A MASTER DISTRIBUTOR OF BIOLOGICAL PRODUCTS
fertilizers • soil amendments and inoculants • adjuvants • crop protection
For 15 years, Andaman Ag Corporation has promoted farming practices that support the growth of healthy soils. Our purpose has been to complement nature through our recommended practices and product applications. As a master distributor of biological products — including fertilizers, soil amendments and inoculants, adjuvants, and crop protection — we can provide our clients with a comprehensive crop program based on their needs, issues, and objectives.
Our slogan, “From the Ground Up,” captures our commitment to achieving more robust crops, greater yields, and improved quality through improved soils. Fueled by new scientific discoveries coupled with old-fashion common sense, the new agriculture is focused on the soil.
The two key elements of our new understanding of the science of agriculture are:
- Soil is much more than just dirt
- Plants do much more than passively absorb whatever sunlight, water and minerals, nature and growers can give them
For the past decade, I have been writing about the news in agricultural science and ag product development in a newsletter distributed to growers and others in the industry. I recently wrote a book called “From the Ground Up,” that’s a collection of those newsletters. You can get it from Amazon or the Acres USA Bookstore.
Latest News
Helping Plants Play Defense
Land plants first appeared 1.6 billion years ago, when bacteria had already been around for 2 billion years or so. For eternities, plants and pathogens (bacteria, viruses, and fungi) have been doing their ecological dance, with plants evolving to limit diseases and their impact on natural plant communities and bacteria evolving new ways to get around plants’ defenses. A balance typically is reached that maintains itself until novel diseases are introduced from other regions, usually because of human activity. An infamous example of that is chestnut blight, a fungus that decimated American chestnut trees, a keystone species in eastern U.S. forests. The fungus was inadvertently introduced by the importation of Japanese chestnut trees in the early 1900s. Then there is what is currently occurring in southern Italy, where the Xylella fastidiosa bacteria, imported with asymptomatic plants from Costa Rica, has killed millions of olive trees in Puglia.
ROI and Biological Products
The agriculture market has always been challenging, and maybe particularly so now, with pressures from declining market prices, the availability and cost of labor, new regulations, water restrictions, etc. Crop input prices are on the rise and regulations are restricting what growers can do going forward. Bottom line: Growers must find new ways to be successful.
Technology in agriculture, like in most parts of our lives, has changed how we do things and, maybe more importantly, enabled us to measure what we had only presumed or speculated about in the past. Back in 2008, Andaman Ag began introducing biological products to the market. It wasn’t the most receptive audience at that time. But while working overseas, I witnessed the benefits of biological products firsthand. One of the key takeaways was their ability to improve growers’ Return on Investment, or ROI, over time.
Primary and Secondary Metabolites, Climate Change, and Yields
Plant metabolism basically can be divided into primary metabolism, which encompasses reactions and pathways vital for survival, and secondary metabolism, which fulfills a multitude of important functions for growth and development, including the interaction of the plant with environmental stresses.