Soil Management by Nature or Man? - Natural Food and Farming: 1965

In our studies of how Mother Nature was growing crops which were able to protect themselves against pests and disease to survive the ages, and to be available for domestication by man when he took over the soil and crop management, we find that two basic requirements had always been met or fulfilled.

In the first place, rock minerals were weathering in the soil to remind us of the poetic claim that "The Mills of God must grind.” In the second place, the organic matter grown on the soil was naturally put back in place on top or within the soil for its decay there. That served to put microbial life into the soil. It generated the carbonic acid there (and other acids of decay) to break some of the nutrient elements out of the rock more rapidly for them to be caught up and held, or adsorbed, by some of the more stable, weathered, non-nutrient elements like the silicon of the clay. That adsorption holds them for plants services when the plant uses the same kind of carbonic acid to take those nutrients off by trading the hydrogen, or acid, for them.
 

By means of grinding fresh rock regularly as natural mineral fertilizers in the soil, and by conserving the organic matter to go back to maintain the soil’s humus at higher levels, nature had protected her crops so they grew annually from their own seeds. By a unique self protection they were doing well when man came along to take over what we call “scientific” crop management and “scientific” soil management. Certainly we are not now duplicating those practices in which nature was more successful than we appreciate.

According to our knowledge to date, the soil’s total capacity to hold electrically positive nutrients in available form should have about 60-75% for calcium, 6-12% for magnesium, 3-5% for potassium, and not more than that much of sodium and also all the needed trace elements and non-nutrient hydrogen, or acidity.

Those figures represent the soil’s content of positively charged elements in what, to date, we may consider a balanced plant ration… In our preceding remarks, we have not spoken about the soil’s organic supplies of nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus in the required plant’s ration. We have not mentioned some of the trace elements also connected more actively with the supply of organic matter than with the reserve minerals.

We need to look to the organic matter of the soil to make these last three more essential major nutrient elements available to the crops. We need to remind ourselves that it is the organic matter that makes the surface layer the “living soil” and the “handful of dust” with its power for creating life.

We must not forget that microbes are what make a living soil “alive.” And far more important, we must remember that soil microbes, like all other microbes, eat at the first sitting, or first table. Plants eat at the second. Microbes go first for energy food, since they cannot use the sunshine’s energy directly. Plants go first for “grow” food, since they can use sunshine energy that way.

A sprouting seed “roots” for a living, or for “grow” food first. It puts up its advertising of growth by showing its leaves above the soil in the sunshine second.

 

Microbes are the decomposers of the organic matter and the conservers of the inorganic fertility, of the nitrogen, of the sulphur and of the phosphorus. Those three elements do not escape so much from a soil which has plenty of organic matter and growing crops to conserve those elements. We need to consider organic matter to conserve, to mobilize and to increase the nitrogen, the sulfur and the phosphorus of the soils, if those are to be fully productive.

Soil microbes oxidize carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus to get energy thereby. It is in their oxidized forms that those elements are taken into the plant. Carbon is taken into the leaves. The others are taken into the plant root and, thus, all are in cycles of re-use.

It was by that more complete recycling for conservation that nature built up the soil in organic matter which we are compelling our microbes to burn out so rapidly when we return primarily chemical salts and little carbon of organic matter by which in this combination for microbial service, these fertility elements must be held in the soil. Plants and microbes must be in symbiotic activity and not in competition for fertility if our productive soils are to be maintained.

Carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus are the negatively charged elements with which the positively charged hydrogen, calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium combine to make the readily soluble inorganic salts. But in those combined forms they are not held by the soil as such. They are ionically injurious to plant roots. They are leached out by percolating rainwater. It is the clay-humus part of the soil which filters the positively charged ions, or elements, out of those salts; much like the household water softener takes the calcium, or lime, hardness out of the water supply. The clay-humus holds them as insoluble, yet available, to plant roots which are trading acid, or hydrogen, for them.

 

The negatively charged, soluble nitrates, sulfates, phosphates, so oxidized by the microbes, serve as nutrition for them and for the plants to be reduced into the organo-molecular states of living tissue where they are insoluble but functional in large organic molecules and not as salts. On death, they are oxidized again for microbial energy and repeat the cycle.

It is in this natural plan of soil management where we must recognize the real service by the fertility elements of soil, air and water playing their roles in creation before we can take over for wiser management of nature’s part in crop production. Her two phases of management stand out. Nature returned the organic matter as completely as possible, in that she held many of the fertility elements and kept them available. She grew crops where she also added unweathered mineral salts and dusts through winds with their storms of such and by overflowing waters with their inwash of deposited minerals.

By that simple, two-phase procedure of fertility management, nature had many different crops of healthy plants here for man when he arrived. But each crop was on its own particularly suitable soil in its specific climatic, geo-chemical and balanced fertility setting with man and warm-blooded animals on the high-calcium soils. We have not yet included calcium as the foremost fertility element when we list the contents of commercial fertilizers, for the inspector, even though we lime the soil to combat its acidity and, thereby, work against the very mechanism by which the plant roots feed our crops.

