Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The Reams Test — My Favorite
This is the second test I do. The Albrecht test is good, but we don't want to stop there.
Carey Reams was one of the most influential scientists for ecological agriculture, an
outside-the-box thinker. He developed a testing system to give you an indication of what
your plants might actually get from the soil, even more so than the Albrecht test. The
Reams test lets you know more about which nutrients are biologically active in your soil.
To be clear, we've been looking at two different testing procedures — the test cham-
pioned by William A. Albrecht uses stronger extractants to measure CEC, cations and an-
ions, while the Reams test uses weaker extractants to measure nutrients. I ignore the anions
such as nitrate and phosphate from the base saturation test, but rely on them more from the
Reams test.
The Reams test uses the Morgan procedure and the relatively weak acids from the
LaMotte testing kit. These acids are more like those produced by plant roots, therefore the
test reveals more about what the plant can actually get from the soil, regardless of how
much of each nutrient is in the soil. You could be sitting on a bed of limestone that might
show up as having a lot of calcium in a base saturation soil test, but a Reams test may in-
dicate it's not available to plants. Some labs use different testing solutions than the LaMotte
kit, but as long as they are following guidelines similar to those of Reams, it works for me.
Incidentally, it won't say Reams test on the paper, but if you look for these numbers I
have below all lumped together, you've found it. After many years of observation, analysis
and the help of colleagues and students, Reams settled on the following as being the
amounts to strive for in pounds per acre using his test.
