Get in touch
Got a question, want to book a soil test or place an order? We’d love to hear from you - there’s nothing we love more than chatting about healthier soil, animals and farms. Call us on 0508 678 464 or drop us a note, and we’ll be in touch in two shakes.
FIELD NOTE:
Rugged and beautiful. Hill Country is hard to beat, except when it comes to pasture management. Machinery doesn’t cope so well, and almost all high country soils are deficient in Sulphur. Sedimentary soils can’t supply Sulphur to plants, yet legumes require Sulphur to fix nitrogen and make proteins. And it’s not just Sulphur that clover needs.
The Benefits of Liming
Liming has many benefits, the most well-known being its ability to counter soil acidification and, in turn, improve nutrient availability. Liming is also extremely beneficial to soil biology. Earthworms, fungi, and bacteria respond positively to lime, leading to improved nutrient cycling.
High-fertility soils with a high cation exchange capacity require significantly more lime than low-CEC soils; this resistance to pH change is known as buffering. Fine lime is ideal for releasing carbonate faster than a soil's exchange capacity can buffer it, meaning a significant change can be brought about to soil solution pH and calcium availability. This improves earthworm potential, bacteria activity, mycorrhizal fungi activity and legume performance (including N-fixation).
Soil testing is useful to establish if lime is required to correct soil pH. In addition to the longer-term effect on soil pH, it’s also worth considering short-term availability for soil biology and the immediate impact on soil solution pH, i.e., how the current crop benefits.
Particle Size Matters
When applying lime, the importance of particle size cannot be overstated. Lime is a rock which must break down in the soil to become available in soil solution. The smaller the particle size, the greater the total surface area and the larger and faster the liming effect. Larger deposits provide minimal benefit and can often be found in the soil many years after application.
The problem with lime has always been application. Fine particles are extremely prone to drifting. Bulky rock might stay put, but it weighs down trucks and top dressers. And breaks down slowly and unevenly.
Perfectly Sized Pellets
With the increased costs of imported fertilisers and the application challenges for hard-to-reach pastures, finding more effective ways to fertilise is in back the limelight. Optimise pelletised micronised lime provides a practical and cost-effective means to achieve accurate placement of effective ultra-fine particle lime.
The pellets can also be custom-blended with additives such as elemental Sulphur, Phosphate and Trace Elements to suit your specific soil needs. This means you can address liming and other nutrient requirements in a simple combined application. All ingredients are fine-ground before pelletising to maximise availability. This is especially beneficial for elemental Sulphur; as with lime, the availability of elemental Sulphur is also strongly related to particle size. Incorporating Trace Elements with relatively low application rates, such as Boron, into the pellets delivers the nutrients your soil needs while streamlining your pasture management process.
Take to the air: Fertilising hard to reach places
As a solid lime-based fertiliser, Optimise is ideal for ground-spreading, drilling, and aerial applications - perfect for hard-to-access hill country pastures. With significantly less bulk, it ensures safer load release for top-dressing pilots. Customers agree: applying traditional aglime by air simply wasn’t economical.
Optimise is certified with AsureQuality as an input for organic production, and certified custom blends can be provided on request.
