fbpx

Do farmers not care about their soil?

When farmers truly care about their soil, will they continue to use soil management practices that lose 2 pounds of topsoil for each pound of corn that is produced, as is currently the case in the state of Iowa?

When farmers truly care about their soil (and their neighbors), will they continue to apply excessive nitrogen fertilizer that pollutes groundwater and drinking water sources?

Many farmers do care, deeply.

Many more profess to care, but their actions testify the hollowness of their words.

We can only begin to make progress when we stop lying to ourselves.

We do ourselves and everyone else a disservice by insisting “This is the way it needs to be to grow your cheap food. We got this.”, and continuing to engage in the same behavior that got us here.

How have your management practices changed to improve soil health?

 

 

2021-07-25T19:36:08-05:00July 28th, 2021|Tags: |

Which does the most damage, tillage, herbicide, or fertilizer?

When growers discuss the damage to soil biology from herbicide applications, and possible alternatives, one of the first questions/justifications is: “Doesn’t tillage harm the soil more than herbicide applications?” Michael McNeill believes applied products often have a bigger negative contribution than tillage.

From the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast with Michael McNeill:

John: You’ve iterated several times that you have to stop doing what inflicted the damage in the first place. What I heard you saying was that it’s really the herbicides and fungicides and the insecticide applications that are causing this degradation of soil health. And I heard you mentioned that these herbicides and these various pesticides that people are applying are actually chelation agents.

Why do you believe that these products are the causal agent for the suppression of soil health? Couldn’t it also be the extensive tillage that we had for a number of decades and some of these other contributing factors?

Michael: Well, I have some farms that I feel are way over-tilled. They’re organic farmers. They really do till excessively, in my mind. But it doesn’t seem to be bothering the soil at all. It isn’t quite as good as I’d like to see it, but as long as they’re keeping their organic matter up, preventing erosion, using cover crops, and that sort of thing, the tillage in itself doesn’t seem to be doing as much damage as I originally thought it would.

Now, having said that, you have to be careful which tillage tools you use. A disc is not a very good tillage tool to be using—it causes compaction, it fractures the soil structure much worse than a tined implement that you could pull through—whether that be a v-ripper or a narrow-pointed field cultivator. These kinds of things do not seem to do the structural damage that I see with things like the disc, or even like a moldboard plow or a field cultivator with sweeps on it.

John: In essence, you’re saying that tillage doesn’t have the damaging effects on soil health that the herbicides do, from your perspective.

Michael: It’s not as bad as the herbicides, not as bad as anhydrous ammonia, and not as bad as the high-salt fertilizers. They tend to be more of an issue. And when you put them all together, it overwhelms the soil-life system.

John: I understand the impact of anhydrous ammonia and salt fertilizers—both of those are very oxidizing and can have the potential to produce a lot of damage to the soil’s microbial community. But I don’t understand how herbicides would have that same effect. You mentioned herbicides being chelating agents. From your perspective, how is it that herbicides and these various pesticides have such a damaging effect on soil health?

Michael: We have not paid a lot of attention to micronutrients in the soil. Micronutrients are extremely important to plant growth. And they are readily and easily chelated by the pesticides that we use. And once you tie them up, you start shutting down significant pathways. That’s where my physiology training and background came into play—when I started seeing a lot of these physiological processes being shut down.

An example people are probably familiar with is that if you chelate manganese and tie it up, you shut down the shikimate pathway. When you shut that down, diseases can move in very quickly, because that’s sort of the plant’s immune system, if you will. If you shut that down, you have to buy fungicides. You put on the fungicides to protect your plant from the disease that’s invaded, and then you start killing more of the fungal life in the soil. And it’s a vicious, vicious cycle that you’ve set up.

