text: Agrominerals allow for nutrients to be added to the soil after a long history of crops depleting it. The agriculture industry is suffering from its high loss rate in arable layers in the soil and ground nutrients compared to the natural replenishment rate. Remineralization looks into the process of taking rock powders and incorporating it into the soil as a way to replenish the nutrients in the ground. With rock powder the plant absorbs only what it needs, and any unused minerals will remain crystalized until it is used. While chemical fertilizers use dissolvable salts to deliver the nutrients to the plant, whatever is not absorb will run off into the nearest groundwater. 
  Rocks have become a cheap by-product in many industries and so there is a potential for a massive supply of viables rocks for a cheap price. Remineralization using rock powder can provide up to 5 years’ worth of nutrients in a soil. When used in the combination with organic fertilizer, rock powder has proven to be just as effective as chemical fertilizer for a much smaller cost. It has even shown to have higher yields for long term crops. When using rock powder, the plants tended to look healthier, and it was found that the powder helps with holding moisture content. The effectiveness of the remineralization process is dependent on the mineralogy and chemistry of the rock powder, as well as the soil characteristics. 
  The challenge with rock powders is understanding the solubility rates of the rock powder. Rates are dependent on factors like organic matter, pH levels, secondary clay precipitation. This is a major area of research since their dissolution kinetics are not fully understood. One of the major challenges is recreating the field conditions in the lab, in many cases the solubility rates in the lab are 2-5 magnitudes higher than the ones in the field. It's important to fully understand what the mineralogy and chemical components of a rock. Volcanic rocks were thought to be a good source for rock powder but it was determined that it contains toxic elements as well. Research has been done into phosphate rocks, but these too have the issue of containing heavy and radioactive elements. 
  The use of rock powder in remineralization has the potential to help mitigate global warming. When nutrients from certain powders are absorbed, cations are released in the soil which reacts to with carbon dioxide to create carbonate minerals, which can serve as a carbon sink for the carbon cycle. With this discovery there has been a push to further look into remineralizations using rocks powders due to its sustainability potential both from a farming side and a global climate change side.