Agrominerals

Agrominerals (also known as stone bread or petrol fertilizer) are minerals of importance to agriculture and horticulture industries for they can provide essential plant nutrients.

Agrominerals started with small uses most often seen in hobbyist gardening but are moving to a much larger scale such as commercial farming operations that take up 100's acres of land.

While studying alternative ways to replenish ground nutrients, it has been found that agrominerals can also help mitigate other issues such climate change, water preservation and soil management.

With current farming practice, the system is expected to have high crop production with low soil quality.

[1] Over time with this type of practice, ground nutrients have been depleted which has led to an increase in chemical fertilizer usage.

[2] Finding alternative sources for these agrominerals was a concept that was created to focus on soil remediation, to increase productivity in a low-cost manner.

These include using perlite to enhance the aeration of the soil, using pumice to control evaporation while one can use vermiculites and zeolites to store moisture.

[1] This soil modification was the start of the agromineral concept and has evolved into looking for alternative sources to obtain the three major nutrient elements.

[3] This process has been implemented into bigger operations and has found great success in places like Brazil, Germany, Norway, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Uganda.

[1] The biggest limiting factor is potassium, despite being the fourth most abundant element in the Earth's crust it has only one major source that being potash.

[3] Research will be needed to find more efficient ways to crush rock for rock-powders to be a sustainable solution for replenishing plant nutrients.

[3] While chemical fertilizers use dissolvable salts to deliver the nutrients to the plant, whatever is not absorb will run off into the nearest groundwater.