When to use inoculants to regenerate soil

In our experience, when microbial inoculants are applied as part of a different nutrition management system, they have consistently been some of the most significant ROI applications, and produce dramatic changes in soil health. Yet, many growers buy ‘bugs in a jug’ and see little or no response. When this happens, it often because the applied inoculant was put into the wrong environment, was not supported with biostimulants, or fertilizer and pesticide applications were continued. Don’t expect to continue managing everything else the same, and a microbial inoculant will change soil biology. The biology became degraded in the first place because of management practices and product applications. If these remain the same, don’t expect biology to make a miraculous comeback.

From the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast with Michael McNeill:

John: When you have a degraded system like that—where there are suppressed yields and suppressed soil health, as you’re describing it—how do you go from depressed yields of 70 to 90 bushels per acre back up to 200, with aspirations of going back up to 250 bushels per acre? How do you achieve that?

Michael: Well, it’s a long, hard task. There aren’t any silver bullets. You have to figure out what was going wrong and stop doing that—that’s number one. Number two, you’re going to have to look at what it’s going to take to remediate the soil. Has the soil become really hard—hard like a road? I get penetrometer readings where it takes 500 pounds of downward pressure to penetrate the top two inches of the soil—that’s hard. That’s just like a gravel road. A crop will not grow in that.

When they tilling it, it’s breaking up into chunks. And then when it rains, it puddles and it just seals over. And so we get no oxygen into the soil. You have to incorporate some tillage, and then you have to start providing some food for the microbial life—which is almost non-existent. It’s not non-existent, because you can bring it back—that’s the good news. If you don’t let this thing go too long, you can bring it back.

Now whether we’re bringing all of it back or not, I don’t know. But once you get it started coming back, then you can look at inoculating with mycorrhizae and some of the things—the pseudomonads, the actinomycetes—that could be missing, and stimulate them. But first, you have to get oxygen into the soil, get the water working correctly, and get the food right. There’s no magic in inoculating the soil—if it’s loaded with poison, it will kill your inoculant. You have to fix that problem first before you try inoculating. You wouldn’t have to do an inoculation, but it does speed it up—you gain about a year, maybe two years, when you do that.

I see people thinking they’re buying a magic silver bullet by inoculating, but then they continue to do the things that caused their soil to die in the first place. And they’re not winning. They’re losing.

Pesticides as a cause of soil degradation

Many agronomists and farmers with three or four decades of experience describe how soil health deteriorated quickly when herbicide and pesticide use became mainstream. Michael McNeill shares his observations.

From the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast with Michael McNeill:

John: And when you say you have about 165,000 acres that you work on today, what is the scope of the work you do on each of these farms?

Michael: Most of it is working with soil health and soil fertility, and helping growers select the right genetics for the fertility programs that they’re working with. Soil health is becoming a bigger and bigger issue for me to deal with. When I first started, it wasn’t a really big issue. It’s huge now. And so I’m devoting more of my time now to soil health than I ever thought I would.

John: I’d love to talk about that a little bit—when you say that soil health didn’t used to be a big issue, and now you’re spending a lot of time on it, what changed with soil health? How are you managing it differently today than you were twenty or thirty years ago?

Michael: Well, it’s interesting that you would ask me that, John. The other day I was cleaning out a drawer in my desk, and I found some old pictures that I had taken back in 1972 or 1973 of crops that were growing. I had some close-ups and some overviews of the field. The thing that I noticed was how healthy the plants were. There were no disease lesions on them anywhere. The corn plants were just perfect. And the whole field was that way.

It’s really hard to find a field today that is that way. I was looking at the weeds that were growing along the fence rows, and they were big and healthy and looked great. They don’t look so good today, comparatively speaking. And you say, “Well, maybe that’s a good thing!” No, it’s not. The whole area that we’re farming is unhealthy. It makes me ask the question—what’s changed?

To me, the big difference from that era until today is that farmers have been drawn into big ag. You need to use herbicides. You don’t want to use a cultivator. You have to farm more land. So you use herbicides, but herbicides are doing things to the soil, because they’re all chelators. So now the plants become a little bit imbalanced in the nutrition that they’re taking up, and you find more disease—you find more insect pressure. So you start using fungicides and insecticides—more chelators, more poisons being dumped onto the ground. And you’re pretty impressed with how they work. The field is perfectly clean, and weed free—excellent. The diseases were dramatically reduced. The fungicides worked really well. The corn borers and some other of the insects that were issues went away. It was magic. The chemistry was totally magic—it looked beautiful.

