Calcis^®: The new flavor of lime

EAST HARTFORD – BioSafe Systems prides itself being an American owned company offering sustainable and environmentally responsible products that protect our natural resources, including our water, crops, soils, and food supply. As the company behind the “Green” activated peroxide chemistries, including the algaecides GreenClean® Liquid 5.0 and GreenClean®PRO, we now also offer Calcis®, a product that will greatly help in improving the poor water quality of so many lakes and ponds. Calcis is a highly concentrated flowable calcium carbonate pond supplement that can be used to “lime” a pond in place of applying traditional agricultural limestone using traditional and cumbersome pond liming methods.

In many regions throughout the United States the water quality in some ponds can be quite poor with very low total alkalinity and hardness. These poor water quality conditions can contribute to many issues including but not limited to unbalanced aquatic nutrients and food-chain, issues with pH, and low fish production. Calcis is designed to make liming any pond quick and easy with its highly concentrated formulation. Five gallons of Calcis can yield approximately the same equivalent benefit to the water chemistry and hydrosoil as one ton of agricultural limestone, and it will do it much faster and easier. Generally, water chemistry adjustments occur within one week as compared to several months with agricultural lime. However, the results have shown to last years, just like traditional agricultural lime, which is promising.

What is considered the “traditional” method of pond liming involves a lot of time and resources. Robby Mays of American Sport Fish in Montgomery, Alabama says, “We do a lot of traditional liming using one or several of the special liming barges we operate. It takes a lot of labor to lime most of the lakes we service, starting with a trip to the lake to locate suitable areas to dump 18-wheeler loads of limestone. Then we have to coordinate with the lime pits and trucking companies before we move our barges and loading equipment on site. For small ponds the 25-ton minimum loads are more than we would need, that is where this liquid lime would make application so easy. One of our management biologists, Ginger, treated a ¾-acre pond using a small skiff and an agricultural sprayer in less than two hours. That was easy, efficient, and labor-saving. We see similar uses for Calcis in the near future.”

Calcis can be used stand-alone as the lime to be applied in pond, as follow up “bump applications” to bring back up a water chemistry adjustment, or even in conjunction with traditional barge liming jobs. Wade Bales, fisheries biologist and owner of Quality Lakes in South Carolina has used Calcis and is very pleased with the results. “We do traditional liming from a barge using agricultural limestone. It is important for us to cover as much of the pond bottom with limestone as we can, however, in a lake we did this year, several of the coves contained so much standing timber we could not access these areas with our barge. We used a small skiff and applied Calcis to these areas with great success. It will also allow us to lime any of the small ponds we manage that are too small to consider using our big liming barge. This product appears to have lots of applications for our pond management work.”

You may ask “This product is a liquid, how is it better than agricultural lime?” Well, Calcis is not only impressive in how well it does its job, but also in how effectively and easily it can be applied. Particularly, its ability to settle to the bottom evenly and quickly. Calcis is a very dense suspension of uniformly micronized calcium carbonate crystals. One gallon nearly weighs 15 pounds, almost twice the weight of water. Generally, the Calcis will noticeably settle in just minutes as you apply it and settle completely within hours. Once it is down, it stays down, just like a heavy sediment. It, similarly to heavy sediment, doesn’t simply wash out of the pond due to flow. This product is refined, engineered, and formulated to be a concentrated bottle of the best lime available. Calcis is 100% viable calcium carbonate for the adjustment of the water chemistry and hydrosoil. It has no rocks, gravel, sand, or large particles that are unrefined and too large to make measurable water chemistry adjustment. Additionally there are no ultra-fine particles that dissolve too quickly or stay suspended and cloud the water. Calcis is all the good stuff, and it opens the door to all the different uses for a perfect pond lime.