the soil or was it created by a natural growing cycle? Phosphorus stores in the cell walls of the plant, which means that when a new cell is formed, more phosphorus is now in the plant tissue. There are years and years of data in agriculture showing the mining of certain nutrients. Iowa State did an 11 year study on the effects of not applying phosphorus to a corn field and the result was a net reduction of 300 lbs. of phosphorus over the 11 year time frame.

Here’s the difference and one of my major frustrations with the current academic model for turf grass studies; a field test at a university for turf is by no means the same as a homeowner’s lawn. A homeowner is going to do what they are going to do no matter what anyone tells them. This means excessive fertilization, excessive watering, and aggressive mowing heights that are never suitable for their turf type. It also means that there is a greater chance of nutrient recycling to take place. A main test for universities is grass clipping weights. This is a method of weighing the top growth after cutting and removing the “stubble.” Whether this is intentional or not, nutrients are being removed and therefore the “test areas” require more nutrients to be applied. If the turf industry would get their heads away from thinking like farmers, the whole industry would change.

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