Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Meanwhile, still shortly after WWII, J.I. Rodale started the organic gardening
movement in the USA, inspired by the work of SirAlbert Howard and Lady Eve
Balfour in the UK, while WilliamAlbrecht was proving the validity and value of
mineral balanced agriculture. William who?
The late WilliamA.Albrecht, PhD, and his crew of researchers at the University of
Missouri agricultural station were responsible for developing the mineral basis of
the NewAgriculture: the concept of balancing the alkaline nutrients in the soil
based on the soil's capacity to hold them. In the 1920s they decided to take a
close look at the various mineral fractions of soil: the clay, silt, and sand fractions.
They took some of the local soil, removed the organic matter, and spun it in a
centrifuge to separate it by size and weight. This yielded an almost clear, jelly-like
layer on top that turned out to be made up of incredibly tiny clay particles, particles
too small to be viewed by most microscopes. They were so tiny that they stayed
suspended in water and wouldn't even centrifuge out, though they didn't dissolve.
Colloids are what this type of particle is called; this was colloidal clay. What did
these tiny bits do in the soil? It turned out they did a lot. Those colloidal clay
particles were the basis of the soil's cation exchange capacity. They stored the
alkaline nutrients in the soil, held by a simple static electrical charge, safe from
being washed away, yet readily available to soil life. The plants and soil life traded
+charged Hydrogen ions for these + charged nutrients.Albrecht and crew spent
the next three decades
experimenting with various combinations of mineral nutrients, growing the crops
and feeding them to animals, measuring the nutritional value of the crop and the
health of the animals.
However, by the late 1950s and early '60s the big chemical companies had
managed to take over most of the USA's agricultural schools. They offered to fund
new buildings and research projects, and pay for new professorial chairs, but
ProfessorAlbrecht and the other holistic researchers from the 1920s, '30s, and
'40shad to go.Albrecht had demonstrated that the chemical companies' approach
was an unnecessary path to bankruptcy and destruction and he wasn't about to
teach their party line, especially as he had developed and spent years proving a
better system that was sustainable and healthy.Albrecht was forced into
retirement in the 1960s; his work was buried and would have been lost if not for
the efforts of economist and editor Charles Walters, who started the magazine
AcresUSAin 1970 to promoteAlbrecht's ideas. Charles Walters called this new
science of balancing the cation minerals in the soil Eco-agriculture. It has been
implemented on hundreds of thousands of acres of commercial farms in the US
andAustralia with great success, but the mineral balancing message hasn't yet
gotten to the home gardener or small producer, nor has it gotten to the various
branches of alternative agriculture. The corporate-dominated StateAgriculture
Colleges pretend it doesn't exist.
