So the fact that the lab results are 2 years old, and the State of Oregon still has a stop sales order on them in your mind is irrelevant. Wouldn't you (if you owned the company) reapply to have your nutrients retested?
Every time a product is submitted they create a new entry for it. So when they re-apply it's considered a new product and the old entry is not deleted.
If they advertise a guaranteed content of 7% Mg and the lab results showed 0.0148%, that is a huge error. The majority of the micros are grossly under the stated % on the label. So let's say it was a random sample, doesn't AN test their own nutrients before sending them out, something along the lines of Quality Control?
If we actually knew a damn thing about what actually happened we could draw some conclusions. As it stands all we have is this report that may or may not be misleading and no real way to pursue answers.
Some people don't want answers, they want rumors and innuendo, and this is excellent fuel for that fire. My point is simply that without more information it's impossible to draw any conclusions with any certainty.
The reason there's a stop sales order is for mis-labeling.
Yes, but we don't know what it is. The ultimate underlying reason isn't included in the report, only the measured data. Perhaps you know that there's more than one way to measure for any specific dissolved solid? And therefore you'd know that different tests often yield different results?
If you sent the same fertilizer to six different labs for testing you would not get the same NPK results unless all six labs ran the same types of tests.
I would think that Oregon is a large enough potential market that they would fight to have the order lifted. I don't know the mechanisms required to do that, but I can't think that it's so Byzantine that AN wouldn't fight it.
The internet. You can buy anything from anywhere and there is little to no actual attention paid to whether it's legal to sell where you reside. I have stuff sitting within arm's reach - not even counting plants - that I bought online and isn't remotely legal to own anywhere in the US.
Would it be better to sell it in stores in Oregon? Undoubtedly. Are any of us aware of what AN is doing to make that happen? NO.
So yes, we'd all assume AN is fighting this. None of us see it happening. But instead of asking why they aren't fighting it, ask yourself
how we'd even know if they were or not. For all we know they're fighting tooth and nail. It's not like this makes the evening news.
One last thought, if other nutrient companies can get the heavy metals levels much lower then why doesn't AN do that?. I personally don't care what the EPA says, the FDA says you can have rat feces in your food, but I guarantee if I find a rat turd in my cereal I am not buying that brand ever again. As for my backyard soil, I'm not paying $20 a liter for backyard soil. I'm paying $20 a liter for a high-quality product that will have what it guarantees on the label.
Show me what you're comparing. Which AN product to which non-AN product. This "someone made something that was somewhat different" is not even an argument. Odds are any statement that vague could theoretically be true. For all I know you're talking about some company's pH Up compared to one of AN's base nutes.
Your point about the EPA and rat feces is sensationalist and, for those who know what you're talking about, actually works against you.
If you found a rat turd in your cereal, that would be a violation of the FDA's (not EPA's) Food Defect Action Level. So not only is your food regulated by a different agency, but you're exaggerating. The amount of rat feces considered allowable by the FDA is both unavoidable and not harmful. If you think you've ever eaten a food that didn't contain some type of feces, you're almost certainly wrong.
You have feces on your hands at this very moment unless you've recently scrubbed in for surgery, and even then it's unlikely your hands are truly clean.
The concept of having ANYTHING completely devoid of harmful substances is an illusion in real life.
Clean rooms aren't actually perfectly clean, your breakfast cereal DOES have feces in it... our world is absolutely drenched in filth.
It's the degree of it that's the issue. If you actually removed a human being from all infectious vectors their immune system would atrophy to the point that the slightest infectious material could be potentially life-threatening.
But the point, really, is that the EPA is not the FDA, rat feces is not a heavy metal, and if you can visually detect a contaminate that's universally unacceptable by the FDA anyway. The fact that the level of obsession over the
perception of sterilization and cleanliness is actually unhealthy for more than one reason, and that modern society's belief in the potential of "perfectly clean" is ludicrous and laughable is just another nail in the coffin.
It's a filthy world. We're filthy animals. We've all ingested dead cells, feces, and anything else you think of from everyone we've ever lived with and countless complete strangers. That doesn't make the effort of trying to be clean pointless, but it does make worrying about a few ppm of something found in larger concentrations in your everyday environment a bit crazy.