But as time went on, the chemistry started poisoning the good things that were in the soil. And so, today, I’m called out to look at farms where the guy’s production has dropped off dramatically and the soil is virtually dead.

John: When you say the production has dropped off dramatically, what have you observed?

Michael: Looking at ten-year crop insurance records, the guy was getting 190 to 210 bushels per acre and had around a 200-bushel 10-year average. Excellent, excellent yields. Now it’s getting 70- and 80-bushel yields. That’s dramatic, and it will put him out of business very quickly.

John: That is very dramatic.

Michael: This isn’t just happening on a little field here, a farm there. I’m seeing 8,000- and 10,000-acre farms that this has happened to. And that really, really woke me up. I started seeing this about five years ago. I’ve been working with these growers who are asking me whether I can help them remediate that. Can I help bring the farm back? And in a three- to four-year period, we’ve had pretty good success. I would say we’re back now at where we were when this crashed.

The farmers are excited that they can now take it to a different level—to the 250-bushel range or greater. And they can see growth and potential and doing what they’re doing. They’ve moved away from GMO crops, and they’ve particularly moved away from glyphosate.

Organic matter – the “constitution” of the soil

Many reference the Albrecht papers but it seems few have read them, which is distinctly unfortunate, considering he pioneered many of the soil nutrition management guidelines that are still used today, a hundred years later.

When we manage applied fertilizers and amendments, it is very important to consider the nutrient release curves, and time applications so we have the greatest nutrient release at the moment of peak crop demand. Nutrient release curves should dictate whether a product is applied in fall, spring, or after planting.

Of course, when we have abundant organic matter and functional biology delivering all of the crop’s nutrition requirements as the system was designed to function, such close management finesse is no longer required. William Albrecht described this first:

Organic matter – the “constitution” of the soils1

The most neglected and most important chemo-dynamic factor of the soil is the organic matter. Organic matter may be said to be the constitution of the soil. As a definition of the word constitution in that usage, we take its meaning when the doctor consoles the friends of a patient in serious illness by reminding them that the patient has a good constitution. According to its meaning, as used in medical practice, a good constitution is the capacity of the individual to survive in spite of the doctors rather than because of them. The organic matter in the soil has been the capacity for our soils and our crops to survive in spite of the soil doctors, rather than because of them.

Your attention has already been called to the importance of the organic molecule when it is on the clay. There is also the tremendous significance of the organic matter as a season’s release of plant nutrition. This release is timed to increase during the growing season or become larger as the temperature goes higher. The microbial activities follow Vant Hoff’s law and double their rate of decay of the organic residues with every 10° rise in centigrade temperature. Nature has always been fertilizing with the organic matter which is dropped back to the soil from the previous plant generations which have died in place. Organic matter is still the most reliable fertilizer in terms of the nutrient ratios and of the time when maximums must be delivered.

Another aspect of organic matter about which we probably haven’t thought much is the value of some organic compounds in cycle, that is they may be dropped back as crop residues and the next crops roots may be taking them up, using them and dropping them back again. Plants need the various ring compounds in very small amounts to make some of the essential amino acids. They need the phenol ring in phenylalanine, one of the essential amino acids, essential for plant growth as well as for animals and ourselves. They need the indole ring, which is a phenol ring plus a side ring. It is the compound which gives the odor to feces when the digestion acts on the tryptophan of which that ring is a part. Tryptophan is the most commonly deficient amino acid, and is one of marked complexity.

1. Walters, C. The Albrecht Papers, Volume 1–Foundation concepts. Acres USA, (1975). Page 67

PS If you are reading this post on social media, there is a good probability you are not seeing everything I post. You can subscribe to the blog here for an email in your inbox each morning I post something new.

