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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soil Microbes Get Their Food First

 

It was less than three generations ago that Pasteur’s work in France suggested the bacterial causation of disease. Even though we are coming to see that the bacterial entry into the body may be encouraged by weakness induced by deficiencies of many kinds, yet the fear of microbes, germs and bacteria is almost universal. Everybody is afraid of getting germs. Pasteur told us that heat is the best weapon for fighting these microscopic life forms and we have been heating, boiling, steaming and sterilizing in the fight against microbes.

Now that the science of microbiology has brought us penicillin, streptomycin and other similar microbial products as protection for our bodies against the microbes, particularly since we are learning to live with them more for our benefit than for our harm. We are coming to see that microbes are a foundational part of the pyramid of life forms, of which we are the topmost. If we are to live complacently with them, we must remember that they are next to the soil in that pyramidal structure. They are between the soil and the plants. They either cooperate with, or compete with, the plants for the creative power in the form of nutrients in the soil. Hence, they are a part of the biotic foundation on which animal and human life depend. Microbes are now recognized as important because they eat more simply than all other life. They also eat first of the fertility of the soil.

1.      struggle for calories

Microbes are less complex in their anatomy and in many respects are less highly developed than plants. Unlike plants, the microbes cannot make their own energy-food compounds by the help of sunlight. On the contrary, sunlight kills microbes. By the process of photosynthesis, plants build their own carbohydrates for body energy from carbon dioxide in the air and from hydrogen and oxygen in water from the soil. Plants make many carbonaceous complexes from these three simple elements which they build into intricate energy-giving compounds of high fuel value and as deposits above the soil or as additions within its surface layer. Plants work in the light. Microbes work in the dark. Unable to derive energy directly from the sun, they must get it from these chemical compounds passed on to them by the death of the plants.

As a means of getting energy for heat and work, the microbes burn or oxidize organic compounds, just as we do in our bodies. Microbial life depends on just such compounds as make up dead plant and animal bodies. It simplifies them. It tears them apart. It is the wrecking crew taking over dead plant and animal tissues or return the separate elemental parts back to the air, water, soil or other points of origin. It is working in the dark and sending back to simplicity all that the plants built up to complexity.

This microbial struggle is what we call decay. The process of rotting organic matter is the result of microbial processes of digestion and metabolism of the organic matter, by which the energy initially put into chemical combination through plant photosynthesis, is released again for microbial life service.

As humans, we too use organic compounds such as sugars, starches, proteins, fat and other food components to provide our energy. This occurs as part of the process by which we break down these compounds into carbon dioxide, water, urea and other simple substances eventually thrown off as body excretions. Humans, like the microbes, are struggling for calories. In humans we call it digestion and metabolism. For the microbes, it means decay, or the simplification process which the different substances are undergoing when we commonly say “They are rotting.”

2.      competition with crops

Plowing under some organic matter in the garden or field is a good way of disposing of crop residues because the microbes “burn” or oxidize them. They do it slowly, however. Yet the process of microbial combustion of such materials may have disastrous effects on a crop planted soon after plowing, when we say we “burned out” the crop.

Microbes need more than energy “go” foods. They need the “grow” foods, too, just as we do. They do not demand that their nitrogen be given them in the complete proteins or the more complex compounds of this element as we do. Nevertheless, they are just as exacting in their needs for nitrogen, at least in its simpler forms. This is a “grow” food necessary to balance their energy foods in the proper ratio just as we demand the balance in speaking of our own nutritive ratio, or the balance of carbohydrates against proteins in our own diets or in the ration of feeds for our domestic animals.

So when we plow under any woody residue of stalks, leaves or other parts of plants that have given up their protein contents for seed making, these residues are an unbalanced microbial diet. They do not permit the microbes to grow rapidly on them. They are too much carbohydrate. As a diet they are deficient in “grow” foods. They are short in proteins, or nitrogen, and in minerals, hence decay very slowly.

Woody crop residues, like straws, have long been used for roof covers in the Old World. They last well but need to be replaced more often at the ridge top than over the entire roof. It is at the ridge tops that birds sit more often to leave their droppings, which are rich in urea nitrogen. When this soluble nitrogen – along with the mineral salts of the bird droppings – is added to the straw, the first rain hastens its decay. This decay, however, is limited to the ridge of the roof, or to the area in which these supplements of nitrogen balance the microbial diet originally consisting of straw. Until this balance was brought about the straw was too carbonaceous to decay, and was good thatch. Microbes require little of the “grow” foods but without it they do not carry out their decay processes.

When strawy crop residues or sawdust, for example, are plowed into the soil, the soil microbes are offered a diet that is high in carbon, or energy, and low in bodybuilding foods. Since the microbes are well distributed throughout this plowed soil, they are in such intimate contact with the clay that they make colloidal exchanges with it for its available nutrients. They can take ammonia nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, calcium and other nutrients for their own growth from the clay to balance the sawdust as a more adequate diet.

