Excellent video series here, thank you for the knowledge! Of course it creates even more questions for me, but this is a very good start to understanding.
Absolutely excellent unifying theory on plant/substrate pH. The way everyone else explains it as a function of nitrification is too limiting. This made the understanding both simpler and more universal in application. Thank you! I think part 3 needs to be about the carbon cycle, pH, and how moving nutrients from air to substrate changes the pH...it's an advantageous partition (air/substrate) that allows manipulation of pH. Most conventional agriculture including chemical hydroponics, is carbon burning...photosynthesizing at an efficiency that releases more carbon than it fixes, photosynthesizing at 15% of the plants capacity. Excellent nutrient management and biological delivery, can increase photosynthetic efficiency x4. When you get high levels of photosynthesis, the plant has an excess of sugars and starts dumping them in the root zone, where microbiology consumes the sugar, releases CO2 in the substrate, dropping the pH. In high functioning plant symbiosis, you might not get much of a pH change between vegging and fruiting. Because in veg, the plant is going to be putting more sugar in the substrate, and in fruiting it's going to start putting most/all of it in the fruit. I'd want to believe that the plant evolved to shift sugars downward or upward in way that stabilizes the pH of the substrate, so that the microbiome stays stable. Also, would you talk about urea and amino acid uptake? A lot of evidence shows that those two forms of N are the most efficient for plant uptake, probably because they already have carbon, and they are most similar in proportionality to the composition of protein. I've personally found that approx. 80/20 ratio of protein/amino acid to urea N input (no ammonium or nitrate inputs) , renders the best plants with lots of lipid production. Some of the urea and amino acids will go through hydrolysis and deamination, respectively, then nitrification...which means plants are still taking up ammonium and nitrate...but the net effect is more stable for the microbiome. With this 80/20 ratio, the sap analysis shows about 50% amino acid, 40% nitrate and 10% ammonium. NovaCrop Control, who's conducted >300,000 sap tests, has confirmed this is roughly an optimal distribution for plant health.
Thanks for commenting. However there seem to be some misconceptions in your assessments. Plants in hydroponics are in no way working at reduced photosynthetic capacity. Research in hydroponics has shown that plants under this regime, with carbon supplementation, under ideal nutrition, work in a light-limited regime, meaning that their growth is limited by the amount of light they receive. Their usage of photons is at the max possible for any light capture they are receiving. I fail to find any peer reviewed research noting otherwise. Plants in soils - including those grown organically - do work under reduced efficiencies as their growth is often nutrient limited. Carbon accumulation in hydroponic plants is also substantially higher due to the above facts. Also it is worth noting that plants do not release carbohydrates into the root zone as a response to "excess production". That's a misconception. The release of these organics is in fact often done in response to nutritional, environmental or pathogen stress. Plants grown under ideal conditions in DWC will in fact leak close to zero carbon as there is no motivation or gain in doing so. Reduced carbon is a very valuable resource for living organisms so the plants will preserve it. The wikipedia page on exudates has some decent scientific literature references if you want to learn more about the science behind these exudates en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_root_exudates. About urea and amino acids. There has been ample research in the use of urea and amino acids in hydroponics, if you watch my video on carbon in hydroponics I cover some of this topic. Long story short, there has been no systematic advantage found to the feeding of urea or amino acids in hydroponic setups. Although the plant has some specialized amino acid transporters, these amino acids do not get efficiently transported through the xylem up the plant. The only advantages from feeding amino acids (and these are some very specific ones) that I could find in peer reviewed literature might come from signaling effects but these are still not firmly established. The story is different in soil, due to the use of these nitrogen sources by the soil microbiome to produce nitrates. However, from a point of pure plant physiology, pure nitrate feeding has been found to be the most effective for plant health across many studies (see my video on carbon and the references there). However, you mention "a lot of evidence", so I would be happy to review any literature information you can provide and change my point of view if some evidence has been developed that I am unaware of. Remember that peer reviewed trials are invaluable, as corporations seeking to sell things can often carry out very biased research.
