Solve Your Manganese Deficiency

All right, so in one of our clips, we talked about manganese and how when we get manganese into the plant, manganese serves as the potassium thermostat for the plant and will regulate potassium flow. And that allows for better homeostatic regulation of potassium, calcium balance, and so forth. But manganese is also very important for another reason, that when, as the plant absorbs water from the soil, and in the case of some plants, when it absorbs water from the atmosphere, the first step in the photosynthesis process is that manganese functions as a key enzyme cofactor for water hydrolysis, where the water molecule gets split into hydrogen and hydroxyl h and. Oh. So that means you can have a perfect environment, perfect growing conditions with optimal levels of lighting and sunlight and moisture and carbon dioxide. And if the plant doesn't have enough manganese, manganese becomes the bottleneck that limits photosynthesis. And. And we see this very commonly in over 95% of agricultural soils in North America. Unless you have volcanic soils, igneous soils that are known to have high manganese levels, most soils today do not deliver enough manganese to the crop. And in many cases, it's not because there isn't enough manganese in the soil. There often is abundant manganese, but it is in the incorrect oxidation state. You very often often have various manganese oxides, manganese with a triple positive or a quadruple positive, which is what is referred to as oxidized manganese manganese oxide. So this is oxidized. And then it is a function of soil biology to take this oxidized manganese and convert it to reduced manganese. You remove one or two electrons, and now you have reduced manganese. The reason this matters is because this is the form of manganese that plants can actually absorb and utilize. And the majority of the manganese in our soils is in the oxidized form of manganese. Because of a lot of the historical cultural management practices that we've used. We've used lots of tillage, we've used lots of salt fertilizers that have high electrical conductivity. We've made a lot of limestone applications. Many of the things that we've done, we have bare soil that's left exposed to the sunlight. All of those things have an oxidizing effect. And many of our soils today don't have the vigorous biology that is needed to convert oxidized manganese to reduced manganese. Now, the reason this gets interesting and the reason I'm talking about manganese, there's two reasons. One reason is Manganese is so universally deficient on SAP analysis and on tissue analysis, it's an opportunity for an easy fix. But you can't fix it with a soil application. And this is the conundrum. When we put, let's say manganese sulfate, for example, manganese sulfate in the bag is in the reduced form, it's in a bioavailable form. But when you add it to the soil, because of this soil's oxidation state, that manganese sulfate becomes oxidized very quickly. Our experience with manganese sulfate, we have tried all kinds of combinations, chelation agents, adding it to compost and humic substances. When we add manganese sulfate to soil, we can successfully increase soil levels of manganese, but we do not measure it in a crop response. We do not see manganese sulfate show up on a SAP analysis. The same is true of manganese chelates such as EDTA chelates and so forth. We can add those to soil. You can add them as a foliar. You often don't see them up, see them show up in a SAP analysis. So in order to get manganese. So the long term solution is to build soil microbial populations to do this conversion process. There are some cover crops that have very colonized and have a very strong reducing soil microbial community that really enhance this process. But in the short term fix for current growing season and during the initial stages of a transition period, we have to address manganese as a foliar for the simple reason that whatever manganese gets added to the soil, unless it is chelated in a soil microbial friendly form as rebound manganese is, when you add manganese to the soil, it doesn't get absorbed by the root system. So with this is the reason rebound manganese exists. We designed rebound manganese so that we can apply it as a foliar. It is in the reduced form and it's also chelated so that it is flow mobile. So we can put on a rebound manganese application. Here it lands on the leaf surface and it will actually move from the leaf into the fruit, or it will move from the leaf down into the root system. And this is very, very important. If you have root diseases such as Bazarium or Rhizoctonia that are associated with manganese, it's critical to be able to put on a manganese application on the foliage and get it down into the root system. And there's very few manganese products that are able of delivering that result.