Humic Substances: Charge, Attraction, and Soil Chemistry Explained #shorts

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]Really everything in chemistry comes down to charge and how these charges interact. The charges give the humic substance their their ability of to do everything really. And so if we have a lot of these, what happens is that positively charged ions in the soil such as calcium and manganese and iron and zinc and copper and all these things can bond or be attracted to some of these negative negatively charged sites. So if we have calcium here, that has two positive charges and that wants to be drawn to the negative negative side charged site. Likewise, some of the clay particles will also want to be charged and moved to the negative positive charged sites on this as well as say nitrates which want to be next to the positive charged sites. So really humic substances are super important because they have all these different charges on the material which then attracts different charges like our nutrients as well as clay and it forms the structures which is why we get all these benefits such as an increase in cation exchange capacity which is the ability for the molecule to hold on to and release cations but also anion exchange capacity, its ability to hold on to anions. In addition to all that, holding on to clays and grouping all these things together. It's super important to understand this because all all of the benefits come from this. So now we have a rough understanding of what makes humic substances, where they're formed, how they're formed and kind of what they look like.