2020-03-16T14:13:13-05:00March 13th, 2020|Tags: , , |

Direct absorption of molecules

The implications of plant absorption of large molecules and endocytosis are that the present mainstream model of agronomy based on measuring and managing nutrient ions is significantly incomplete, and can not be the basis for a regenerative agriculture without additional testing and management paradigms.

Bargyla Rateaver was one of the first, if not the first advocate for plant absorption of large molecules and endocytosis in North America that I am aware of. The Organic Method Primer she authored is under-appreciated for the encyclopedia of practical and agronomic knowledge it is.

Here are Bargyla’s thoughts on the subject, updated in 1993:

Direct Absorption1

Since the disastrous integration of manmade chemicals into agriculture, a huge structure of error has been built upon the false premise that “only ions can be absorbed”. Based on this, a measurement of soil and recommendation for soil have utilized the concept of “cation exchange” and the “CEC” has been the be-all of soil testing. Small structures such as ions are said to be “able to cross the membrane”. Discussions of the varied means for this fill textbook chapters on the subject of absorption.

We now know that this is all passé, an outdated formula promoted by the greedy minds of the chemical dispensers. There have been a number of investigators over the years who have documented that entire molecules were absorbed, but only small molecules. W. Flaig1 in 1968, speaking at the Vatican’s convocation on organic matter and soil fertility, entitled his work “Uptake of organic substances from soil organic matter by plants and their influence on metabolism”. In Japan, Satoshi Mori and Naoko Nishizawa proved that barley roots preferred to take up organic nitrogen compounds if offered these as well as inorganic forms.2

In the chapter on cover crops, we refer to Fritz Went, who saw in Amazon jungles that mycorrhizae absorb nutrients directly from decaying leaves on the ground. Nora M. Stark, who worked with him, in those early days before endocytosis was known, made the penetrating remark: “It is possible, that in extremely poor soils, mycorrhizae are important in supplying nutrients directly from litter to living roots”. She also mentioned that, in one case, she had “traced a hyphae from a dead fruit into a living feeder root cell”.3

Hainsworth notes, on pg 27, that carnivorous plants absorb digestion products of their prey apparently without reducing them to simple inorganic compounds.

We know now that whole molecules of any size can be taken into cells, and clusters of molecules that are particles, by endocytosis (and fluid phase endocytosis) via coated pits–extremely clever devices by an omniscient Creator: the cell membrane invaginates, trapping molecules on the clathrin-coated membrane surface, thereby forming vesicles to enclose such molecules and carry them through the cell, dropping them en route, and/or dumping unwanted or storage molecules in the vacuoles, finally returning to the cell membrane from which they came. (Plastic beads and bacteria enter via uncoated membrane regions; this takes energy. Large algal cells are taken up by fusion with the larger host protoplast, note L. C. Fowke et al.)

As there are hundreds of these coated pits and ensuing vesicles being constantly formed on cell membranes, the provision for cell absorption of compounds (and clusters of them constituting particles) is amply demonstrated; whole molecule absorption is not a small, erratic, exceptional, unusual phenomenon. On the contrary, those crowds of pits indicate that this is one of the Creator’s normal ways of circulating whatever cells need from one to another, from the environment to the cell’s interior metabolism4, or out of it to the environment, by exocytosis.

This new knowledge enables agriculture and horticulture to dispense, forever, with the theories of ion absorption. Long ago M. Dikkers told us that the plant deals with molecules, not ions.

It seems, however, that agricultural academia has either not yet caught up with the new research data, or minimizes it, or simply cannot bear to acknowledge that the monstrous pile of data accumulated throughout the world’s agricultural efforts can be wrong. One author, aware of endocytosis, nevertheless said it must be simply an adjunct to the usual ion absorption theory!

We are therefore the first to have introduced to agriculture the information and concerning the actual facts of how plants absorb through coated pits, distribute by smooth vesicles and exude via smooth vesicles, and the repercussions this implies for husbandry. It totally reverses dependence on the worthless Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC) tests, to which even organic growers still desperately cling.

