This is an excerpt from Charles Walters’ Eco-Farm — An Acres U.S.A. Primer, available from the Acres U.S.A. bookstore at The Acres U.S.A. Bookstore
Plants ought to enjoy perfect health. They keep regular hours. They don’t smoke or drink hard liquor. They’re programmed by their genetic codes to grow and produce on a certain timetable. Yet somehow nature’s clock often goes wrong, the fruit fails to arrive, the plants may even lodge or die, with the farmer’s efforts going down the tube.
1. Guerrilla war
Why is one farmer successful in producing crops, another a failure, even when they have the same resources and the same soil? What is the best way to farm? Does the fertility management really underwrite the health of a crop, and therefore the health of animal and man? These are questions farmers ask each day, and the answers are usually wanting. Nor do the great myths of agriculture come to the rescue. The Food and Drug Administration started carrying on a guerilla war with the organic gardening people many years ago as a part of a refurbish-the-findings-of-medicine drive. In the process the FDA developed some fairly naive ideas about farming, soil systems, and why the plant ought to grow properly (even though it doesn’t). Some of these ideas were even published in the Federal Register as findings of facts to be accepted under the pain of law, if not mortal sin.
Item. “There is no relation between the vitamin content of foods and the chemical composition of the soil in which they are grown.”
Item. “Scientifically, it is inaccurate to state that the quality of soil in the U.S. causes abnormally low concentrations of vitamins or minerals in the food supply produced in this country.”
It was probably not enough for the organic people to answer the above by saying, perhaps correctly, that FDA people had been on white bread a little too long. The bureau people in fact leaned on the 1959 Yearbook of Agriculture, in which USDA blandly proclaimed that “Lack of fertilizer may reduce the yield of a crop, but not the amount of nutrients in the food produced.” It seems that up in Ithaca, New York, some scientists took a worn out piece of ground and ran a test. They fertilized one plot with nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Otherwise the two plots were hand led alike. After testing the results they found both crops more or less alike in nutrient content, except that the fertilized plot produced more. Milk from animals fed production from the two plots revealed no significant difference. In due time the experiment became an entry in the Journal of the American Medical Association—thus scientific evidence, if you will, that poor soil will produce quality food.
Not many people can accept this breath-taking absurdity as science. Even workaday farmers know that not all soils have an ample supply of calcium, nitrogen, phosphorus and a long list of elements, including the trace elements. Earth minerals are required to synthesize amino acids, proteins, vitamins, enzymes, lipids, octacosanols, phosphatides and the rest of the building blocks used to construct plant life. Plants and microbes— even those in the cow’s gut—synthesize the amino acids that make up proteins. “Both plants and animals assemble their proteins to provide their reproductive functions,” noted Professor William A. Albrecht, “since these are the only compounds through which the stream of life can flow.”
The stream of life in plants has to do with more than providing bins and bushels. Plants may not smoke or drink hard liquor, but they suffer from lack of moisture and endure nutrient shortages or imbalance because of the physical, biological and chemical climate in which they live. When plants suffer, it shows up in the vitamin content and mineral content of food.
2. Health and light
Many plants grow poorly as long as the soil fails to warm up. During this period in early spring, very little nitrogen is served up by proteins in the soil’s organic matter. One can see pasture grasses literally starved for want of nitrogen. Then one day the soil wakes up, and the landscape is painted green overnight.
