Sulphate of potash

Thedual1

Member
@Thedual1 , having high mag clays and gypsum being often recommended, what do you class as 'extremely cheap' ?. I am based in South West in a clay valley between cotswold hills.At this location Limestone is cheap ish. Gypsum is not by comparison .
I freely admit my A level chemistry knowledge has slipped.

We have an abundance up in Scotland as no one is using it, was used for bedding but there was a case of acattle being gassed, think it mixed with slurry. I heard a while back it basically for the cost of haulage.
 

York

Member
Location
D-Berlin
As I understand it there are lots of different grades of gypsum?
to my knowledge there are basically 3 types of Gypsum:
- natural Gypsum, mined from Gypsum deposits
- Gypsum form "cleaning" the exhaust from burning facilities. this gypsum is differentiated into.
- not usable in farming: mainly depending on the source of fuel which results in for farming not acceptable by products level, like heavy metals.
- usable for farming
- recycled gypsum from plaster boards
The natural mined Gypsum is the only gypsum suitable for organic farming.
At least this is the situation over here in germany. And you are right, the price for Gypsum from power plants is very competative & mainly influenced by the logistical costs.

I was only referring to natural & power plant gypsum suitable for farming.
York-Th.
 

Clive

Staff Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lichfield
any experience of using foliar potash ? I'm considering a switch to it this season alongside the Fibrophos (high K) im already using

products I'm considering are K-leaf of maxi-phi Hi-K
 

Wastexprt

Member
BASIS
As I understand it there are lots of different grades of gypsum?

Mined gypsum

FGD gypsum (declining in amounts as coal fired power stations wind down) which, according to the EA all goes to plasterboard manufacture.

Recovered plasterboard gypsum, derived from plasterboard and screened and sorted to remove the backing paper, screws etc. As plasterboard is produced from FGD it therefore follows that part of the recovered plasterboard gypsum will be FGD derived. At a meeting I went to last July in London to discuss all this, this was the bit that the EA didn't like the most and goes some way to explaining the difficulty in trying the removal of the land spreading option in PAS109.
 

York

Member
Location
D-Berlin
Mined gypsum

FGD gypsum (declining in amounts as coal fired power stations wind down) which, according to the EA all goes to plasterboard manufacture.

Recovered plasterboard gypsum, derived from plasterboard and screened and sorted to remove the backing paper, screws etc. As plasterboard is produced from FGD it therefore follows that part of the recovered plasterboard gypsum will be FGD derived. At a meeting I went to last July in London to discuss all this, this was the bit that the EA didn't like the most and goes some way to explaining the difficulty in trying the removal of the land spreading option in PAS109.
Interesting,
either you have a extremely large plasterboard industry
of you have only a small number of small power plants
One big power plant, using soft coal from open strip mining, has around 1th ton. daily of Gypsum. I'm not writing about prices, loaded, but I only can tell you: no one in farm supply industry is interested in marketing as:
- every one can go there and have trucks loaded for the same price
= no possibility of margin.
I had a contract of "daily a truck" of gypsum = 5 trucks a week. If you are 2 weeks short in a year of clients the profit is gone up the chimney. I was happy that I was able to go out of the contract after 3 month as I didn't want to put Gypsum where it was not needed. One farmer, the reason i looked for the source, started with a 500 t contract and did apply it, I didn't know about it, on fields where we hadn't rec's for Gypsum but lime. He shouldn't have ordered this amount to start with. 5 years down the line he admits that Kinsey is right, this soils are tighter and he needs 30% more hp for the same tillage tools than on other fields.
York-Th.
 

Wastexprt

Member
BASIS
Interesting,
either you have a extremely large plasterboard industry
of you have only a small number of small power plants
One big power plant, using soft coal from open strip mining, has around 1th ton. daily of Gypsum. I'm not writing about prices, loaded, but I only can tell you: no one in farm supply industry is interested in marketing as:
- every one can go there and have trucks loaded for the same price
= no possibility of margin.
I had a contract of "daily a truck" of gypsum = 5 trucks a week. If you are 2 weeks short in a year of clients the profit is gone up the chimney. I was happy that I was able to go out of the contract after 3 month as I didn't want to put Gypsum where it was not needed. One farmer, the reason i looked for the source, started with a 500 t contract and did apply it, I didn't know about it, on fields where we hadn't rec's for Gypsum but lime. He shouldn't have ordered this amount to start with. 5 years down the line he admits that Kinsey is right, this soils are tighter and he needs 30% more hp for the same tillage tools than on other fields.
York-Th.
We have a very large plasterboard industry. Interestingly, as the coal fired power plants close there is a reduction in supply of FGD gypsum to plasterboard, as such the amount that they will accept from recycled means will increase. This will reduce the amount available to go to land.
 

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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