@Science in Hydroponics I do look at academic research, but a lot of it is based on chemical systems and they isolate one variable, versus biological systems and running a cofactor analysis. While plants can be autotrophic, they are not autotrophic in nature, and there's countless multifactor pathways for nutrient uptake that aren't accounted for in chemistry-based research. A good overview of this is in John Kempf's plant health pyramid. ruclips.net/video/D1wJefaFrVI/видео.html You asked for evidence regarding carbon fixing vs carbon burning which typically correlates with biological based farming vs chemical based farming. It has loosely formed in my my understanding from an array of academic research, sharing trade knowledge with other farmers, personal experiments and accounts, and following top minds in the field like yourself. 1)Looking at academic research on hydroponics, I don't see anything that puts lettuce higher than a brix of 5. Commonly they report 3 or below. Our own biologically based hydroponics system produces brix 5 at 9am as a baseline (brix 6-7 at 4pm) and we are on our way to 8 with sap analysis and tighter micronutrient management. When I measure brix at the store for organic, conventional or hydroponic lettuce, I typically see brix 1. Dr. Carey Reams said lettuce can achieve brix 10. So until I see hydroponic research that consistently is producing crops at our level or higher, I'm going to assume the research describes how unhealthy plants behave not how healthy plants behave. And unhealthy plants can behave very differently from healthly plants. I've noticed that some academic research about growth vs nutrition does not mention the diseases that the plants had accumulated at termination. In one example, I reached out to the PI and asked why the study only carried for the first 30 days of growth and the PI said because some plants got disease....as though the experiment would be fouled, vs the disease being a direct result of the poor nutrition being studied...this is related to the problem with single-factor analysis. 2) A consultant I work with(who I won't put on the spot) has done thousands of sap analyses and said "when I see the nutrient levels on hydroponic crops, the nutrient levels are so low, I wonder how the plant is even alive." 3)I've seen countless references to the fact that soil carbon reservoir has been depleted worldwide from chemical based farming. Conversely I've seen countless references(and first hand experiences) to regenerative farmers increasing soil carbon levels by .5% each year. 4) check out the research of Dr. David Johnson, but here is a short interview. Around 13:00min he talks about a common pathway for carbon fixing, sugar storage and exudates...but there's always other pathways and I notice similar phenomenon in our vermiponic system. ruclips.net/video/qoNv5XBFzOk/видео.html The short is, as the plant gets healthier it both retains more sugar and exudes more sugar. More explanation here: kindharvest.ag/dynamics-of-carbon-sequestration-nutrient-interactions-and-managing-calcium-soil-amendments/?no_frame=1 5) I also don't trust research by companies that sell products (about 95% of our nutrient program are from free local waste streams...I don't know of any other hydroponic operation that can claim that. We're not loyal to any company or product.). I also haven't see much good academic literature on organic hydroponic production. Most research I've seen concluded with a confession that they couldn't produce better results than the control which was a chemical based hydro system. While this is possibly "unbiased", it's also incompetent. I put the most trust in regenerative farmers who's livelihood depends on turning out a good product. When researchers constantly conclude with mediocre results or "more research needed", it's quite obvious that their pay check is coming with good or bad results...and that is important for unbias research but does not foster enough ambition to make biological systems work, because biological systems are more complex/mulivariate and multi-pathwayed. It's not as easy research. In our internal research and development we typically look to academic research in biological based systems in the soil. Then we create a hydroponic environmental approximation, and most of the time the same outcome appears...which tells me the great mother found the appropriate nutrient pathway. When you are in a biological systems, there's countless pathways for nutrient uptake that don't exist under a chemical basis/autotrophic pathway. And most people in the research of biological pathways state proudly that they probably understand less than 5% of what is happening biologically, whereas the chemists typically make conclusive statements on how the chemistry works. Which is just to say, there's a lot happening in nature that has yet to be fully understood, and just because it's not documented clearly how it's happening, does not mean it's not happening. We don't believe in patenting or protecting ideas, however we are limited in our time to publish our findings. They will be published eventually. If anybody has any skepticism about claims I make, the farm is open to the public on Saturdays, and any person can see all our methods and test any parameters they want.
