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“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
Wendell Barry
This weekend a friend on Facebook posted a link to an article. This lead me on a hunt for similar articles on the topic. Food Soil and our Nutrition I found three articles that all spoke to how our food even organically grown is missing nutritional benefits compared to food from 70 years ago. This is due to our soil being depleted by traditional agricultural methods. In one article, selenium which is known to help battle the growth of cancerous cells in our bodies is becoming absent from our food. Artificial fertilizers, petrochemicals used in agriculture may provide NPK(nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) but though that is what is needed to grow healthy plants, it is not the sum of the whole. There are 27 trace elements that plants also absorb which then can make its way into our bodies to help our immune systems. But these have been depleted from our soil. We haven't been feeding our soils. Steve Solomon founder of Territorial Seeds back in the 70's has spent his life working the land and understanding what the soil gives to us. His book "Gardening When it Counts" speaks to the power of the soil. Initially when I read it I thought this guy knows his stuff, but it was just some guy's take on how we should garden. After reading these articles his book has caused me to take his recommendations more seriously. These articles speak to the rise of diseases and illnesses in humans since the advent of modern agricultural methods. How certain trace elements are all but gone in the soils. One such element is calcium. If you have deficiencies as everyone knows leads to bone loss and osteoporosis, but it also leads to depression, problems with blood clotting and heart palpitations.Vegetarians used to be able to get all their nutrition from the food they ate but now they can't because those vital nutrients are missing from the soil. You can also look and say that it is also missing from our meats too as our animals are eating processed food that is also missing those trace elements. Read the following articles and you will understand how we growis just as important as what we grow.
Here are the three articles you should review:
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