What is in that bag of fertilizer

The good

In general, organic fertilizers appeared to be the safest for gardeners concerned about heavy metals.

Linda's Gardening and Hydroponics of Puyallup tested eight fertilizers and aced the tougher environmentalist standards for them all by very wide margins. Linda Snavely, owner, said she won't use agricultural fertilizers for her custom blends because they aren't clean enough for her target customers: cancer and AIDS patients and hydroponic gardeners.

"That's the point. We strive to make everything as environmentally safe as we can," she said.

Walt's Organic Fertilizer of Seattle tested 14 products and 12 came up cleaner than dirt. One exceeded the soil background level of nickel and one for cadmium, slightly.

Walt Benecki, owner, said those were still perfectly safe. He emphasized that organic products restore the natural material to the soil and don't leach like quick-release chemical products. Benecki said he didn't think the background level was a good standard to apply to all fertilizers because it didn't account for the different chemistry of organic and chemical products.

Alaska Fish Fertilizer products, widely sold in organic food stores, were a little over background level in arsenic and mercury, as you might expect from fish, but still well within the state standards.

A company called Down to Earth Distributors Inc. had mixed results with cadmium, mercury and lead. Blood Meal, Earth Feather Meal, Cottonseed Meal, Bio-Turf and Rhododendron Azalea Mix were cleaner than Vegan Mix, Aged Bat Guano, Seabird Guano and All-Purpose Vegetable 4-6-2, which were slightly above soil background level in two toxic metals.

Products from The Scotts Co., the largest fertilizer distributor to America's hardware and garden stores, were very clean overall. Scotts submitted 163 test reports to the state; 84 were below the soil background level in all five toxic chemicals.

Scotts' Miracle-Gro was exceptionally low in contaminants. Nine of the 10 Miracle Gro products tested would have passed the strictest test proposed by environmentalists - a test opposed by Scotts, whose lobbyist argued there was no proof of harm from higher levels of toxic metals.

On the other hand, Scotts also sells a product, "14-3-3 FFII," with 78 parts per million of arsenic, 10 times the background level, and seventh-highest among products registered with the state.

Legal - but not so good

More than 500 fertilizers contained higher than background cadmium and lower than a 100:1 ratio of zinc to cadmium. Scientists say that ratio is the key to preventing cadmium from traveling from the soil to plants, especially leafy plants such as lettuce.

Cadmium is one of the worst bad actors among toxic chemicals. Trace amounts may cause cancer and reproductive defects years after exposure.

None of the dozen fertilizers with the highest cadmium had enough zinc to block uptake. They included products from Agrium US, Husch & Husch, Integrated Fertility Management, J.R. Simplot Co. and Helena Chemical Co. They had cadmium from 134 ppm to 277 ppm. Cadmium is found naturally in most Washington soils at 1 ppm or less.

The product with the highest cadmium was a 16-16-16 blend from Whatcom Farmers Coop in Lynden. It had 4,506 parts per million cadmium, almost one-half of one percent, 16 times higher than anybody else's. The company's agriculture department manager, Greg Barnette, said he didn't know where that cadmium came from.

"That's a one-time sample on the product," he said. "It may be higher than the other ones, but it is well within the state limits."

Another 360 registered fertilizers had higher than dirt levels of cadmium but also high enough zinc content to block the cadmium.

Arsenic, a carcinogenic metal with cumulative effects over a lifetime, was found at the highest level, 4,380 parts per million, in a fertilizer called Ironite. Ironite also led the list in lead. It is made of tailings from an abandoned silver mine in Arizona. The owners of Ironite insist the arsenic and lead in the product are so tightly bound with other chemicals (arsenopyrite and galena) that they pose no risk.

Ironite failed the Washington standards at a recommended application rate of 1.5 pounds per 100 square feet, so the company reduced the rate to 1.5 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Now it's legal.

A product called #90 Ag Dolomite from Chemical Lime Co. of Salinas, Calif., was second-highest in arsenic with 1,814 ppm, followed by Hardware Hank Starter Fertilizer 12-22-14, containing 270 ppm arsenic.

The natural background level of arsenic in our soil is about 7 parts per million.

Scotts listed arsenic levels from 52 ppm to 72 ppm in 12 products including the popular Weed'n'Feed, ProTurf and Turf Builder lines. Scotts had 21 of the highest 49 arsenic levels in registered products. Almost all the Scotts products with high arsenic were advertised as combinations of fertilizer and weed control, which a buyer might expect to contain toxic chemicals.

Lead is another toxic chemical to watch out for. It causes numerous ills including IQ damage. Lead in fertilizer tends to stay in the soil instead of entering plants, so it poses the most risk from breathing in dust or a child eating the dirt.

The 10 companies with products containing the most lead were Ironite, Bay Zinc, Monterey Chemical, Helena Chemical, Pace International, Fort James Camas, Pursell Industries, Plant Health Technologies and Terra International.

Bay Zinc of Moxee City, Yakima County, landed on top of the list with a product called Blu Min Zinc LHM. The "LHM" stands for Low Heavy Metals, but it was low only compared with previous Bay Zinc products. It has 1,200 ppm lead. The soil's natural level is about 17. Bay Zinc recycles industrial byproducts into fertilizer. Its material, sold to fertilizer blenders, is legal in Washington and Canada because of its low recommended application rate.