| SINGLE FACTOR ANALYSIS A caution is in order as you continue to read and study this primer. To be sure, light affects plant growth, synthesis of food materials, and seed production according to the type of plant involved. And it may be—as John Ott says—that “possibly the basic principles of photochemistry in connection with the process of photosynthesis do carry over from plant life into animal life, but in a greatly improved way. If the basic chemistry of the human body responds to glandular actions controlled by the pituitary gland responding to light energy, then—as with plants—the characteristics of the light energy would be a very important factor.” Obviously, these observations call for answers in an area where the questions haven’t even been framed yet. And, indeed, science cannot get the answers until it knows the questions. In any case, light is only one factor—one of the several environmental factors that preside over crop response in the field. Any plant in a natural environment has to live with natural temperature, high or low soil moisture, during bright, dark or cloudy weather, under polluted skies, whatever. The plant does not respond to any of the environmental factors separately. It responds to all factors as they are blended into the grand mosaic of the composite environment. |
Ambient air temperatures also figure in plant performance. Photosynthesis comes to a halt at night because the chloroplasts settle down for a sleep of sorts. There is a word for this—photoperiodism—and scientists who use that word speak of daily rhythms, biological clocks, and the like. USDA scientists H. A. Bortwick and S. B. Hendricks found, as early as 1948, that red and far-red light—that is, visible light almost in the infrared part of the spectrum—regulates plant growth. They found a protein which runs the light switch in plants, so to speak. They proved that the molecule styled phytochrome is triggered by light. It presides over the plant life process—its germination, flowering, growth. Even in sleep, respiration and burning of sugar continues. Good Iowa farmers will tell you that they can hear the corn grow at night, and they can. Entomologist and philosopher Phil Callahan has watched bamboo growing. “After a good electrical storm you can sit down level with the fresh little bamboo shoots and actually see them get longer” Callahan said. But when air temperatures soar beyond endurance, respiration and sugar burning are affected simply because too much sugar is lost.
“Light exerts a profound effect on plants and on all animal life,” John Ott once told Acres U.S.A. readers via the medium of a taped interview. His two books My Ivory Cellar and Health and Light furbish and refurbish this thesis.
“Sunlight is a broad, continuous spectrum peaking a little in the blue-green. It then cuts off abruptly in the ultraviolet at about 2.900 angstroms because of the filtering effect of the earth’s atmosphere,” Ott wrote in Health and Light. An angstrom is a unit of length so small it demanded a name of its own. Technically speaking it is one ten-billionth of a meter, and is used in optics and to measure light, something a farmer hardly concerns himself with. Yet a farmer has to be concerned with light.
Using time-lapse photography, Ott has been able to show the streaming of protoplasm with cells of a living plant leaf. This has to do with the photosynthesis we discussed in the first lesson of this book. Air, water, sunshine and a few earth minerals make it possible for plants to create food energy in the presence of an appropriate temperature.
But when the sun sets, photosynthesis stops. Long periods of cloudy weather and faltering sunlight intensity not only affect plant life, they help nature decide which plants can survive in climes with long and short days. Modern technology, particularly weather modification and industrial development, has a profound effect on sunlight availability, ergo crop production. The consequences of inserting carbon black and other nucleating agents into the atmosphere by climate and weather modifiers escapes instant comprehension. But the result of heavy and concentrated industrialization has been a matter of record. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. has reported a 14% loss of overall light intensity over the past 60 years. Mount Wilson observatory in California has published figures to the effect that all farm acres have lost 10% of average sunlight intensity during the last 50 years, and 26% reduction in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. Some virus problems and aphids brought on in part by inadequate sunlight have in fact been controlled by placing light reflective aluminum foil on the ground beneath the plants.
Poultry growers have long realized that the light in a chicken’s eye stimulates the pituitary and thereby increases egg production. Ott says the pituitary is the balance wheel of the entire glandular system, not only in chickens, but in men as well.
Indeed, Ott’s experiments tell us something we ought to know, even if we can do little about it. In one experiment he photographed chloroplasts within Elodea grass as they responded to different wavelengths of light energy. When the Elodea grass was exposed “to the full spectrum of all the wavelengths of natural sunlight, all the chloroplasts would stream in an orderly fashion around and around from one end of the cell to the other. However, if the sunlight was filtered through ordinary window glass that blocked most of the ultraviolet, or if an ordinary incandescent microscope light which is lacking in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum was used, some of the chloroplasts would drop out of the streaming pattern and remain immobile near the center or off in one comer of the cell of the leaf.” Under red light, chloroplasts would drop out of the streaming pattern or take a shortcut, not touching all the bases. But when the color filters were removed, the chloroplasts would go back to their normal streaming procedure.
