Creating and maintaining a healthy balanced soil is crucial to success in growing crops organically. The father of soil science is Professor William Albrecht who studied soils all around the world all his life. He demonstrated that in terms of volume the major elements are calcium, magnesium and potassium. Nitrogen, phophorus and silcon are also significant.
Later research shows that volume is not the only important factor. Individual elements whilst small in quantity can be essential catalysts to the many chemical/biological processes that take place in plants such as photosynthesis. There is a heirarchy of elements needed for these processes to work in plants and this might also apply in humans. (I have added the most common natural food source for us in brackets).
Sulphur is necessary as a catalyst for all the reactions that begin with boron and end with potassium. This is apparently the biochemical sequence of nutrition in plants. The 8 elements in sequence are:
1.Boron (lettuce)
2.Silica (brazil nuts)
3.Calcium (broad beans & watercress)
4.Nitrogen (cucumber)
5.Magnesium (Beans, poppyseed & spinach)
6.Phosphorus (Beetroot)
7.Carbon (vitamin C)
8. Potassium (Lettuce)
There are 92 elements that make up the earth and the human body and not a lot is known about all the minor trace elements. I believe they all play a role and as an example who has heard of yttrium? This element created a three-fold increase in the lifespan of test animals!! Yttrium is found in cabbage, lettuce and tomatoes (if grown in soils that contain yttrium). Lettuce should contain many of the above important minerals and has become one of my favourite foods!!
Geoff Buckley Click here for more information on creating a healthy balanced soil.
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Showing posts with label organic farming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label organic farming. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Thursday, April 7, 2011
The reason I'm fanatical about soil health
I've just been reading a book called "Nutrition: the Good, the Bad and the Politics" by a Western Australian doctor Igor Tabrizian. I thoroughly recommend this book to you.
Reading this book inspired me to put up this post. Dr Tabrizian has realised that many health problems as diverse as panic attacks, painful menstrual cramps, blurred vision, ADHD and ADD, are caused by the basic chemical reactions that are occurring in the body. He says that the process that drives normal biochemistry to abnormal chemistry involves any combination of five factors: genetics, deficiency, excess, imbalance or toxins. This applies to the human body and well as the soil.
Soil health depends on the basic chemical reactions that are occurring and these are affected by genetics (soil origin), deficiency, excess, imbalance and toxins. For soil, genetics is equivalent to the rock from which the soil is formed. Different rocks contain different elements so the starting point for soil is the material from which that soil is formed.
I'm fanatical about soil health. I have spend years building soil health on our property. It has been an expensive exercise and we continue to do those things that are required to build nutrient levels, nutrient balance, and to provide a home for an enormous population of soil organisms. In consequence my own health has imroved over the time I have been involved in doing this. I'm rarely sick and I can do four or five hours of physical labour with no ill effects. That's not common for someone who has exceeded their quota of three score years and ten!
The reason I'm fanatical about what I do is that I strongly believe that good soil health is fundamental to good plant health which is fundamental to good human health. It seems obvious that someone who relies on food grown in impoverished soil is going to be deficient in the chemical elements required for good health.
That's the conclusion that Dr Tabrizian has come to. Diverse symptoms of ill health can be traced to deficiencies in one or more elements. He discovered that anxiety, muscle cramps, headached, insomnia and hypertension can be cured with magnesium. Immune deficiency problems are related to low levels of zinc as are hay fever, eczdema. insommnia.
So why aren't we being told these things? According to Dr Tabrizian "the truth is not being told to doctors because they are manipulated too cleverly to have any insight into the extent of the information shovelled to them. Most doctors are not aware of the amount of good research already undertaken in the field of molecular medicine." (p 12)
Similarly, most farmers rely on the advice given by agronomists and fertilizer representatives who are strongly influenced by the messages from BIG multinational chemical companies whose profits depend on being able to sell as much cheaply produced fertilizer as possible and then by selling the poisonous "rememdies" that are needed when crops become weed and insect infected.
Dr Tabrizian believes that governments and BIG business collude to keep the population at large slightly sick. The name of the game is to extract the maximum amount of profits and tax from the herd and then kill them off slowly" (p7). This is a frightening and extreme statement but other than total ignorance, it is the only viewpoint capable of explaining what is happening in our world today.
So what's to be done? Obviously, the ball is in our court. It is up to us to find out the truth by doing our own research and discovering things for ourselves but to go against conventional wisdome takes a degree of fanaticism. Going against conventional wisdom is what we do. It is what we teach. It is the reason we have published books, written training programmes, created this blog. The world is making us sick! Things need to change.
Written by Bev Buckley, For more information visit Growing Healthy
Reading this book inspired me to put up this post. Dr Tabrizian has realised that many health problems as diverse as panic attacks, painful menstrual cramps, blurred vision, ADHD and ADD, are caused by the basic chemical reactions that are occurring in the body. He says that the process that drives normal biochemistry to abnormal chemistry involves any combination of five factors: genetics, deficiency, excess, imbalance or toxins. This applies to the human body and well as the soil.
Soil health depends on the basic chemical reactions that are occurring and these are affected by genetics (soil origin), deficiency, excess, imbalance and toxins. For soil, genetics is equivalent to the rock from which the soil is formed. Different rocks contain different elements so the starting point for soil is the material from which that soil is formed.
I'm fanatical about soil health. I have spend years building soil health on our property. It has been an expensive exercise and we continue to do those things that are required to build nutrient levels, nutrient balance, and to provide a home for an enormous population of soil organisms. In consequence my own health has imroved over the time I have been involved in doing this. I'm rarely sick and I can do four or five hours of physical labour with no ill effects. That's not common for someone who has exceeded their quota of three score years and ten!
The reason I'm fanatical about what I do is that I strongly believe that good soil health is fundamental to good plant health which is fundamental to good human health. It seems obvious that someone who relies on food grown in impoverished soil is going to be deficient in the chemical elements required for good health.
That's the conclusion that Dr Tabrizian has come to. Diverse symptoms of ill health can be traced to deficiencies in one or more elements. He discovered that anxiety, muscle cramps, headached, insomnia and hypertension can be cured with magnesium. Immune deficiency problems are related to low levels of zinc as are hay fever, eczdema. insommnia.
So why aren't we being told these things? According to Dr Tabrizian "the truth is not being told to doctors because they are manipulated too cleverly to have any insight into the extent of the information shovelled to them. Most doctors are not aware of the amount of good research already undertaken in the field of molecular medicine." (p 12)
Similarly, most farmers rely on the advice given by agronomists and fertilizer representatives who are strongly influenced by the messages from BIG multinational chemical companies whose profits depend on being able to sell as much cheaply produced fertilizer as possible and then by selling the poisonous "rememdies" that are needed when crops become weed and insect infected.
Dr Tabrizian believes that governments and BIG business collude to keep the population at large slightly sick. The name of the game is to extract the maximum amount of profits and tax from the herd and then kill them off slowly" (p7). This is a frightening and extreme statement but other than total ignorance, it is the only viewpoint capable of explaining what is happening in our world today.
So what's to be done? Obviously, the ball is in our court. It is up to us to find out the truth by doing our own research and discovering things for ourselves but to go against conventional wisdome takes a degree of fanaticism. Going against conventional wisdom is what we do. It is what we teach. It is the reason we have published books, written training programmes, created this blog. The world is making us sick! Things need to change.
Written by Bev Buckley, For more information visit Growing Healthy
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