Increase Nut Quality and Yield by Improving Late Season Nutrient Uptake and Root Health with BioMax™ Dual Action +

High-quality, high-yielding nut crops require a robust, healthy tree root rhizosphere where natural soil born organisms improve the availability and efficiency of soil fertilizers to complement fast-acting prescriptive foliar nutrition programs.

Agro-K Corporation’s new BioMax™ Dual Action + feeds and activates native beneficial bacteria and fungi to make more soil nutrients plant-available and grower investment in fertility programs more effective. BioMax™ Dual Action + also promotes root development leading to a larger stronger root mass that is more effective at foraging for nutrients and moisture.

Second to last or final irrigation provides an excellent opportunity for nut growers to improve fall root growth for late season nutrient uptake to ensure good strong spring growth.  A late season BioMax Dual Action + application helps reinvigorate the soil rhizosphere to provide trees with nutritional replenishment after the demands of the season’s production.  This timing also coincides with the normal fall root flush trees experience to increase nutrient uptake for over-wintering and to ensure the tree has sufficient nutrient reserves for next spring when soils are cool and wet and root function is limited.  Applications of BioMax™ Dual Action + at this timing in conjunction with a sound soil and foliar fertility program can help promote better nut set and early leaf development the following spring.

Improving root development and root mass late season is also critically important in new tree establishment.  Whether it is new blocks or replacement trees, establishing root systems in the first several years is the key to bringing trees into bearing as quickly as possible as well as maximizing long-term productivity and overall tree health.  BioMax Dual Action + is an excellent tool to incorporate in establishment programs.

The microbial activity within a healthy rhizosphere breaks up soil for improved porosity and water penetration to roots. Increasing biological activity results in additional releases of carbon dioxide, which creates a natural aeration of the soil.  This internal aeration effect helps to open up the soil to promote better soil tilth and moisture movement.  This process can improve the leaching of salts out of the root zone.  In irrigated high-value cropping systems in arid growing regions salt build-up can limit tree productivity and affect tree health.  By improving microbial activity and water penetration simultaneously BioMax Dual Action + helps to improve irrigation efficiencies as well has tree health and productivity.

In the rhizosphere a healthy and diverse microbial population is important to promote root growth and enhance natural “root flushing” to maximize nutrient extraction and uptake from the soil.  Late in the growing season a natural root flush happens so that the tree can take up nutrients for winter storage and to build carbohydrates for next season which will ensure strong spring growth.  BioMax™ Dual Action +, by stimulating the existing native beneficial bacteria and fungi, helps accelerate the conversion of unavailable nutrients into available nutrients the roots can absorb.  A late season application of BioMax Dual Action + works in concert with the trees natural root flush to both enhance it and maximize new root development and nutrient uptake.

BioMax™ Dual Action + is a combination of Agro-K’s exclusive microbial fermentation technology and Agro-K’s pioneering seaweed extract and stabilization technology.  Together these technologies work synergistically to build a healthy microbial-diverse rhizosphere and a stronger more functional root system that is better able to feed and size high yielding nut trees.

BioMax™ is Agro-K’s fermentation-based soil fertilizer containing enzymes, fermentation by-products and micronutrients that together constitute a complex microbial food source which stimulates and increases native, existing beneficial aerobic bacteria and soil fungi such as mycorrhizae. This results in increased nutrient availability and root foraging capability and capacity.  BioMax™ contains no living microbial agents. Instead, BioMax™ targets and feeds naturally existing bacteria and fungi already present and adapted to that specific soil environment.

Ground-applied fertilizers – especially phosphate and potassium – are rapidly bound up in the soil structure, leaving only a small faction available for root uptake. BioMax™ Dual Action + increases biological activity thereby maximizing nutrient availability to the roots. Enhancing soil nutrient availability ahead of critical nut development stages is important to increased quality and yield.

The companion aspect of BioMax™ Dual Action + is Agro-K’s proprietary seaweed extract technology designed to promote root growth, plant growth, and overall tree vigor.  Agro-K’s seaweed products are the result of more than four decades of experience perfecting seaweed formulations for targeted agricultural use.  Agro-K’s unique soil seaweed blend goes through a unique stabilization manufacturing process that helps preserve and maximize key growth promoting components to create a potent soil biological promoter that promotes root growth, development and function.

The “Dual Action” strategy of combining Agro-K’s fermentation soil microbial food source technology to improve nutrient availability with Agro-K’s seaweed-based root growth promoting technology creates a powerful nutritional tool to improve nut yield and quality.

BioMax™ Dual Action + is best used as part of a comprehensive plant physiology-based nutrient program utilizing foliar products in Agro-K’s Vigor and Dextro-Lac® line. These products are compatible with most other foliar crop inputs, including customary mid-season applications at hull split and for codling moth.

As has been true for 40 years, Agro-K continues to provide the nutrition programs, strategies, and products growers can trust to optimize yield and quality. The recent focus of Agro-K research and development has included a response to the climate and production challenges facing orchards and vineyards today. The result is this new nutrition program strategy combining use of soil-applied and foliar feeding technologies.