Fort James company in Camas finished No. 5 in arsenic and No. 6 in lead with a fertilizer product spread on Clark County farm fields under an agreement that the farmers won't plant human food crops there.

Terra International of Sioux City, Iowa, also scored high in two of the controlled toxic chemicals with its Prolific Max fertilizer, as did a Nortrace product called Citrapex 20% Iron and Tetra International's Zink-Gro.

Terra and Nortrace joined Helena Chemical Co. of Princeton, Calif., and Bay Zinc as makers of products that added all five of the non-nutrient toxics to the background level in the soil. But they didn't add too much of any one toxic to be illegal.

Sites need tweaking

The state could better help consumers if it made the following improvements to the Web sites:

-- List the background level of each heavy metal for easy reference. Put passing grades in green.

-- Show the zinc:cadmium ratio. If it is 100:1 or better, put it in green, as you can see on The Seattle Times Web site.

-- List the application rates and perform the dose calculations to show how close each products lies to the limit. A simple bar chart would do the trick.

-- Put the database on a sortable spreadsheet, such as some Web sites use for sports statistics, instead of listing products one page at a time. Duff Wilson can be reached at 206-464-2288. His e-mail address is dwilson@seattletimes.com. -------------------------

More details on the Web

For a complete list of products compared with soil background levels and toxic cleanup levels of heavy metals, see The Seattle Times Web site at www.seattletimes.com/fertilizers/.

------------------------- Know the score about heavy metals in garden fertilizers

Background levels of heavy metals

Washington state adopted the nation's first standard limiting toxic heavy metals in fertilizer. The standard, favored by farming and chemical interests, permitted fertilizers that would double the background level of heavy metals in the soil if applied at the maximum recommended rate for 45 years.

Environmental groups wanted the state to limit the heavy metals in fertilizer to the natural background level of the earth, and no more - no degradation of the soil.

Scientists say these are the background levels of the nine regulated heavy metals in average Washington soil:

Arsenic - 7 parts per million #

Cadmium - 1 ppm or less #

Nickel - 38 ppm #

Lead - 17 ppm #

Mercury - 0.07 ppm #

Molybdenum 2 ppm

Selenium 1 ppm

Zinc 86 ppm

Cobalt 36 ppm

# The Seattle Times compared the soil background levels of the first five, which are the most-toxic metals, with levels in the fertilizer products.

Some of the best

Some 727 of the 2,350 fertilizers licensed by the state would pass the environmentalists' standard. A sampling of products that are cleaner than dirt:

# Summersun Kelp-Based Fertilizer (Summersun Greenhouse Co.)

# Fred Meyer Plant Starter with Vitamin B1 (Dexol Industries)

# Technigro 24-7-15 Plus (Sun Gro Horticulture Inc.)

# Natural All-Purpose Fertilizer (Walt's Organic Fertilizer)

# Bouquet Rose & Flower Food 4-8-4 (Soil Conditioners Inc.)

# Biosol (Rocky Mountain Bio-products Inc.)

# Scotts Pro Turf, Miracle Gro, and Peters Pro (Scotts Co.)

# Schultz Plant Food Plus (Schultz Co.)

# Kmart Ammonium Sulfate; Martha Stewart Bone Meal (Pursell Industries)

# Dyna-Gro Liquid (Dyna-Gro Corp.)

Some of the worst

A sampling of the products that tested dirtiest:

# Ironite 1-0-0 (4,380 ppm arsenic, 2,910 ppm lead, 48 ppm cadmium, 15 ppm mercury)

# Blu Min Zinc LHM (Bay Zinc Co.) (all 5 toxic metals)

# Granulated Rock Phosphate 0-3-0 (IFM) (all 5)

# Meister 18-8-9 TracePak (Helena Chemical Co.) (all 5)

# Citrapex 20% Iron (Nortrace Ltd.) (all 5)

# JR Simplot Phosphates (cadmium)

# Monterey Micronized Neutral Zinc (lead, arsenic, cadmium)

# Greenacres 12-15-14 (nickel, cadmium, arsenic)

# Lilly Miller Super Phosphate 0-45-0 (nickel, cadmium, arsenic)

# Hi Cal (Tetra Micronutrients) (arsenic, cadmium, mercury)

These heavy metals are not advertised on the product. They can come from natural or industrial waste materials. They may be toxic at low levels to plant and animal life, or they may not, depending on complex chemical and biological factors.

Sources: Washington State departments of Ecology and Agriculture, Washington State University, U.S. Geological Survey, Frontier Geosciences

------------------------- Testing your garden soil

Home gardeners can have their soil or fertilizer products tested for toxic metals at a cost of about $50 to $300 per sample. The price depends on number of metals checked, precision of answer needed, and most of all, quantity of samples submitted.

Nicolas Bloom of Frontier Geosciences in Seattle suggests people pool their samples to submit a large number to save money. "It can be up to three times cheaper," he said. The state Department of Ecology lists accredited laboratories at www.wa.gov/ecology/eils/labs/wa.html.

A shorter list can be found in the Yellow Pages under "Laboratories, Testing."