So what is the actual difference between ADA AS and Soilmaster?

Soilmaster...

Soilmaster is as they say: a thermally optimized Montmorillonite clay that is baked around 1000 to 1500 F.

This is 2 US Montmorillonite Clay chemical makeup (should be close to Soilmaster)

Texas Montmorillonite
CHEMICAL COMPOSITION (%):
SiO2: 70.1
Al2O3: 16.0
TiO2: 0.22
Fe2O3: 0.65
FeO: 0.15
MnO: 0.009
MgO: 3.69
CaO: 1.59
Na2O: 0.27
K2O: 0.078
F:0.084,
P2O5: 0.026
S: 0.04.

Montmorillonite (Wyoming)
CHEMICAL COMPOSITION (%):
SiO2: 62.9,
Al2O3: 19.6
TiO2: 0.090,
Fe2O3:3.35
FeO: 0.32
MnO: 0.006
MgO: 3.05
CaO: 1.68
Na2O: 1.53
K2O: 0.53
F: 0.111
P2O5: 0.049

The CEC is 19, PH is 6.

Laterite is a natural, high Iron Weathered material, not really a clay.
You can see it’s composition , CEC and PH at:


I was on the phone today wit my contact for Soilmaster
He is supposed to send me lot of infos and marketing package around their products and I ask for the chemical analysishttp://home.infinet.net/teban/jamie.htm

Aquasoil vs Soilmaster

You have to look at the physical process of these products to understand their properties.

Soilmaster is clay fired at 1000 to 1500 F at this temperature clay start to vitrify and will be inert and not leach nutrient (or in very small quantity, depend of temperature). It’s almost inert like quartz sand

I beleive that Aquasoil is a specialy prepare clay mix with nutrient in the form of oxyde to ressemble what we use for trace elements and fired at lower temperature where constituant water is gone. At that point the clay lost any plasticity forever and will not be easily dissolve by water.

By playing with the amount of iron an manganese you can control the color from red to dark brown or black.

Here in presence of water and acidic environment you have lot more leaching of the constituant elements, making Aquasoil a rich complete substrat compare to inert Soilmaster.

Laterite is a kind of natural clay that lost is plasticity and constituant water by natural geologic transformation.

The good point with Soilmaster it’s is CEC

Cation exchange capacity:
What CEC actually measures is the soil's ability to hold cations by electrical attraction. Cations are positively charged elements, the positive charge indicated by a + sign after the element symbol. The number of + signs indicates the amount of charge the element possesses.The five most abundant exchangeable cations in the soil are calcium (Ca++ ), magnesium (Mg++), potassium (K+), sodium (Na+) and aluminium (Al+++).
Cations are held by negatively charged particles of clay and humus called colloids. Colloids consist of thin, flat plates, and for their size have a comparatively large surface area. For this reason they are capable of holding enormous quantities of cations. They act as a storehouse of nutrients for plant roots.

Click to expand...

For example Laterite have a CEC of only 2.7 and I beleive that Aquasoil is maybe around 5.(It’s an educated guess) but the slow leaching of nutrients feed the roots with some quantity of nutrients.

Soilmaster have a CEC of 29 to 41, meaning that any nutrient in dissolution in the water will be store in the substrat and readily available by the plants.