Microalgae as biostimulants

[spes1959@gmail.com]

Good evening friends, I recently read several scientific articles that talk about the use in agriculture of microalgae also called phytoplankton. They are single-celled very rich in proteins, vitamins and amino acids. Is anyone among you using them as a support for fertilization? What do you think About their use?

[estación seca]

I went to a lecture on using this for commercial agriculture. It is being used here in Arizona for some food crops. The speaker didn't discuss using it on epiphytes.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, people put water into translucent above-ground containers, allow a full algal growth to develop, then irrigate the crop with the water. It is best used before the algae begin dying off.

[isurus79]

Seems like an overly expensive method of fertilization. I doubt there is additional benefit to using microalgae over fertilizer you can buy at the store!

[estación seca]

It winds up being very much less expensive for commercial scale agriculture. For home use it is a lot of work.

[Ray]

The company that has the Inocucor license, AlgaEnergy of Irving TX, is primarily a microalgae firm.

They sent me a 2.5-gallon jug of Surety Microalgae fertilizer. It is a 1.5-0.2-0.5 formula that is 0.3% nitrates, 0.3% urea, and 0.9% other soluble nitrogen compounds (whatever that means).

I have not seen any benefit to its use and agree with Stephen that the nutrients can be applied far more easily and cheaply with traditional fertilizers.

[Roberta]

Fertilizing crops that grow in the ground (and grow rapidly) is a very different "game" than fertilizing epiphytes that grow slowly, and get their nutrients from whatever washes down from the canopy.

[spes1959@gmail.com]

Maybe I didn't get into it well I didn't want to replace fertilizers with microalgae extracts but I just wanted to know if anyone had experience in this field as I think many of you have with Kelpak.

[Dimples]

Seems to me a few people have already shared their experience with the product class, in both a professional and at-home capacity. It’s a cheap way to make nitrogen fertilizer for super fast growing, nitrogen hungry crops, in areas with tons of sunlight and suitable temperatures. It’s not the most efficient method of fertilizing for the home grower.

What’s your plan with it?

[MateoinLosAngeles]

Originally Posted by spes1959@gmail.com

Maybe I didn't get into it well I didn't want to replace fertilizers with microalgae extracts but I just wanted to know if anyone had experience in this field as I think many of you have with Kelpak.

There's some research that specifically uses Kelpak. An interesting one compares Kelpak which contains polyamines with direct inoculation of polyamines and the results showed that the Kelpak-treated plants grew better whereas the polyamine ones weren't significantly better than the control.

I'm not sure what the story of this product is, or how anyone thought that the specific type of algae they use would have effects not seen in any other kelp extracts. What we know is that it's a commercial product and both its content and extraction process are potentially trade secrets so don't expect any other Kelp extract to just work in the same way. The company owning Kelpak also seems to have made sure their product is well studied so it's also hard to find comparable evidence since not all conditions would be equal for all kelp products.

The presence of cytokinins plays a role, which is the reason why people experiment with coconut water which is naturally rich in cytokinins. Yet, Kelpak has a higher content of auxins than cytokinins. Go figure.

I use it, I use a lot of it, as well as Quantum. I haven't found any other product that compares. Before I started to order products from Ray I ran different experiments with Kelp extracts and probiotics from Amazon. The random kelp extracts did absolutely nothing. I ran an experiment treating three plants with a probiotic from Bloom City, while the rest of my collection was treated with Quantum. The Bloom City plants were significantly slower growers.