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| Photo credit Marc Suderman |
For us to see the analogy between his last five words and the
chemical warfare on pests and diseases, calls for no unusual stretch of the
imagination, which pictures man as the top stratum in the biotic pyramid
“biting” all the other strata beneath – but supporting him.
It may, however, be going beyond the elastic limit of your
imagination to see another analogy between Carver’s first five words, and the declining or exploited fertility of
the living soil now failing to serve, via nutrition, as the foundation stratum
for all others, viz. microbes, plants, animals and man.
That this changing lower stratum should cause the “biting” of
each other by the upper ones may not be so self-evident.
But that pyramidal construction of the many life forms, from
the soil upward, represents the evolutionary succession which arrived at man as
the apex; all via their individual healthy survival.
The latter was possible only by fitness of each in the
climatic soil setting growing suitable nourishment. Only by that combination
could all of them have been available to feed man on his very late arrival.
Accordingly, the healthy human survival calls for
consideration of that struggle also from the soil upwards, through nutrition
for self-protection against so-called ‘diseases’.
That call seems more logical than one for more powerful
drugs, of which each is catalogued against a specific ailment for its cure,
through man’s ministrations from his uppermost stratum downwards.
In support of the importance of the soil as nutrition for healthy
self-protection and prevention of diseases and pests, observations and research
studies at the Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station in the U.S.A. deserve
citation here in connection with plants, the only producers of food through
their collection and storage of the sun’s energy.
Those bits of knowledge are particularly appropriate as
ecological approaches in the broader scope of the interrelations and
interdependencies of man and other forms of life. We need, especially, to see
the interdependence between ourselves and the more lowly ones, including the
living soil and its microbes by which, in the ultimate analysis, we must be
fed.
As far back as the 1920’s, there came suggestions from
Missouri’s agricultural research that plant diseases may be caused by
deficiencies of some of the inorganic elements required from the soil as
nourishment.
Those suggestions turned up in connection with the early
application of the technique in which purified acid, colloidal clay, with
calcium adsorbed in it, was used as increasing amounts in quartz sand to study
the growths and their bacterial nodulation of soybean plants.
This method served as the tool to control, in refined detail,
the plant’s diet of fertility elements offered, and to measure the resulting
chemical contents of healthy plants proving themselves users of atmospheric
nitrogen and producers of satisfactory yields of forage.
This discovery of a case of plant “disease” caused by
deficient nutrition was an accident when the plants were suddenly – and some
very severely – attacked by a fungus. The symptoms suggested a “damping-off”
disease.
That accident, in the plans of the research programme,
brought to mind a scientist’s statement, namely: “Many discoveries are
accidents for the minds prepared to recognize them.”
Consequently, those irregularities prompted more careful
examinations, which revealed that the differences in percentages of healthy and
diseased plants were a clear-cut case of the numbers invaded by the fungus as a
reciprocal of: (a) the increasing amounts of exchangeable calcium offered as
nutrition; (b) the better plant growth shown by more height and heavier
weights; (c) the greater uptake of calcium; (d) the more and larger nodules on
the roots; and (e) more nitrogen fixed from the atmosphere through synthesis of
more protein and thereby the autoimmunity through physiological defences, often
viewed as antibodies and other such mechanisms.
Since each of those several factors could suggest by its
increase that it was the cause of the highly correlated decrease in the numbers
of sick plants, there is much danger of erroneously concluding that such causal
connection holds true.
But correlations are perfect when both phenomena have a
common cause, as was true here. The larger plants, the less of disease, and the
more self-protection resulted because of the several increased effects via
nutrition which was improved through the increases of calcium available in the
soil.
Other research on the variable composition of plants, grown
by similar techniques of feeding them, showed that by narrowing the ratio of
calcium to potassium, offered by the clay of the soil, one could grow large
yields of legume-plant bulk carrying increased carbohydrates but reduced
concentrations of amino acids or proteins, and reduced nitrogen fixation from
the atmosphere.
By using a wider ratio of calcium to potassium going to the
plant roots from the clay, the plant’s yield as bulk was decreased, but the
amino acid contents in protein and the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen were
both increased.
Accordingly, in some of our crop production which disregards
balanced soil fertility, we can see plants being literally “fattened” under
their protein-deficiency, but their larger carbohydrate output, with a
“sickening” effect on the plants – much in the same manner as humans develop
obesity – and our fattening of livestock, brings on increased susceptibility to
diseases.
In the self-protection by plants, the significant factors
suggest themselves as causes according as they favour nutrition, including more
complete protein synthesis.
That nature projects self-protection (against insects) into
the next generation, according as the soil grows it, was also demonstrated by
some research studies by the Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station.
One readily accepts the theory that any seed, as a dormancy
or with life processes at a very low rate, must preserve those processes in
their health between their very high rates of the crop making the seed and of
the succeeding generation started by the planting of it.
