Our Humate Deposit

Our products are made from a natural supply of humic material found in Coastal Georgia. The deposit is a unique natural blend of organic matter that was deposited in a bowl shaped depression hundreds of thousands of years ago. Like all humates, the resource comes from plant and animal remains that have been breaking down over eons, creating a carbon-rich vein of humic and fulvic acids. This resource lies just below the surface, but this deposit has never been compressed as some others have, so the material didn’t harden over the years. Like many of the earth’s mineral resources, humate is found in various qualities. Some very large deposits aren’t the best quality, while others are rich. The area that supplies our products is particularly good because of its age (not too young, not too old) and biological make up. Humates are a complicated mixture of compounds, but people have recognized for hundreds of years that plants grow better with humus. Native Americans used it; early settlers from Europe followed their example.

“Humic substances, the major components of soil organic matter, are important to agricultural areas such as soil chemistry, biology, and fertility, as well as environmental quality. The multiple parts played by these materials can greatly benefit plant growth. Examples are their contributions in plant growth enhancement, increasing fertilizer efficiency, or reducing soil compaction” USDA Report

In modern times, people harvest and use humic material for its ability to remediate pollution. Humates act as an organic surfactant to detoxify contamination. That’s why the resource in Coastal Georgia was first tapped. Many poultry farmers across the country rely on Southland Organics products to provide a natural solution to a natural problem. Keeping the chickens’ environment clean of ammonia is important to the health of the birds, and Southland’s carbon-rich compounds do just that. Those same compounds help to restore depleted soil, replenishing nutrients and improving plant health, an area that researchers have been exploring more over the past several years.

What’s in the Deposit?

The humate material is primarily organic carbon with some nitrogen (1.76% nitrogen, according to tests), as well as small amounts of phosphorous, potassium. It has small amounts of calcium, magnesium, iron, manganese, zinc, copper and sulfur needed for plant life. These elements are in a plant-available form. The material includes minerals like calcium and magnesium which the plant absorbs as a foliar fertilizer and which aids in absorption of other nutrients at the root. With a carbon makeup that is 60% marine animal carbon and 40% vegetative carbon compounds, the deposit is more complex and superior to other, mostly vegetative sources. Also present is a rich supply of cypress lignin. The lignin serves as a high-level food source for the good fungi in your soil. It strengthens plant cell walls and enhances soil nutrients.

How do we make our products?

Our processing is simple and preserves the critical ingredients found in the raw material. We simply remove the any brush and surface debris, and then take an 8-inch layer of material off the surface to ensure we get the most beneficial soil biology, yet leave enough to repopulate the next layer. At the processing facility, we screen the raw product to remove roots or other debris to give us a dry humate. Since the process does not require heat or chemicals of any kind, our basic humate is kept in its natural state. This means that the chemical makeup of our humate has not been altered in any way and the living microbes are unharmed and ready to go to work restoring the soil. To create a dry spreadable product, we screen the humate to get a uniform texture that can be applied using commercial or residential broadcast or drop spreaders. To create the liquid products we have a simplistic process for extracting the substrate. The strenuous process meets or exceeds standards for production in Organic agriculture.