We firmly believe that this discovery is the second great find of this century, second to only the disclosure/explanation of the DNA/RNA spiral, as it affects worldwide agricultural practice.

It seems that academia can afford to admit a previous error, if such does not impinge on financial benefits. In 1983 University of California researchers in San Francisco acknowledged that, although it had always been thought that a cell nucleus formed by highly complicated processes, it actually could form “spontaneously around any DNA in the cell. regardless of source, independently of genes”.

Such a nucleus had a membrane “identical to normal nuclear membrane…double layer of fat molecules pierced by many pores through which large molecules are transported”.

When confronted with his own microscopic view proving that granules can enter cells, Christopher Somerville of Michigan State University, expressed surprise. He looked at cells of an Arabidopsis thaliana hybrid, into which a plastic. PHB (polyhydroxybutyrate), made naturally by a bacterium, had been engineered. Small amounts of the plastic were made by the hybrid, in leaves, stems, roots. That the plastic occurred as particles, not ions, was undeniable, because the stained particles showed up as red dots. The dots would have had to be particles, as microscopes today are not yet able to show individual molecules (or ions!) sited in cells.

“The researchers expected to find PHB in only the cytoplasm of the plant cells, but it appears in the nucleus and vacuoles as well. That’s mysterious to us because these compartments are surrounded by membranes and it appears that the granules may be able to cross through”.5 Two strange aspects appear here: that there should be any doubt that the granules entered the cell, and that it should be surprising that they “crossed” the membranes of the cell organelles, when they must have first “crossed” the cell plasma membrane. The idea of ion entrance is implicit in the word “cross”, a concept the academic mind apparently finds almost impossible to forget; all relevant theories are based on it.

Obviously, the granules entered by endocytosis.

Much is known about this process in animal and human cells, but very little about it in plants, since there are only a handful of researchers around the world, who are working on it. Only three of them made it possible for us to show you electron micrographs depicting the stages in progress of molecules going into cells.

Plant cells differ from all others in having a cellulose wall, giving a plant rigidity; it is made of a meshwork of fibrils. It is apparently not difficult for items to pass through the cell wall, a mere tangle of microfibrils of cellulose, and there has not been any mass of data to prove or disprove this.

Inside this cellulose-mesh wall is a membrane. All living cells are surrounded by such a membrane, called in plants the cell’s plasma membrane.

No one seems to think a molecule has trouble getting through the cellulose mesh; it is confrontation with the membrane that was thought to pose all the problems. It is passage through this that has prompted so many scientists to devise explanatory theories.

In spite of all the theories, no one has ever seen the ions (such as K+), cited in soil tests, go through the membrane. Now we can track the progress of molecule masses by means of electron microscope pictures.

1 Inst, für Biochemie des Bodens der Forschungsanstalt für Landwirtschaft, Braunschweig, Germany.

2 Faculty of Agriculture, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.

3 N. M. Stark “Mycorrhizae and Nutrient Cycling in the Tropics” in Mycorrhizae, Proceedings of the first North American Conference on Mycorrhizae, April 1969, ed. Edward Hacskaylo. Misc. Pubn 1198, USDA Forest Service, 1971.

4 Another very clever system is that of plasmodesmata, openings in contiguous cell walls, through which protoplasm (cytoplasm) is continuous from cell to cell, so that materials can move through these special, narrow passages.

5 BioOptions Vol 3 (3) pg. 2

1. Rateaver, B. & Rateaver, G. Organic Method Primer Update: A Practical Explanation : the how and why for the Beginner and the Experience. (The Rateavers, 1993). Page 21

Matching seed with soil quality

Much of the available genetics for commodity crops today are bred to perform well on imbalanced soil and are unlikely to perform as well on biologically healthy soils as varieties bred for those environments.