Thanks for your reply. I'll be eagerly waiting for publications in peer reviewed journals further exploring these claims. Feel free to share those with me as they become available. On a side note, high brix in plant sap does not necessarily mean you're growing a healthier plant. Sugars in phloem can increase substantially in plants that are nutrient limited, as sugars are not as effectively used in growing points along the plant and therefore build to larger concentrations in the plant's transport systems. This is the reason why hydroponic vs organic crops tend to have lower brix in sap. Any plant that is not nutrient uptake limited will have higher brix in sap if it's otherwise healthy. A plant that is much larger and has adequate mineral composition in leaf/fruit, is definitely not less healthy. It just grew faster and never held as many sugars in the phloem. This is easily demonstrated in a hydroponic crop. If you increase the tension by providing drought stress (increase EC of media, increase dryback, etc) you will see the brix increase substantially. So you can have high brix in a hydroponic crop, which is in some cases desirable, by manipulating the environment to basically make it nutrient-limited. Also, nutrient uptake pathways for many nutrients are absolute. Potassium for example, exists as only K+ in solution, completely independently of the environment. No other forms of available K exist, and this is the only thing available for plants to uptake, organic, soil, hydroponic, etc. The basics of chemistry do not change when you change environments.
Excuse me sir, I can't enter in your web site, I don't know if it has a little error or its my internet, but the mensaje when I try to enter it's "your connection it's not private" and I can't enter, forgive my English I can't speak well
Sorry, we are going through some server infrastructure changes, so the website is unavailable at this time. It should be back online in a couple of days.
Es un alivio saber que su Blog no se había caído o desaparecido. Su blog es de mucha ayuda para mi. Gracias por toda la información tan importante que nos aporta. Encantado de aprender con usted. Saludos desde España.
The rate of ammonium uptake is 100 to 1000 times faster than nitrate and much much higher than sum of other ions. Such a high rate can reduce pH of the solution quickly when it is in the solution at high concentrations specially when cation exchange capacity or pH buffering ability, is low. ammonium is a cation so it effects other cations uptake. I feed my plants, which they aren't tomatoes, with 3-5% N as ammonium in coco coir at pH 6.1-6.3 with 0.375-0.75mM carbonate species every 12-48 hours depending on size of the plants and the result is best of the best.
It is correct that ammonium uptake is extremely fast, so you must be careful with the amounts you feed. If you overfeed it, you can cause pH to drop dramatically, you need to make sure that ammonium uptake is balanced with proper nitrate uptake. How much ammonium is ideal will depend on the tissue composition you're trying to build, which depends on the plant species you are growing and the speed at which they are growing.
@@ScienceinHydroponics Aloha from Hawaii. data from the University of Vermont seems to indicate the Phosphorous uptake for Cannabis goes up 250% from generative stage to flowering. Would a proper way to go 15 ppm for generative stage and around 38 ppm for flowering? We know uptake depends on genetics and other factors do you have a little input to to point in in the right direction Doctor Daniel? ruclips.net/video/-V7uRF989b8/видео.html
Hello Daniel and many thanks again for this great new video. On many comercial fertilizers lables, one can find a third 'form' of nitrogen: carbamide Can this be taken into calculation exactly like ammonia, regarding the pH of the media? Thank you.
Plants will uptake urea and they will then hydrolyze it to ammonium, this will create an imbalance in the plant that will end up causing the expulsion of protons, which will acidify the media. So yes, this behaves like ammonium regarding pH, although it is a bit delayed as uptake at first does not cause a pH change, but the metabolism of the urea inside the plant does.
absolutely gold channel. thank you so much for your videos!
Thanks a lot for watching and leaving a comment!
These video are amazing. Ty for taking the time to make them!
Just wanted to check in, hope alls well. So many other hydro components to be discussed, stoked and waiting to hear your next lesson. 🥹
Thanks for writing! Thankfully I have a lot of work right now, so there sadly hasn't been a lot of time to record videos. Hopefully soon though!
@@ScienceinHydroponics understandable, I’ll be here, thanks
Excellent video series here, thank you for the knowledge! Of course it creates even more questions for me, but this is a very good start to understanding.
Science always creates more questions than it answers! That's the spirit!
Absolutely excellent unifying theory on plant/substrate pH. The way everyone else explains it as a function of nitrification is too limiting. This made the understanding both simpler and more universal in application. Thank you!
