Soil/Life Part 1
Hi Everyone,
Quite a few months ago I talked about discussing the materials in a book that I had read called Soil Fertility and Animal Health by Dr. William Albrecht. I really struggled with trying to convey some of the information from that book because if I did then I would just end up with an email that was about the same size as the book. The material is THAT interesting! So how do you share so much stuff without just telling the whole thing?
As time passed I ran across another book called Soil, Grass and Cancer by Andre Voisin. Both books can be purchased from Amazon for around 20 bucks each, which would be well worth the money spent if you choose to buy one or both. After I read the Voisin book, then I finally felt that I could attempt to share some of the material as Voisin's book says pretty much the same material, but in a more simple form. Albrecht's book gives you a whole lot of technical charts, graphs and a lot of agronomic specific material that I'm not sure the average person not familiar with such terms would be able to grasp the full effect from. So now I would like to jump in and try to swim.
Voisin begins his discussion talking about grass, just like Albrecht does as they both feel like the grass tells a whole lot. Voisin claims that grass gives us a "biochemical photograph" of the soil in which it is grown. Then the animal (man and woman, is included here), is nothing more than the product of the soil in which its food is grown. Of course we are talking about the physical aspect of the animal, not the spiritual, although the physical health has an unthinkable influence on the spiritual health. There has for a long time been an on going struggle of the minds over which comes first, the spiritual or the physical. I prefer to side with the idea that Matt Ridley presents in his book, The Agile Gene, where in he claims that they influence each other at the same time, IE; there is no first or second as far as we are concerned at this point in the game. Further more to make everyone happy he says there is a God that organizes this whole thing, he calls it the "Genome Organizing Device" IE; in short, God.
Back to Voisin, in the last paragraph of the first chapter he says the following, "An attempt will be made in this book to show how 'dusts' of the soil are 'assembled, bolted and screwed' to form the cells of our body and allow them to function. The special aim will be to demonstrate how illness can be due to an upset in the balance of this 'assembly'".
Now when we come to Albercht's material at the beginning of his book he talks about the grass. However, here he introduces a concept that for the most part I don't know if many people has a whole lot of knowledge about, that being the electrical conductivity of the soil. In order for this to take place there has to be the correct makeup of the minerals and moisture within the soil. The soil has to be properly developed. He talks about the the studies that has been made and those doing the studies have found that the best conductivity falls along the 98 degree Longitude. As you progress either to the east to the west of that line then you find the conductivity diminishing. Also within this area he has found the ideal conditions for proper soil development and this is an area where he really hammers on, specifically soil development.
Anyway for this soil development he claims you need about 25 to 30 inches of rain fall per year and at the proper intervals for the soil to develop. As you move to the east of that line you progressively find the soil to be more acidic. This in part is due to more heavy rainfall thus leaching the soil of the minerals and in the end the growth is mainly cellulose. Then as you move more westerly from the 98th., you find the soil is progressively alkaline. This, in part, is to low rainfall leading to poorly or underdeveloped soils.
Thus, if the soil isn't properly developed then the nutrition isn't transferred to the plant in the forms and amounts needed by the animals or man. Now this isn't to say that you can't have a given plot of soil that is not somewhat developed enough to raise a decent crop, but the scientific fact is that it is still incomplete as defined by nature. Also, just because a plot of land is within the ideal range does not mean it is well developed, this owing to the fact that some people rape, plunder and pillage the soil and thus it then becomes unproductive as to its potential as defined by nature. He claims that one of the operations of nature is that the dust becomes airborne in the west and is carried and deposited in the mid west as a natural form of fertilizer. In Voisin's work he discusses how the soil needs for sulfur was met via nature through the burning of coal. Now as the coal burning is declining, in the sense of lack of simple forms of sulfur being omitted, the needs then have to be met in some other form. It would appear that nature has a way of dealing with things of nature. Now the problem we get is when man, playing God, rearranges these natural forms of elements, and some of the natural solutions don't seem to work very well. One of the big things that we find in both of these works is the need for the elements to come together in the soil in the way the plant needs them. Then for the plant to convert them/rearrange them and line them up for the animal and man alike to be able to use them.
To be continued...
Written by Kent King.
