Quantification of Carboxylic Acids and Phenols in High Organic Content Liquids with an Automated Potentiometric Titration Method.

Currently there are many different types of high organic content liquids (HOCL) available in the market for agricultural use. These products often include components like seaweed extracts, compost tea and/or humic substances as well as other additives which result in a complex mixture that is difficult to characterize. The typical label analysis for these types of products include Humic Acid, Total Carbon or Organic Matter, which are bulk material properties that don’t necessarily correlate with agricultural benefits. In this work, an alternative quantitative method that determines Carboxylic Acids and Phenols is proposed as one step in a two part analysis of HOCL. This method uses an automated potentiometric titration to determine acidic functional groups in HOCL. Results show that the proposed quantitative method can accurately and precisely determine the concentration of known spiked standards in a complex liquid organic matrix. We think this method may be an improvement on existing methods to quantify liquid agricultural supplements.