It is unfortunate for the plants when woody residues are plowed under. When the microbes are more intimately in contact with the soil than are the plant roots, the microbes eat first of the available fertility elements. While the microbes are balancing their sawdust diet by taking the fertility of the soil into their own body compounds, we do not appreciate the production of the microbial crop, nor the proportion of the available fertility which they appropriate for their own needs. Instead we see how poorly the corn crop or other plants grow when planted soon after straw, heavy weeds or sawdust are plowed under. We say “The crop is burned out,” when it is extra fertility and not water that is needed. Yes, the microbes eat first. This disaster follows inevitably when the soil is too low in fertility to feed both the microbial crop within and the farm crop above the soil.

But unfortunately the disaster is only temporary. While the energy compounds are being consumed, the excessive carbon is escaping to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The nitrogen and inorganic nutrient elements are kept within the soil. Thus while the carbon supply in the soil is being lessened by volatilization, the ratios of the carbon to the nitrogen and to the inorganic elements are made more narrow. These ratios approach that of the microbial body composition – more nearly that of protein.

Thus by decay the straw with a carbon-nitrogen ration of 80 to 1 leaves microbially manipulated residues going toward what we call “humus” and toward a carbon-nitrogen ratio of nearly 12 to 1. This resulting substance is then more nearly like the chemical composition of the microbes themselves. So when no large, new supplies of carbonaceous organic matter are added to the soil, new microbes can grow only by consuming their predecessors or the humus residues of their creation.

Humus residues, used as food by the microbes, comprise a diet low in energy values, but high in body-building values. Humus is also unbalanced, but unlike straw, it is unbalanced in the opposite respect. It is not badly unbalanced, because “grow” foods, like proteins, can be “burned” for energy. Man can live by meat (protein) alone, as Steffanson and other Arctic explorers have demonstrated. It is a bit costly, however, so we use carbohydrates to balance the protein. In that case the proteins are going for tissue building rather than to provide energy. The microbes also can use protein-like compounds for energy and very effectively. We encourage them to do this when we plow under legumes. Here again they balance their own diets but with benefit to the crop above the soil, rather than with disaster which follows the plowing under of straw.

When we plow under proteinaceous organic matter, such as legumes, with not only a high content of nitrogen but also a high content of calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium and all the other inorganic nutrient elements, the microbes are placed on a diet of narrow carbon-nitrogen ratio. The ratio of carbon to the inorganic nutrients is also narrow. It is like an exclusively meat diet would be for us, or like a tankage diet would be for a pig. The energy foods in such a ration are low in supply. Conversely, the nitrogen and minerals are a surplus. This surplus is not built into microbial bodies. Instead, it is liberated in simpler forms which are left in the soil as fertilizers for farm crops.

What we plow under determines what we have as left-overs for the crops. The microbes always eat first. The crops we grow “eat at the second table.” In wise management of the soil we must consider whether the composition of the organic matter we plow under is a good or poor diet for the microbes. If the soil is so low in fertility that it grows only a woody crop to be plowed under, then there can be little soil improvement for the following crop. It gives the microbes only energy foods. They must exhaust still further the last fertility supply in the soil to balance their diet and consequently the crops starve.

But if the soil is high in fertility so that it grows legumes, and if we then plow these protein-rich, mineral-rich forages under, the microbes receive more than energy foods. Given the nitrogenous, fertility-laden green manures plowed under, they pass this fertility back to the soil. Here their struggle is for energy, a struggle by which they are not in competition with the crop, the energy for which comes not from the soil but from the sunshine instead.

Microbes eat first. On poor soil with little humus and inorganic fertility, this spells disaster to the farm crop if we plow under only the poor vegetation which such soils produce. Growing merely any kind of organic matter to let it go back to the soil is not lifting the soil to higher fertility; any more than one lifts himself by pulling on his bootstraps. On soils that are more fertile in mineral nutrients, the idea in plowing cover crops to turn under is to help the farm crop. It helps them if we plow under the more proteinaceous and leguminous cover vegetation which fertile soils produce.

While we have been mining our soils to push them to a lower level of fertility, the microbes that originally were working for us are now working against us. They are eating first, not only so far as the plants are concerned, but indirectly so far as even we and our animals are concerned.

It is in this competition with the microbes that inorganic fertilizers and mineral additions to the soil can play their role by balancing the microbial diet. Such minerals are taken by both the plants and the microbes. But if the fertilizers are put deeper into the soil, they may be below the layer where they affect the microbes, either favorably or unfavorably. They will serve the plants, which send their roots down there, under the power coming from the sunshine. They will not affect the microbes unless they are mixed into the humus-bearing surface soil. Putting the fertilizers down deeper puts their nutrient contents where the plants, rather than the microbes, eat first. This is fertilizing, by means of inorganics, the fertilizing crop that combines them with organics to serve the microbes when this fertilizing crop is turned under for true soil improvement. This is a way of composting the inorganics within the body of the soil itself.

-          Excerpt from The Albrecht Papers Vol.1 - 1948

Healthy Soils Mean Healthy Humans

Photo credit Marc Suderman

THE INTENSE PUBLIC CONCERN focused on the dangers from poisonous – even carcinogenic – chemicals sprayed on the landscape, makes appropriate the home-spun remark by George Washington Carver who said, “When the manger is empty, the horses bite each other.”

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.

-          Excerpt from “Soil Fertility & Human and Animal Health – The Albrecht Papers Vol. 8