Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
their students, make up most of the mineral-aware agricultural consultants around
today, worldwide, including this author.
Organic gardening, unfortunately, was stuck back in the 1950s, and it has largely
remained there since: Compost, manure, mulch, and that's about it. The other
schools of alternative agriculture - Steiner's Biodynamics, Permaculture, Elaine
Ingham's Soil Food Web concept, the various miracle microbe schools etc.- all
emphasize the biological and compost-based approach almost exclusively. The
occasional mention is made of rock dust, phosphate rock, or dolomite lime, but
seldom with any understanding of the soil chemistry involved.
The one truly mineral-oriented school of "mainstream" alternative agriculture is
what I call the Glacial Rock Dust school, based on the famous 1982 topic
The
Survival of Civilization
, whose authors argued that the retreat of the glaciers at the
end of the last ice age was the last time our soils had a fresh dose of minerals.
Their solution was to add freshly ground rock powder to the soil as the source of
those missing minerals, but there is little understanding of the actual role of
minerals, and no conception of the amounts or balance of minerals needed.A
average everyday soil with a cation exchange capacity of 10 requires around
3,000 lbs of Calcium in exchangeable form per acre, and 50 or so pounds of Zinc.
Is that in the rock dust or not? Does the soil need the minerals in that particular
rockdust at all? Freshly ground rock dust is a great soil amendment, but it can't be
counted on to correct a mineral imbalance or deficiency.
What the USAended up with by the 1970s was a great division between those
practicing organic agriculture and those farming with strong, concentrated
chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Neither side talked to the other, the
organic group taking the moral high ground against poisoning the land and the
chemical farmers deriding the organic followers as backwards Luddites. Neither
side knew about the successes of those using the methods ofAlbrecht or Reams.
How could they? Organic Gardening was heavily invested in the idea that organic
matter and soil biology alone were the answers, while the chemical farmers were
convinced that the next hybrid crop and the newest pesticide were going to solve
their growing problems. Neither one was interested in learning that they were both
wrong, that there was a system already up and running that didn't require scores
of tons of compost and manure per acre and didn't need toxic rescue chemistry
either.
Our Story Continues Today
Back at the corporate laboratories and bought-off State agriculture colleges, the
dyed-in-the-wool chemical farming fans are still trying to prove that the growing of
food can be forced into an industrial production model. Their version of "working
with biology" up until the 1990s was hybrid crops, and has now morphed into
GMOs, genetically modified organisms. Both the hybrids and the GMOs are
usually plants that have been bred to live on a starvation diet of NPK fertilizer