Here is a quote from Arden Andersen, Science in Agriculture –

Now, a poor seed will not produce good seed on poor soil, but it will produce the quantity of poor seed it was bred to produce. A poor seed on good soil results in impedance to the flow of energy back into the soil. A good seed on a poor soil causes impedance to the flow out of the soil into the plant. Therefore, seed matching is very important. The analogy can be made to two people talking to each other on their CB radios. If both CB’s are tuned to the same frequency, communication is successful. If one or the other is out of tune and can either transmit or receive but cannot do both, communication is unsuccessful. I have experienced seed matching on many acres, and without exception, those farmers employing anhydrous ammonia, potassium chloride, must use certain hybrids to obtain the desired volume of yield. The feed value is very poor, but that is of little concern to these farmers because they are selling the crop. Farmers who have well-balanced soils on biological mineralization programs will fail using the same hybrids. They must use seed grown on similar programs in order to achieve maximum efficiency.1

Back to John ~

My personal experience with alfalfa has been that the varieties bred and optimized for biological systems exceed the performance of varieties bred in the standard system across al soil types and management systems. However, mainstream alfalfa fertilization practices may not be quite as systemically damaging as annual commodity crop production.

I believe there is a lot of eagerness and desire in the market for more vigorous varieties, bred for biological systems, in many crops.

1. Andersen, A. B. Science in agriculture: Advanced methods for sustainable farming. (Acres USA, 2000). Page 83

2020-03-16T14:08:28-05:00February 28th, 2020|Tags: , , , , |

The contributions of soil biology to plant nutrition

Have been known for decades, but have not gained traction in a business environment that offers no economic incentives to agribusiness for reducing or eliminating the need for applied fertilizers. Applied fertilizers produce an apparent magical response, and we are discovering that is indeed magical since it can not be sustained into the future.

Soil Microorganisms and Higher Plants is a classic, and worth reading if you desire to understand more of what soil biology can deliver, here are a few excerpts:

The biogeny of soil is the most significant indicator of its fertility. As soon as the activity of a microbial population begins in a rock, the first signs of fertility are manifested. The degree of soil fertility is determined by the intensity of the life processes of the microbial population.

It is impossible to solve problems of pedology, not to speak of agriculture and plant growing, without taking into account the microflora of soil. Plants are a very strong ecological factor, selecting certain species of bacteria, fungi, actinomycetes and other inhabitants of soil. As a result of wrong agricultural practices and crop rotation, the soil becomes infested with harmful microbial forms. By use of suitable plants in the crop rotation, one may change the microflora of soil in the desired direction and eliminate harmful organisms, in other words – restore the health of soil. Page 2 – 3

Increased accumulation of microbes in the root soil was first observed by Hiltner in 1904. He proposed the term  “rhizosphere”. In investigating the root system of various plants, Hiltner came to the conclusion that the accumulation of microbes in this area was not accidental and it was caused by the biological activity of the roots. Page 281

The microflora of the root zone is of great importance in plant nutrition. Growing near or on the roots, microorganisms, together with the plants, create a special zone – the rhizosphere. Soil in this zone differs in its physical, chemical, and biological properties from that outside the rhizosphere. The interactions between microbial species and between microbes and plants result in the formation of plant nutrient compounds. Substances present in the soil are subjected to a greater or lesser extent of processing before their absorption by the roots. The plants do not absorb those compounds which are characteristic of soil outside the rhizosphere but rather they absorb metabolic products of the rhizosphere. The rhizosphere microflora prepares organic and inorganic nutrients for the plants. Page 264

In the rhizosphere, iron, manganese, and other metals occur in combination with organic compounds formed by microbes. Amino acids, organic acids, and other metabolites of microbes form stable complex compounds. They are utilized by plants and used as a source of specific organometallic nutrients. These are found in greatest concentration in the rhizosphere and are preserved in the soil for long times. Page 281

Free PDFs of the book can be found on our reading list here.

2020-03-16T14:14:50-05:00February 27th, 2020|Tags: , , , , |

Can plants develop their own bacterial symbionts?

