Carbon Based Fertilizers - How To

Hi Guys,

I hope everyone is doing well.

Thought maybe I could get some information on carbon based fertilizers. Anyone have some experience on making them? Any good research starting points?

So I have stumbled on some talks around these types of fertilizers being a must have on your feeding list. I am aware that this is what we are trying to achieve, carbon production in the plant, with the cultivation techniques that we employ. It seems like this is our goal and the reason why we see such good results in living soil systems due to the raw inputs that we work with.

As with KNF recipes, I have learnt that there are ways of getting certain inputs ready for the plant to uptake without plant metabolic processes and I was hoping that I could find a way to get some free carbon into my soils with a homemade fertilizer.

Someone from Explogrow, who offered a carbon based fertilizer as one of the products, has come back to me and spoken about adding Humic Acid to a Sikh ale fertilizer (still talking to this person getting more info which I will share in this thread) but I cannot seem to find anything on the fertilizer itself. Everything seems very vague and unclear and I cannot find a recipe to follow so I thought this is the best place to get some info on this topic.

Anything and everything welcomed.

I thought plants got their carbon from CO2 gas... and anyway a lot of the normal organic amendments (dead plant and animal remains, poop, etc) are full of carbon compounds already.

In the world of chemistry, "carbon-based" and "organic" are used somewhat interchangeably, so maybe they are just talking about "organic" fertilizers...?

Carbon applied to the soil is for the microbial life, not the plant.

Top dressing with malted barley powder provides slow release glucose (C6-H12-O6). Glucose is a labile carbon source used by soil microbes that provides the energy they need for cellular metabolic function.

Thanks guys. I think I am getting a better understanding of this. From what I have found, inputs such are biochar and humic/fulvic acids are great go tos in order to add more carbon to your soil.

What has been recommended to me is binding nutrients to carbon through adding humic/fulvic acid to it. I am still in the research phase of this so once i have something more I will share it.

From what I understand at the moment is that the nutrients, found in solutions, bonds to the carbon input (fulvic) and then you just feed that to your soils. I am not sure what that process looks like but once i have something I will share it here.