Innovative Soil Amendment For Water Saving In Agriculture And Urban Landscapes

Figure 1: AustraBlend is olive gray (5Y 5/2) on Munsell color notation system, where 5Y is Hue (relation to color spectrum-red, yellow, green, blue & purple), 5 is value (lightness of color) and 2 is chroma (strength of the color)

What is AustraBlend®Multi Mineral Root Zone Conditioner?

AustraBlend® (ABMMRZC) is olive gray on Munsell soil color chart (Figure 1), mined from Australia and is rich in Nontronite clay mineral. Nontronite belongs to the triphormic phyllosilicate clay minerals group – Smectites. It consists of two Silica tetrahedron sheets and sandwiched Alumina octahedron sheet termed as 2:1 type of clay minerals (Figure 2). Nontronite is the iron (Fe) rich member of the smectite group of clay minerals. Due to crystal imperfections and isomorphous substitution it presents high negative charges which attract positively charged nutrients (NH4, K, Mg, Fe, Cu, Mn, Zn etc) on their negatively charged surfaces, which are released to plants on demand. High negative charges are a source of cation-exchange-capacity (CEC) which determines soil fertility status of soil. Other minerals in variable quantities are plagioclase, anorthoclase, clinopyroxene and quartz.

Sandy soils, dominant in the UAE and GCC countries present very low CEC, hence are infertile and require frequent irrigation and nutrient application as these elements are lost through leaching. AustraBlend has shown a great capacity to improve CEC, sandy soil structure and thus significantly reduce water and nutrient applications.

AustraBlend®MMRZC saves water!

• A trial at Dubai based International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA) revealed 50% guaranteed water saving in forage production system without reducing forage yield compared to 100% ETc water application (Figure 3).