Our principle task as growers is to farm soil microbes. The larger and more vigorous a population of microbes we can grow in our soil profiles, the more nutritious and healthier our crops will become. Soil biology can supply all of a crops nutritional requirements when they are well managed and well supported.

A recent fascinating book that connects many dots in the historical research which have not come to mainstream attention is Herwig Pommeresche’s Humusphere. Translated from German, it is a treasure trove of references to European research on plant, soil, and microbial interactions which have been ignored in mainstream agronomy.

Here is an excerpt on the topic of remutation, how plants can develop bacterial cells from mitochondria and chloroplasts:

~

Recognizing that endocytosis takes place in plants is an important piece of support for the microbiological model of the cycle of living material, which includes microorganisms.

But there is also another area of microbiological research that seems to have completely lost the attention of the modern scientific community. It essentially represents the second half of the endosymbiosis theory developed by Lynn Margulis and the adherents of the Gaia hypothesis. This is remutation, postulated by Hugo Schanderl. In 1947, Schanderl1 had already succeeded in breeding and regenerating remutating, as he called it – living, viable microorganisms out of certain cell components, such as mitochondria and chloroplasts, from plant tissue after it died. These experiments showed that any living cell is capable of releasing new life after it has died.

Schanderl described every mutation in agricultural soil bacteriology as follows in 19702: “When a plant is buried, the soil is enriched with bacteria not only because a vast number of existing soil bacteria decompose and break down the plant corpse, multiplying tremendously in the process, but also because the soil is enriched with bacteria from higher plants as they break themselves down. Certainly, bacteria present in the soil also find abundant nutrients during composting, which allows them to multiply. But, as can be experimentally demonstrated, no bacteria need to enter from the outside whatsoever for decomposition to take place and a breeding ground of bacteria to arise.”

He continues in the same article: “A significant proportion of the bacteria regenerated from plant cell organelles present in cow dung return to the planting soil. Unlike artificial fertilizer, this kind of fertilizer is filled with life and enriches the soil with bacterial life, increasing it’s fertility.”

After more than fifty years of being ignored and denied by the sciences, the remutation model is now being indirectly confirmed by cellular and molecular research. Autonomous DNA that is independent of the cell’s nucleus has been found in both mitochondria and chloroplasts, which has led to acknowledgement of the endosymbiosis theory. In evolutionary terms, this also describes how ancient single-celled microorganisms relinquished their independence in favor of organizing into larger cells and, in a manner of speaking, were relegated into subordinate cell components.

Schanderl’s remutation model implies that all decomposing organic substances, as well as all seeds that are starting the development of new life, are most likely capable of reshaping their own cell components into autonomous microorganisms such that living plants can employ their help – if they reabsorb them from their surroundings – to carry on their metabolic processes. The question also arises as to what extent living cells are even able to absorb an exclusive diet of inorganic, water-soluble salt ions. Page 43-45

1. Rudloff, C. F. & Schanderl, H. Befruchtungsbiologie der Obstgewächse und ihre Anwendung in der Praxis. (1945).

2. Schanderl, H. Über die Isolierung von Bakterien aus normalem Pflanzengewebe und ihre vermutliche Herkunft. (1951).

2020-03-16T14:10:13-05:00February 26th, 2020|Tags: , , , |

Treat the patient, not the lab test

We all know friends or have heard the stories of people who are not well, and visit a doctor, only to be told “Sorry, there is nothing wrong with you.”

A quote from Arden Andersen I have really appreciated is “treat the patient, and not the lab test.”

We need to do the same for our crops. when a crop is susceptible to disease or insects, and the lab reports seem to be perfect, the lab reports are obviously not reflecting reality well.

In these cases, you treat the crop, and not the lab reports. This is particularly a problem when relying on soil analysis. To such a degree that I can safely say there is no correlation between nutrients reported on most soil reports and actual crop absorption.

Treat the crop, not the lab report.

2020-03-16T14:04:12-05:00February 19th, 2020|Tags: , , |
Go to Top