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snowy blowy morn to the North
 
here's an interest quote for you all:

Plants Don’t Use Many Nutrients
How can we grow food year after year and not run out of nutrients? An important fact is that plants don’t use a lot of nutrients. van Helmont did an interesting experiment in 1684, where he showed that you could grow a 164 pound tree from a couple of ounces of soil.

The amount of minerals in food is very small compared to the amount in soil. But how small?

Consider this calculation. Soil contains 1-5% iron – let’s use an average of 2% which is 400,000 mg/sqft, in the plow layer. A carrot weights 50 g and contains 0.3 mg of iron. So that 1 sq ft of soil has enough iron to grow 1.3 million carrots. That is a lot more than 50 years of farming.

Source:

https://www.gardenmyths.com/soil-fertility-decreasing/


Those numbers look fairly accurate. They do not exist in a lab though. The majority of that iron is not plant available. It is dependent on pH, bacterial action, OM content, depth, temperature... etc. Same for most nutrients, there is moreP in soils than every plant in the world together could use in hundreds of years, but only a tiny fraction is in plant available form.
 
here's an interest quote for you all:

Plants Don’t Use Many Nutrients
How can we grow food year after year and not run out of nutrients? An important fact is that plants don’t use a lot of nutrients. van Helmont did an interesting experiment in 1684, where he showed that you could grow a 164 pound tree from a couple of ounces of soil.

The amount of minerals in food is very small compared to the amount in soil. But how small?

Consider this calculation. Soil contains 1-5% iron – let’s use an average of 2% which is 400,000 mg/sqft, in the plow layer. A carrot weights 50 g and contains 0.3 mg of iron. So that 1 sq ft of soil has enough iron to grow 1.3 million carrots. That is a lot more than 50 years of farming.

Source:

https://www.gardenmyths.com/soil-fertility-decreasing/
cheers 22!, less is more, so much of the time
 
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