Hi Christiane Thanks for your input - bentonite sounds like good stuff to me - is there just one bentonite - animal feeders round here use sodium bentonite and I can get some of that - I know soil conservation used to recommend bentonite for repairing leaky dams and I thought I had heard of a calcium bentonite is there such a thing ? Maybe my ears were ringing at the time. > There seem to be two lines of thought: > 1. Stimulating soil life, by making clay minerals available. Bentonite is > a weathering product of volcanic tuffs, usually high Mg containing > montmorillonites. The minerals are easily available to microorganisms and > plants and especially recomended for light sandy soils in small quantities > but frequently. > > 2. "but I'd rather use local paddock reared clay" sounds to me as you > wanting to access energies or, in my interpretation, in the [clay] soils > laid down learning by your environment (or is it of your environment?). I > relate this to deep psychology - accessing the sub- or unconscious deep > learnings and then connect this with what is happening now in an > up-and-down process. Analogously, what about adding little bits of each > soil layer to create an interchange of knowledge between the past and the > present? Nothing so deep, just figuring we have some nice clay here thats a strong part of what this farm is and what the soils will do, why bring in clay from hundreds of miles away ? However for a nutritional kick along, supplying readily available trace minerals - thats a different and interesting subject. What rate of bentonite would you suggest to use on a sandy loam soil? - is it affordable on a broadacre scale?
Cheers Lloyd Charles
