Experiencing Nature's Science™
By Jonathan Plehn
President,
Huma®, Inc.
I am extremely proud to officially unveil our company’s new branding and name. We are now Huma®– a 50-year-old legacy ready to be reintroduced to the world! It is a strategic decision to shorten our name from Bio Huma Netics® (BHN) to Huma® and we are confident that this progressive move is in our company and our customers’ best interests. [Read more…]
By Larry Cooper, MA, Cert/KM
Director, Sustainability and Knowledge Management
Bio Huma Netics, Inc.
Celebrating Earth Day every April 22 is a great time to pause and reflect: How are we, today, treating the environment and the plants, animals, and people who live in it? What have we accomplished in the past year that makes our planet a better, more sustainable place to live and raise our families? What are our goals for future improvement?
In this blog, I provide a little historical perspective. How did Earth Day come to be? Why did it come about in 1970? What was life on the planet like before we started celebrating Earth Day? [Read more…]
Bio Huma Netics, Inc. (BHN) hosted its annual staff meeting on December 14-15, 2022, at its headquarters in Gilbert, Arizona. BHN staff from New Mexico, Mexico, and Brazil also flew in to attend the two-day event.
The company planned the all-staff gathering to recognize employees’ contributions and to celebrate significant milestones achieved in 2022—including the acquisition of an additional 40,000-square-foot building in Tempe, AZ, to facilitate further expansion and growth. [Read more…]
By Lyndon Smith
President and CEO,
Bio Huma Netics, Inc.
We attended the Humic Products Trade Association (HPTA) annual meeting this past month in Park City, Utah. It’s always a pleasure to get together with industry peers and talk about issues pertaining to HPTA as well as discussing the latest and the greatest research and product developments taking place in the biostimulant movement throughout the world!
Our alliance with HPTA is a long and strong one. From being a participant (with Mesa Verde) since its inception in 2010 and serving as a member of the Board of Directors—it’s been fun to see us come together in unity and how we’ve accomplished many monumental and exciting milestones together. [Read more…]
Every year, October 13 is marked as Global Fertilizer Day to highlight the significance and acknowledge the contribution of the fertilizer industry in feeding the world’s growing populations.
This annual international awareness campaign is supported by fertilizer associations and companies across the world with the shared purpose of highlighting the social, economic, and environmental impact of fertilizers. Creating awareness will encourage better farming practices and will promote the proper use of fertilizers in the farming community.
Let’s celebrate this day by learning the following fertilizer facts: [Read more…]
By Lyndon Smith,
President and CEO
Bio Huma Netics, Inc.
I’m excited to share that Bio Huma Netics, Inc. (BHN) has acquired an additional building in Arizona. It’s a significant milestone for us that not only testifies to the continual progress we’re making as a company but will also serve as a building block for future expansions. [Read more…]
By Richard Lamar, PhD
Senior Director of Humic Research
Bio Huma Netics, Inc.
We are accustomed to seeing humic substances (humic and fulvic) in dry/granular form, and we tend to think of acids as liquids. So why are humic and fulvic substances called acids?
All substances, solid AND liquid, have a chemical makeup. An acid is a chemical that can donate a proton (H+) to a water molecule (H2O, which would form H3O+) or to another chemical such as ammonia (NH3, which would form NH4+).
Organic acids are generally weak acids that do not completely dissociate (i.e., donate a proton) in water in the way that strong mineral acids do, such as in the case of hydrochloric acid (HCl). The most common organic acids are carboxylic acids, sulfonic acids, phenols and alcohols (Figure 1).
Organic acids can be aliphatic (structured as open chains rather than aromatic rings), such as acetic acid (Fig. 1A) or ethanol (Fig. 1E). Organic acids can also be aromatic (made up of ring structures, originally named so because of their fragrant properties), such as benzoic acid (Fig. 1B), benzene sulfonic acid (Fig. 1C) or phenol (Fig. 1D).
All of these structures can be found in humic and fulvic acids, sometimes all in the same molecule. For example, one humic acid or fulvic acid molecule might contain a benzoic acid, a phenol, an alcohol, and an aliphatic carboxylic acid (Figure 2). All of these functional groups can ionize (i.e., lose their H+ atoms and contribute to acidity) (Figure 3). The primary factor affecting ionization of organic acids is pH.
Figures 1–3. Chemical structures found in organic acids
We will discuss the interrelationship of soil, pH, and humic substances in Humic Corner #4.
Over 50 years ago, on April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans took to the streets to protest environmental destruction and to celebrate the wonders of Planet Earth. The basic message was that we had to find new ways to live our lives, raise our food, and conduct our businesses that were environmentally friendly and sustainable—that would not waste resources or pollute the air, the water, or the soil.
In the early 1970s, Bio Huma Netics and Mesa Verde Humates were independently formed to provide earth-friendly agricultural products and soil and wastewater bioremediation products.
[Read more…]By Richard Lamar, PhD
Director of Humic Research
Bio Huma Netics, Inc.
For centuries, humic acids (HA) were thought to be composed of much larger molecules than those found in fulvic acids (FA). However, the application of Fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS), which separates molecules on the basis of molecular weight, demonstrates that the molecular weights of the two fractions both fall in the range of 200–800 Daltons (Da), with most of the molecules having molecular weights in the range of 200–400 Da (Figure 1). To give context, carbon (C) weighs 12 Da, oxygen (O) weighs 16 Da, and hydrogen (H) weighs 1 Da. Thus, phenol molecules (an aromatic organic compound, also called carbolic acid), which have 6 C, 1 O, and 11 H atoms, weigh 99 Da. [Read more…]