Soil Testing: Essential for Hemp Growers

BY MS. GRACE GONZALES

Established in 1938 in the Upper Rio Grande Valley, TPS Lab, then known as Texas Soil Laboratory, Inc., became the first soil laboratory in Texas and is now one of the oldest and most experienced private agricultural labs in the country. Being a consulting lab, TPS Lab’s main purpose is to solve difficult crop problems and to guide growers to harvest successes.

TPS Lab is a DEA-registered lab for industrial hemp and holds USDA Soil and Plant Material Import Permits and has clients in many parts of the world.

Starting in 1956, TPS Lab began working with a soil and compost testing method that duplicates the way plant roots take up nutrients and is extremely accurate for any type of soil or solid growing media. It is calibrated against actual plant uptake, so interpretations of lab data are not estimates (guesses), as are those of most other labs. Additionally, the lab consults on product development for fertilizer and growing media manufacturers.

In 1964, TPS Lab began testing plant sap using plant nutrition sufficiency standards published in the early ‘50s. Since then, the lab has gradually developed its own proprietary standards, adjusting for dete- riorating soil and irrigation water quality, ever-changing climatic conditions, new products and discoveries in plant nutrition, new crops and new varieties of plants. Due to the endless variables in Nature, how much of what soil nutrients that actually get into the plant cannot be predicted. In calcareous soils, the bulk of many native soil nutrients exist as insoluble compounds and are therefore unavailable to the plant. While treatments can be applied to improve availability, those take time to become effective and the effects are short-lived. Fertilizers can have wide ranges of plant uptake efficiency ranging from zero, and there are other variables that influence nutrient uptake: temperature, sunlight, moisture, soil microbial activity, soil condition and much more. Sap testing provides basically real-time feedback about the nutritional status of the plants which allows corrections to made quickly by foliar sprays or through drip lines – before the crop suffers loss for the season.

Because What’s In Your Water Becomes Part Of Your Soil ®, TPS Lab performs ir-