I think part 3 needs to be about the carbon cycle, pH, and how moving nutrients from air to substrate changes the pH...it's an advantageous partition (air/substrate) that allows manipulation of pH. Most conventional agriculture including chemical hydroponics, is carbon burning...photosynthesizing at an efficiency that releases more carbon than it fixes, photosynthesizing at 15% of the plants capacity. Excellent nutrient management and biological delivery, can increase photosynthetic efficiency x4. When you get high levels of photosynthesis, the plant has an excess of sugars and starts dumping them in the root zone, where microbiology consumes the sugar, releases CO2 in the substrate, dropping the pH.
In high functioning plant symbiosis, you might not get much of a pH change between vegging and fruiting. Because in veg, the plant is going to be putting more sugar in the substrate, and in fruiting it's going to start putting most/all of it in the fruit. I'd want to believe that the plant evolved to shift sugars downward or upward in way that stabilizes the pH of the substrate, so that the microbiome stays stable.
Also, would you talk about urea and amino acid uptake? A lot of evidence shows that those two forms of N are the most efficient for plant uptake, probably because they already have carbon, and they are most similar in proportionality to the composition of protein. I've personally found that approx. 80/20 ratio of protein/amino acid to urea N input (no ammonium or nitrate inputs) , renders the best plants with lots of lipid production. Some of the urea and amino acids will go through hydrolysis and deamination, respectively, then nitrification...which means plants are still taking up ammonium and nitrate...but the net effect is more stable for the microbiome. With this 80/20 ratio, the sap analysis shows about 50% amino acid, 40% nitrate and 10% ammonium. NovaCrop Control, who's conducted >300,000 sap tests, has confirmed this is roughly an optimal distribution for plant health.
Thanks for commenting. However there seem to be some misconceptions in your assessments.
Plants in hydroponics are in no way working at reduced photosynthetic capacity. Research in hydroponics has shown that plants under this regime, with carbon supplementation, under ideal nutrition, work in a light-limited regime, meaning that their growth is limited by the amount of light they receive. Their usage of photons is at the max possible for any light capture they are receiving. I fail to find any peer reviewed research noting otherwise. Plants in soils - including those grown organically - do work under reduced efficiencies as their growth is often nutrient limited. Carbon accumulation in hydroponic plants is also substantially higher due to the above facts.
Also it is worth noting that plants do not release carbohydrates into the root zone as a response to "excess production". That's a misconception. The release of these organics is in fact often done in response to nutritional, environmental or pathogen stress. Plants grown under ideal conditions in DWC will in fact leak close to zero carbon as there is no motivation or gain in doing so. Reduced carbon is a very valuable resource for living organisms so the plants will preserve it. The wikipedia page on exudates has some decent scientific literature references if you want to learn more about the science behind these exudates en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_root_exudates.
About urea and amino acids. There has been ample research in the use of urea and amino acids in hydroponics, if you watch my video on carbon in hydroponics I cover some of this topic. Long story short, there has been no systematic advantage found to the feeding of urea or amino acids in hydroponic setups. Although the plant has some specialized amino acid transporters, these amino acids do not get efficiently transported through the xylem up the plant.
The only advantages from feeding amino acids (and these are some very specific ones) that I could find in peer reviewed literature might come from signaling effects but these are still not firmly established. The story is different in soil, due to the use of these nitrogen sources by the soil microbiome to produce nitrates. However, from a point of pure plant physiology, pure nitrate feeding has been found to be the most effective for plant health across many studies (see my video on carbon and the references there). However, you mention "a lot of evidence", so I would be happy to review any literature information you can provide and change my point of view if some evidence has been developed that I am unaware of. Remember that peer reviewed trials are invaluable, as corporations seeking to sell things can often carry out very biased research.
@Science in Hydroponics I do look at academic research, but a lot of it is based on chemical systems and they isolate one variable, versus biological systems and running a cofactor analysis. While plants can be autotrophic, they are not autotrophic in nature, and there's countless multifactor pathways for nutrient uptake that aren't accounted for in chemistry-based research. A good overview of this is in John Kempf's plant health pyramid. ruclips.net/video/D1wJefaFrVI/видео.html
You asked for evidence regarding carbon fixing vs carbon burning which typically correlates with biological based farming vs chemical based farming. It has loosely formed in my my understanding from an array of academic research, sharing trade knowledge with other farmers, personal experiments and accounts, and following top minds in the field like yourself.
