Optimal humic matter percentage?

Our state soil tests do not report organic matter, but rather humic matter.  Makes it hard to compare with other's organic matter numbers.  I can't seem to find any reference numbers on what is good bad or otherwise for humic matter.  Any ideas?

Anyone?

Timothy Holdaway wrote:Things I am growing or trying to overwinter

I had been growing some peppers in 5-10 gallon containers of aged wood chips with good success.

We have a disused bridge that became inundated with debris 4 years ago during a flood and has become a mine of organic matter for my garden. Evidently bark decomposes at a slower rate with conifer's being the slowest, so this could factor in to the choice of a humic product.

Gray Henon wrote:Our state soil tests do not report organic matter, but rather humic matter.

Have you contacted the soil lab that did the analysis and asked them to define the term?

Humus, organic matter, and soil organic matter are all different things. Some folks, including but not limited to people who work in soil labs and universities for examples, may use one of the terms as an umbrella term and can sometimes mean all the same thing from their point of view.

To better help understand what's going on in soil, Permies resident soil scientist and scholar Bryant Redhawk has written many beautiful and informative threads on these subjects and more found here: https://permies.com/wiki/redhawk-soil

I would expect them to be roughly analogous, if not literally synonymous. But even that doesn't fully answer your question. I have been at workshops with very successful farmers who are tickled pink about fields that they get up to 2.5% OM. The farm I work on aims for closer to 10% OM in our greenhouses. I tend to think that the higher numbers are more ideal but are hard to achieve on a farm that has several annual tillage events. So I think the answer your after is that it will always be relative