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    Soil and Your Health: Healthy Soil Is Vital to Your Health
    Soil and Your Health: Healthy Soil Is Vital to Your Health
    Soil and Your Health: Healthy Soil Is Vital to Your Health
    Ebook125 pages2 hours

    Soil and Your Health: Healthy Soil Is Vital to Your Health

    By Beatrice Trum Hunter

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    About this ebook

    The quality of your food depends on the quality of the soil in which it is grown. Is organically produced food superior to conventionally grown food? How do earthworms and trace minerals benefit soil, and the food and feed grown on it? How do intentionally applied fertilizers, pesticides, and sludge, as well as inadvertent contaminants, affect soil? This book is important reading for understanding how quality soil relates to good health.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurner Publishing Company
    Release dateJan 1, 2004
    ISBN9781591206392
    Soil and Your Health: Healthy Soil Is Vital to Your Health
    Author

    Beatrice Trum Hunter

    Beatrice Trum Hunter has written more than 30 books on food issues, including whole foods, food adulteration, and aditives. Her most recent books include The Whole Foods Primer, Probiotic Foods for Good Health, and Infectious Connections.

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      Book preview

      Soil and Your Health - Beatrice Trum Hunter

      HEALTHY SOIL BUILDS HEALTHY BODIES

      To the average viewer, soil may appear dark or light; dry, moist, or muddy; but certainly inert. Yet, invisible to the naked eye are the many ongoing functions that make soil a virtual nutrition factory, teeming with life. Mixed with water, soil delivers vitamins, minerals, and other beneficial substances to foods grown or raised on it. These products give us the nutrients we need to be healthy. Yet, today’s conventional agricultural practices ignore the importance of soil health and its contribution to human health. The routine application of toxic pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers and other widespread practices, such as the use of sludge, are weakening the health and nutritional vitality of our soil and food.

      We may regard soil as unalterable and able to absorb limitless amounts of toxins. Not so. In the twentieth century, the millennial-old closed system of agriculture was changed radically by the application of chemicals to fertilize soil and others to inhibit the proliferation of destructive pests. Farmers abandoned their traditional use of animal and crop wastes to maintain soil fertility in favor of these new chemicals. Soil began to lose its integrity and capacity to regenerate organic matter faster than it was being lost. Precious topsoil was lost, and widespread soil erosion developed. The experience of the dust bowl in the early twentieth century, and the more recent global dust storms, are the end result. As farmers embraced these new practices, some of their disturbing consequences largely went unnoticed. Now we can trace living microbes, viruses, toxic metals, radioactive byproducts, and dried fecal matter carried thousands of miles from their origin, and deposited elsewhere. Scientists have been able to identify soil and its contaminants as one cause of the worldwide rise in health problems such as asthma and respiratory illnesses.

      Reforming our current unwise farming practices is a formidable task. Farming methods must be changed so that once more our soil will provide crops and livestock with sustenance for human health. Soil and Your Health presents the issues concisely and offers practical information about how we can solve the problems. The more we appreciate the worth of healthy soil, the better we will be able to achieve a healthy and nutritious food supply for ourselves and for future generations.

      SOIL AND YOUR HEALTH

      In the Book of Job, one is advised to Speak to the earth, it shall teach thee. What can we learn from soil? What does it teach us?

      First, we must examine it. Unfortunately, some people regard soil only as dirt, with no recognition that it sustains life.

      In examining soil, take a handful and crumble it. Is it hard-packed and heavy? Or is it spongy and friable? Is it light or dark colored? Its physical appearance gives some indication of its qualities. Then, dig some soil with a spade. Do you find sweet-smelling humus on top? Or is it light-colored and sandy? Or is it like clay? Are earthworms wriggling in it?

      The physical appearance of soil reveals some of its characteristics. Its structure, texture, consistency, porosity, color, and other features indicate some essential properties. Chemical analysis yields more information.

      Soil varies considerably from time to time, from place to place, and even from field to field. Soil formation is dynamic, a living process. Gardeners and farmers can vary the proportions of organic and mineral matter, water, and air, and change the composition of their soil. Even if soil is poor, with good fertilizers, soil can be improved greatly, and become far more fertile.