1)Looking at academic research on hydroponics, I don't see anything that puts lettuce higher than a brix of 5. Commonly they report 3 or below. Our own biologically based hydroponics system produces brix 5 at 9am as a baseline (brix 6-7 at 4pm) and we are on our way to 8 with sap analysis and tighter micronutrient management. When I measure brix at the store for organic, conventional or hydroponic lettuce, I typically see brix 1. Dr. Carey Reams said lettuce can achieve brix 10. So until I see hydroponic research that consistently is producing crops at our level or higher, I'm going to assume the research describes how unhealthy plants behave not how healthy plants behave. And unhealthy plants can behave very differently from healthly plants. I've noticed that some academic research about growth vs nutrition does not mention the diseases that the plants had accumulated at termination. In one example, I reached out to the PI and asked why the study only carried for the first 30 days of growth and the PI said because some plants got disease....as though the experiment would be fouled, vs the disease being a direct result of the poor nutrition being studied...this is related to the problem with single-factor analysis.
2) A consultant I work with(who I won't put on the spot) has done thousands of sap analyses and said "when I see the nutrient levels on hydroponic crops, the nutrient levels are so low, I wonder how the plant is even alive."
3)I've seen countless references to the fact that soil carbon reservoir has been depleted worldwide from chemical based farming. Conversely I've seen countless references(and first hand experiences) to regenerative farmers increasing soil carbon levels by .5% each year.
4) check out the research of Dr. David Johnson, but here is a short interview. Around 13:00min he talks about a common pathway for carbon fixing, sugar storage and exudates...but there's always other pathways and I notice similar phenomenon in our vermiponic system. ruclips.net/video/qoNv5XBFzOk/видео.html
The short is, as the plant gets healthier it both retains more sugar and exudes more sugar. More explanation here: kindharvest.ag/dynamics-of-carbon-sequestration-nutrient-interactions-and-managing-calcium-soil-amendments/?no_frame=1
5) I also don't trust research by companies that sell products (about 95% of our nutrient program are from free local waste streams...I don't know of any other hydroponic operation that can claim that. We're not loyal to any company or product.). I also haven't see much good academic literature on organic hydroponic production. Most research I've seen concluded with a confession that they couldn't produce better results than the control which was a chemical based hydro system. While this is possibly "unbiased", it's also incompetent. I put the most trust in regenerative farmers who's livelihood depends on turning out a good product. When researchers constantly conclude with mediocre results or "more research needed", it's quite obvious that their pay check is coming with good or bad results...and that is important for unbias research but does not foster enough ambition to make biological systems work, because biological systems are more complex/mulivariate and multi-pathwayed. It's not as easy research. In our internal research and development we typically look to academic research in biological based systems in the soil. Then we create a hydroponic environmental approximation, and most of the time the same outcome appears...which tells me the great mother found the appropriate nutrient pathway. When you are in a biological systems, there's countless pathways for nutrient uptake that don't exist under a chemical basis/autotrophic pathway. And most people in the research of biological pathways state proudly that they probably understand less than 5% of what is happening biologically, whereas the chemists typically make conclusive statements on how the chemistry works. Which is just to say, there's a lot happening in nature that has yet to be fully understood, and just because it's not documented clearly how it's happening, does not mean it's not happening.
We don't believe in patenting or protecting ideas, however we are limited in our time to publish our findings. They will be published eventually. If anybody has any skepticism about claims I make, the farm is open to the public on Saturdays, and any person can see all our methods and test any parameters they want.
Thanks for your reply. I'll be eagerly waiting for publications in peer reviewed journals further exploring these claims. Feel free to share those with me as they become available.
On a side note, high brix in plant sap does not necessarily mean you're growing a healthier plant. Sugars in phloem can increase substantially in plants that are nutrient limited, as sugars are not as effectively used in growing points along the plant and therefore build to larger concentrations in the plant's transport systems. This is the reason why hydroponic vs organic crops tend to have lower brix in sap. Any plant that is not nutrient uptake limited will have higher brix in sap if it's otherwise healthy. A plant that is much larger and has adequate mineral composition in leaf/fruit, is definitely not less healthy. It just grew faster and never held as many sugars in the phloem.