Feed the soil and it will feed you.

- Excerpts from: Natural Food and Farming: 1965—The Albrecht Papers Vol. 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Calcium - 4. Delayed Appreciation

 

The delayed appreciation of the significance of calcium in plant nutrition may be laid at the doorstep of a confused thinking about liming and soil acidity. The absence of lime in many soils of the non-temperate zone has long been known. Lime in different forms such as chalk, marl, gypsum or land plaster, has been a soil treatment for centuries. Lime was used in Rome in times B.C., and the Romans used it in England in the first century A.D. Chalking the land is an old practice in the British Isles. The calcareous deposits like “The White Cliffs of Dover” were appreciated in soil improvement for centuries before they were commemorated in song. Liming the soil is a very ancient art, but a very recent science of agriculture. It was when Liebig, Lawes and Gilbert and other scientists began to focus attention on the soil as source of chemical elements for plant nutrition that nitrogen, soluble phosphate, and potassium became our first fertilizers. It was then that the element calcium and the practice of liming were put into the background. Unfortunately for the wider appreciation of calcium, this element in the form of gypsum was regularly a large part of the acid phosphate that was applied extensively in fertilizer to deliver phosphorus. Strange as it may seem, superphosphate fertilizer carries more calcium than it does phosphorus, and consequently calcium has been used so anonymously or incidentally that its services have not been appreciated. Fertilizers have held our thought. Calcium was an unnoticed concomitant. It has been doing much for which the other parts of the fertilizers were getting credit. Appreciation of the true significance of calcium in plant nutrition was therefore long delayed.

More recently soil acidity has held attention. This again has kept calcium out of the picture. Credit for the service of liming has been going to the carbonates with which calcium is associated in limestone. It was a case of the common fallacy in reasoning, namely the ascribing of causal significance to contemporaneous behaviors. Here is the line of reasoning: “Limestone put on the soil lessens the acidity, and limestone put on the soil grows clover. Therefore the change in acidity must be the cause of the growing clover.” Therefore the change in acidity must be the cause of the growing clover. At the same time, there was disregarded the other possible deduction, namely: “Limestone put on the soil applies the plant nutrient calcium. Therefore the applied calcium must be the cause of the growth of clover.”

The labeling of calcium as fertilizer element of first importance was delayed because scientists, like other boys, enjoyed playing with their toys. The advent of electrical instruments inducement to measure soil acidity everywhere. The pH values were determined on slight provocations and causal significance widely ascribed to them, when as a matter of fact the degree of acidity like temperature is a condition and not a cause of many soil chemical reactions.  Because this blind alley of soil acidity was accepted as a thoroughfare so long and because no simple instrument for measuring calcium ionization was available, it has taken extensive plant studies to demonstrate the hidden calcium hungers in plants responsible in turn for hidden but more extensive hungers in animals. Fortunately, a truce has recently been declared in the fight on soil acidity. What was once considered a malady is now considered a beneficial condition of the soil. Instead of a bane, soil acidity is a blessing in that many plant nutrients applied to such soil are made more serviceable by its presence, and soil acidity is an index of how seriously our attention must go to the declining soil fertility.

Now we face new concepts of the mechanisms of plant nutrition. By means of studies using only the colloidal, or finer, clay fraction of the soil, it was learned that this soil portion is really an acid. It is also highly buffered or takes on hydrogen, calcium, magnesium, and any other cations in relatively large quantities to put them out of solution and out of extensive ionic activities. It demonstrated that because of its insolubility, it can hide away many plant nutrients so that pure water will not remove them, yet salt solutions will exchange with them. This absorption and exchange activity of clay is the basic principle that serves in the plant nutrition. This concept comes as a by-product of the studies of calcium in relation to soil acidity.

Imagine that a soil consists of some calcium-bearing minerals of silt size mixed with acid clays. The calcium-bearing mineral interacts with the hydrogen of the acid clay. The hydrogen goes to the mineral in exchange for the calcium going to the clay. Imagine further that the plant root enters into this clay and mineral mixture. It does so more readily because of the presence of the clay. It excretes carbon dioxide (possibly other compounds) into this moist mixture to give carbonic acid with its ionized hydrogen to carry on between the root acid and the clay particle and the mineral. The hydrogen from the root exchanges with the calcium absorbed on the clay in close contact.

Thus plant nutrition is a trading business between root and mineral with the clay serving as the jobber, or the “go-between”. The clay takes the hydrogen offered by the root, trades it to the silt minerals for the calcium and then passes the calcium to the root. Thus nutrients, like calcium, and other positive ions as well, pass from the minerals to the clay and to the root, while hydrogen or acidity, is passing in the opposite direction to weather out of the soil its nutrients mineral reserve and leave finally the acid clay mixed with unweatherable quartz sand. Acid soils are, then, merely the indication of nutrient depletion.

 

- Excerpt from Albrecht's Foundation Concepts - The Albrecht Papers Vol. 1 - pgs. 149-150