      In nature’s original settings of prairie grasslands and virgin forests, organic material was supplied constantly by the native flora and fauna supported by the soil. Beneficial organisms in the soil continually converted dying substances into humus and maintained a permanent state of soil fertility.

      In the agricultural setting, however, the flora and fauna are removed from soil with each new planting. To maintain soil fertility, it is necessary to supply raw organic materials from which humus can be made in the soil itself, or to develop humus in compost, outside the soil and apply the compost to the soil.

      When a closed system of agriculture returns all wastes to the land, high levels of fertility can be sustained. However, the agricultural revolution, with the introduction of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, wrought radical changes to our farm land. The practice of returning all wastes to the land was abandoned. The accelerated growth of plants had the effect of speeding up the rate at which humus was exhausted. As this depletion proceeded in the soil, parasites and diseases began to appear in crops. Soils continued to lose organic matter at a faster pace than the organic matter was being replaced.

      The infestation and damage inflicted by insect pests and plant diseases cannot be divorced from these agricultural practices. As noted by William A. Albrecht, Ph.D., from the Department of Soils, at the University of Missouri’s Experiment Station years ago, With some of our most troublesome crop pests, there is a direct relation between insect numbers and soil fertility; the less fertile, the more insects. Our experience and studies over the last several years have proved this. As we over-crop [intensive farming], single-crop [monoculture], and permit the damage of soil erosion, we grow more crops of harmful troublesome pests than we need to have.

      Humus

      Humus has been defined both as the product of living material, and the source of living material. Humus is the product of decomposed plant and animal residues achieved through the action of microorganisms in the soil. Organic materials are the raw commodities from which humus can be produced. They become humus after soil organisms have broken them down. Humus consists of various decaying plant materials, (leaves, dead roots, and stems), straw, compost, manure, and bodies of microbes, bacteria, and algae residing in soil. Humus is a vital material capable of restoring and maintaining a vigorous soil. The spongy texture of humus allows good aeration throughout the entire profile of soil and improves its structure. This condition increases the soil’s ability to hold moisture and prevents nutrients from being leached out by erosion. Humus is essential for plant growth. It makes all growing plants more resistant to pests and plant diseases. Also, it improves the quality, flavor, and appearance of crops.

      Although soil may appear inert to the human eye, in reality it teems with life. A mere teaspoonful of soil may contain billions of living organisms upon which plants depend for growth and health. Some of these organisms decompose complex matter into simpler forms. Others synthesize available nitrates, and remove surpluses. As nitrates are gradually released, they give plants a continuous supply of nitrogen (a nutrient). This supply is adequate but not excessive. On the other hand, nitrogen-containing chemical fertilizers release large amounts of nitrates to plants and predispose them to many diseases.

      One soil bacterium, azotobacter, can convert atmospheric nitrogen into plant food. Some auximones and other growth-promoting substances play roles similar to vitamins and hormones for plants; other organisms in humus produce antibiotics.

      These helpful soil organisms are stimulated by organic matter and flourish in humus. However, they can be destroyed by the acidic pH (acid-alkaline balance) of chemical fertilizers. For example, beneficial predaceous fungi have been found to be highly effective as controllers of potato nematodes (eelworms), but function only in the presence of organic matter. An incident in Lincolnshire, England, dramatized the importance of organic matter in the soil. Lincolnshire was an area famous for its fertile land and livestock until potatoes became a lucrative cash crop. As more pastureland was converted to this one crop, less stable manure was available, and potato farmers resorted to chemical fertilizers. Gradually, the organic content of the soil dropped. Monoculture continued with the potato crop, and an agricultural disaster occurred when potato nematodes destroyed the crops.

      The potato nematode cyst is a structure enclosing from 50 to 600 eelworm eggs. When they emerge as larvae, they attack the roots of potato plants. The cysts may remain dormant in soil for many years and do not threaten plant life. The cysts only hatch when they come into contact with an exudate, a substance secreted by the roots of potato plants. The secretion is extremely potent even when it is highly diluted.

      Many attempts were made to combat the frustrating spread of potato nematodes in Lincolnshire. The cysts resisted all but the strongest chemicals, which also would have killed the crop. Finally, the prime factor became recognized: the necessity to maintain the organic content in the soil.

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