Re- Laterite "Mined in the

• To: "Aquatic-Plants" <Aquatic-Plants at actwin_com>
• Subject: Re- Laterite "Mined in the
• From: "Mark Shelton" <mark_shelton at pobox_tbe.com>
• Date: 9 Mar 1997 13:40:39 -0600

>From: Linda or Jim Lemke <llemke at kusd_kusd.edu>
>Date: Thu, 6 Mar 1997 22:33:04 -0600
>Subject: Laterite "Mined in the USA"
>
>Back to Laterite again.  I just read the back of a jar of Thiel Aqua
>Tech's "Laterite" (UPC 60100) and to my amazement on the back label it >said
"Mined in the USA". I don't recall it it said anything about iron >(certainly
I wouldn't think it would mention aluminun). So this still >doesn't prove that
there is laterite in the US similar to tropical >laterite. So where is this
mine?
>
>Jim Lemke

    I forwarded the above post to Albert Thiel, his response follows:

Thank you for your message on laterite and for posting the web site address
to the newsgroup. I appreciate it.

Laterite from the Tropics is expensive as we know, so years ago I started
talking to mining companies to find out if we could find a similar product
here. I sent samples to several of them to make sure they knew what I was
talking about.

It took quite some time for many of them to do anything about it because (I
guess) they did not really see a big market for this product.

After receiving samples from several companies and running tests on these
samples we settled on a product mined in Arizona that seemed to contain the
minerals and the iron we are so interested in for our plants and have been
selling that variety for quite some time now with great success.

Plants do real well and replacement is not necessary in the short run. The
variety we have seems to release nutrients for the plants over the long
run.That does not mean though that additional supplementation with Plant
Nutrients is not necessary. Laterite or Elaterite as some mining companies
called it, provides nutrients but not in sufficient amounts in tanks with
large amounts of plants rapidly enough. It is necessary but the release of
nutrients at the root level is slow. In tanks with lots of plants this
requires using addl nutrition so it is more rapidly available. Sort of a two
prong approach: root and supplementation.

Yes the Laterite we sell contains iron and I should probably add that to the
label to make that clear. That is my fault, I guess I assumed that one would
automatically infer that it did because it is laterite. I will change the
label when we produce new ones to reflect this.

I hope this answers your questions and if it does not and you need more
info, please feel free to ask more questions. You are welcome of course to
repost my answer.

Albert Thiel
3/9/97  07:44

FWIW, Mark.

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