This is easily demonstrated in a hydroponic crop. If you increase the tension by providing drought stress (increase EC of media, increase dryback, etc) you will see the brix increase substantially. So you can have high brix in a hydroponic crop, which is in some cases desirable, by manipulating the environment to basically make it nutrient-limited.
Also, nutrient uptake pathways for many nutrients are absolute. Potassium for example, exists as only K+ in solution, completely independently of the environment. No other forms of available K exist, and this is the only thing available for plants to uptake, organic, soil, hydroponic, etc. The basics of chemistry do not change when you change environments.
I've learned a ton of stuff I thought I already knew.
Thanks for doing the lords work 🙌
You're welcome! Thanks for watching.
I’m on a flowering stage right now and I have some mistakes with nutrition, but you material very helpful. Thank you!
You got this!
@@ScienceinHydroponics Thanks for Hydrobuddy. My grow with this program stay better, than before. And your text blog helpful too
Great video man.
Glad you enjoyed it
I miss your uploads...
Thanks for the content , very helpfull !
Glad it was helpful!
Excuse me sir, I can't enter in your web site, I don't know if it has a little error or its my internet, but the mensaje when I try to enter it's "your connection it's not private" and I can't enter, forgive my English I can't speak well
Sorry, we are going through some server infrastructure changes, so the website is unavailable at this time. It should be back online in a couple of days.
Es un alivio saber que su Blog no se había caído o desaparecido. Su blog es de mucha ayuda para mi. Gracias por toda la información tan importante que nos aporta. Encantado de aprender con usted. Saludos desde España.
Can you make PH/probes guide types and storage/Maintenance? 🙏
I will, thanks for the suggestion!
In my country, nitrate is very costly, can i use amonium sulfate with probiotics instead
A valid choice! But you do need to allow enough time for the nitrification reactions to happen.
The rate of ammonium uptake is 100 to 1000 times faster than nitrate and much much higher than sum of other ions. Such a high rate can reduce pH of the solution quickly when it is in the solution at high concentrations specially when cation exchange capacity or pH buffering ability, is low. ammonium is a cation so it effects other cations uptake. I feed my plants, which they aren't tomatoes, with 3-5% N as ammonium in coco coir at pH 6.1-6.3 with 0.375-0.75mM carbonate species every 12-48 hours depending on size of the plants and the result is best of the best.
It is correct that ammonium uptake is extremely fast, so you must be careful with the amounts you feed. If you overfeed it, you can cause pH to drop dramatically, you need to make sure that ammonium uptake is balanced with proper nitrate uptake. How much ammonium is ideal will depend on the tissue composition you're trying to build, which depends on the plant species you are growing and the speed at which they are growing.
Aloha & What we have here is drive by wisdom for the green thumb people. Two thumbs up for outstanding information that is easy to understand.
Thanks for commenting and watching!
@@ScienceinHydroponics Aloha from Hawaii. data from the University of Vermont seems to indicate the Phosphorous uptake for Cannabis goes up 250% from generative stage to flowering. Would a proper way to go 15 ppm for generative stage and around 38 ppm for flowering? We know uptake depends on genetics and other factors do you have a little input to to point in in the right direction Doctor Daniel? ruclips.net/video/-V7uRF989b8/видео.html
Hello Daniel and many thanks again for this great new video.
On many comercial fertilizers lables, one can find a third 'form' of nitrogen: carbamide
Can this be taken into calculation exactly like ammonia, regarding the pH of the media?
Thank you.
Plants will uptake urea and they will then hydrolyze it to ammonium, this will create an imbalance in the plant that will end up causing the expulsion of protons, which will acidify the media. So yes, this behaves like ammonium regarding pH, although it is a bit delayed as uptake at first does not cause a pH change, but the metabolism of the urea inside the plant does.
@@ScienceinHydroponics thanks Daniel… 😘
@@ScienceinHydroponics the delay is like 1hr in a biological system, barely noticeable, unless you're testing every 15 minutes.
If I use hydrobudy in phone should I pay you to use it❓
No, Hydrobuddy on Android is available for free. Currently there are no iOS or paid versions available.