Thursday, November 26, 2009

The guy who writes the soil minerals blog I love (I think his name is Michael Astera) finally had some new posts this month.  He doesn’t post often, but when he does it’s always good stuff. (He also has a website soilminerals.com which has a lot of good info too.)

Anyway, one thing he said caught my attention. In previous posts he’s pointed out that one of the (few) benefits of conventional agriculture is that if a consumer eats some broccoli that was grown on minerally-deficient soils from one location, he’ll also likely be eating, say, peppers that were grown on mineral-rich soils somewhere else.  Because conventional agriculture brings foods in from such far-flung places, as long as you’re eating a good variety of foods, you’re unlikely to become deficient in essential minerals. But if you’re growing all of your own food you stand a very good chance of developing deficiencies since the spot you choose to farm is unlikely to have optimal levels of everything you need. That’s why re-mineralization is so important. What he mentioned in his recent posts concerned grazing animals. He said that in the past we used to hunt grazing animals who regularly migrated vast distances, thus eating from a wide variety of soils. Now all of our animals are confined to relatively small acreages and so they can’t achieve a healthy mineral balance.

Think about it—all of the vast herds of animals that once covered the earth, now dwindling and dwindling and confined by human developments and fences, limiting their range. Unable to freely migrate, they can’t become the fullest and truest manifestations of who they’re meant to be, and earth and sky can’t fully meet within them. And then we eat them and we’re imbalanced too. Animals instinctively know what they need for optimal health, but when they’re penned in they can’t migrate to find it.

Then someone in the comment section said the following, “I read recently in Charles Walters’ Eco-Farm that test after test has shown that hybrid corn is not even able to take up trace minerals from the soil.” This sort of ties in with my question of whether sweet corn is sweet because it grows on minerally-depleted soil. Would it be less sweet on optimal soils? Apparently not. It seems that hybridization has so damaged it that it can’t even access the soil minerals now.

All very interesting stuff. I want to learn more.

Next year I want to test my soil and re-mineralize it and get a Brix refractometer so I can chart my results. It would be fun then to start a garden service to test people’s gardens, write soil prescriptions and help them maximize nutrition in the things they grow.