If such were not true the species extinction would result.
For demonstration of the theory as fact, ears of hybrid
maize, grown on soil given nitrogen fertilizer only and on soil given both
nitrogen and phosphorus, were wrapped and bound as pairs within cellophane
sheets with the ends of the ears exposed to permit entrance of insects, common
to stored grain.
The grain grown from soil given nitrogen only was taken by
the lesser grain borer first. The inside of almost every grain per ear was bored
out to leave the shell and the waste meal resulting.
In contrast, there were but a few borer holes in the grain
grown on soil given both nitrogen and phosphorus. That damage was only at
points of close contact of the two different grains.
The damage had occurred during about two and a half years of
storage. During the early part of that time, the absence of insects prompted
neglect of observation, hence the date of the first attack is unknown.
After two and a half years, some open-pollinated corn, grown
on soil fertilized with barnyard manure, was added to the pairs, with their
active insect fauna, and the storage period extended for about six months.
During that period there were some few additional insect
attacks on the second hybrid but the open-pollinated grain, grown by the soil
treatment of barnyard manure only, had but one hole suggesting borer damage.
Such observations of nature in action on stored grains, raise
the question whether we exhibit much wisdom in our designing of chemical poisons
to fight the disease and pests, when by evolution nature grew the species of
our diseased and insect-ridden crops which were not so attacked and destroyed.
That fact was shown by their healthy presence when we came
along so late for domestication of them. Plants had their self-protection grown
in them. They passed that attribute to their seeds in storage and even,
apparently, on to the next generation to continue the ingrown capacity its
predecessors demonstrated.
That farm animals (and wildlife) grow better health or more
autoimmunity on better soils has been a continuing farmer demonstration, more
particularly by a herd of 200 beef cattle, by the Poirot Farms of Golden City,
Missouri.
During the past forty years their exhausted soil of the
eastern edge of the prairie has been under restoration by a farmer and
conservationist, who has been honoured as a master in each of those categories.
As a naturalist, he is a keen observer who has followed
nature’s laws in building up the fertility of much of the soil of 1,800 acres
by using the choices of wildlife and of his livestock as guides for proper
additions of calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, copper, cobalt and even iodine,
some of the latter three coming to the soil via their presence in the salt.
“Science does not yet know all the biological values Mother
Nature produces in the soil,” says Mr. E.M. Poirot, senior partner. “Animals
just below man in the pyramid of life strata, are a part of the natural
balances. Their choices and responses are, therefore, valuable guides.
“Observations of them are our best helps until the chemical
laboratory can point out the ‘why’ of the effects of the soil restoration on
animal health.
“Before I applied any phosphate, now nearly forty years ago,”
he says, “my cattle were so hungry they chewed bones whenever they found one,
and in the absence of them they would chew oakwood brought in from elsewhere…At
any place where phosphate had been applied, cows would crop the plants,
literally, down into the soil.
“Where lime and phosphate had been applied on part of the
field, the cattle would mark the place to the line by avoiding the grass
growing four inches from the drill-line of the applied treatment.
“The animals seemed to want more of the elements applied.
When those were offered, either in the soil or in the feed boxes in the
pasture, diseases all but disappeared, their weights and general conditions
improved, and they began to bear normal calf crops.
“My cattle are now living in good health, without need of any
veterinary services for infectious diseases during the last eighteen years.
“They are reproducing normally and giving a calf-crop to
nearly 100 percent, without winter shelter and without grains, silage, legume
hay or other feeds, save a special protein mixture during the winter at one
pound per head daily, along with the Bluestem hay left in the field at the spot
where each bale was dropped while baling.
“Through restoring the soil, over 200 head are now enjoying
margins of food, self-protection and reproduction on the same land area, which
less than four decades ago could not supply an adequate ration for eight head
of their ancestors.”
From the preceding examples of natural self-preservation and
careful observations of the autoimmunities of the lower forms of life below
man, we cannot escape the deduction that each living unit, from the simple cell
to the most complex organism, survives, to a large degree, according as it
develops its own self-protection.
Better health of plants and animals are readily demonstrated
as results from the more fertile soils.
Each body establishes many immunities which are not yet
catalogued. Nor have we comprehended and explained many well enough to make
them successfully manageable as uniformity throughout the crowd.
No epidemic is 100 percent disastrous. There are always those
who survive on their own. Nor is health in any group 100 percent perfect.
But there is much to be gained in the latter by the
individual’s own effort of learning about his own nutrition, with buoyant
health as a studied objective by concern with the natural qualities and
nutritional values grown into, and preserved within, the foods we eat.
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Excerpt from “Soil Fertility & Human and Animal
Health – The Albrecht Papers Vol. 8
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