One of the main fertilizers required for plant growth
is potassium called potash. Potash is usually made from a
mineral called silvinite and it comes out as a product KCl
which is 60% potash and 40% chloride. Chloride is a salt,
so one worries when you look around the world whether
we are dumping huge amounts of salt in the fields as a
result of potash application. One of the difficulties with
KCl is that it is soluble, so it goes onto the field and
washes away down through the water table. You lose it…
you lose the potassium. So what this company is doing is
producing a new form of potash which is insoluble.

So it means that it will stick to the plant for a long period
of time and it will be a slow release fertilizer which is important
in farming in general and critical in Brazil where
you have all this rainfall. This loss is measured by a term
called agronomic-efficiency. Some of the estimates on this
trip that I have heard were that the agronomic-efficiency of
Amazon’s product is 20% to 40% greater than KCL because
of the chemical nature of this material measured in
K2O. So it’s revolutionary for Brazil.

thanks to RR on Si