Soil loam soil with a small amount of organic material is considered "ideal", inasmuch as fertilizers or manure are currently used to mitigate nutrient losses due to crop yields in the long term. The mineral constituents of a loam soil might be 40% sand, 40% silt and the balance 20% clay by weight. Soil texture affects soil behaviour, in particular, its retention capacity for nutrients (e.g., cation exchange capacity) and water. Sand and silt are the products of physical and chemical weathering of the parent rock; clay, on the other hand, is most often the product of the precipitation of the
Granular material asteroids. Some examples of granular materials are snow, nuts, coal, sand, rice, coffee, corn flakes, fertilizer, and bearing balls. Research into granular materials is thus directly applicable and goes back at least to Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, whose law of friction was originally stated for granular materials. Granular materials are commercially important in applications as diverse as pharmaceutical industry, agriculture, and energy production. Powders are a special class of granular material due to their small particle size, which makes them more cohesive and more easily suspended in a gas. The soldier/physicist Brigadier Ralph Alger Bagnold was an early pioneer of the