On January 13, AEU Club successfully held the first scientific and practical Workshop on Humic Substances (HS). The workshop was run online and was attended by more than 80 professionals from Vietnam, Indonesia, Russia, Laos, Thailand and the Philippines.
Humic substances are natural specific materials, which are formed from degraded biomass. In nature, the process of their formation takes decades but there are technologies to create them from organic substances literally within hours. Such products can be applied to soils as they are equal to natural humic substances.
HS affect plant growth, enhance nutrient uptake, raise the decomposition of pesticide or toxic compounds, and play a role in transformation, binding and transport of toxic chemicals in soil and water.
In the course of the event, the participants discussed the problems of decreasing organic matter and nutrients in agricultural soils; soil chemical pollution, acidification; and how to tackle such issues with humic substances. The experts proved that HS can trigger the following positive processes in soils:
• stimulating microbial community;
• increasing biomass of beneficial (nitrogen fixation) bacterial groups;
• formation of agriculturally useful soil structure;
• accumulation of organic matter in tropical soils (through increased bacterial and root biomass of all crops);
• reducing the amount of required pesticides.
Besides, Indonesian professionals demonstrated encouraging results of test application of HS on different agricultural crops.
The participants decided to continue the research on the use of humic substances and encourage the spread of these technologies in academic and business circles.
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