It’s the Soil That Feeds Us: Climates Make Soils to Feed or to Fail Us

INTRODUCTION FOR SERIES

Quoted from Dr. Jonathon Forman, Columbus, Ohio

Dr. William A. Albrecht, Professor of Soils at the University of Missouri, insists that “food is basic, of universal interest and international concern. Food, furthermore, is fabricated fertility.” Albrecht points out that, within the plant, carbohydrates are built of air, water, and energy from the sun operating through the chlorophyll within the leaf. This fabrication is the great agricultural chemical industry that is agriculture itself.

Protein building, on the other hand, Albrecht says, is a constructive performance, more deep-seated in the plant. Proteins are, roughly, some carbohydrates into which nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulphur have been dramatically compounded. Just as potassium coming from the soil seems to act as a kind of carbohydrate catalyst, so calcium plays a catalytic role in the formation of protein. All life–plant and animal–analyzes about five percent mineral. In other words, all living things are 95 percent air, water, and sunshine and 5 percent soil. Since the part from the soil furnishes us with our skeletons and the spark plugs (catalysts) for the most of the vital processes in our bodies, soil fertility, or the ability of the soil to deliver minerals is of the greatest importance in all considerations of our national nutrition.

The mobilizing of soil fertility for plant nutrition, and thus for man indirectly, is graphically portrayed by Dr. Albrecht. The sunshine, the rain, and the water come to the growing plant, but the plant must send its roots down after the minerals. The hungry roots of the plant come in contact with the colloidal clay or the soil humus upon which are held the nutrient ions like calcium, magnesium, potassium, etc., in forms not removable by water, but exchangeable by similarly charged ions. The clay colloids act as “food brokers” who can, from their stocks, offer quickly this adsorbed supply of calcium, magnesium, and other, for the hydrogen from the root surface offered in exchange. That is the reason why “exhausted” soil happens to be acid. It follows that the exhaustion is of significance, not the acidity as such, Albrecht insists.

Soils, Dr. Albrecht points out, are made by climatic forces. This accounts for an East and a West in the United States, as well as for the fact that our Eastern states long ago divided into a North and a South. Their natural divisions must not be ascribed to personal or political differences, but to those in the soil produced by climatic activity upon the native rock formations.

Plant health is dependent upon soil fertility, i.e., upon the availability of these essential minerals. Further nutrition for both plants and animals needs to look to clay soils and their essential mineral resources. Civilizations on sandy soil have always been short-lived. We in the United States need to take inventory of our soils to determine their potentialities for future nutritional service. We need to know how much we have in the way of mineral resources. We are about to enter upon international responsibility, a situation which makes this knowledge all the more imperative.

Fertility differs according to soil, depending upon whether it is under constructive or destructive climatic settings. This is the reason, Albrecht offers, for the fact that alfalfa grows without extra soil treatment in Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado where there is less leaching and less destruction with more construction than in many places. Cotton grows in the red, more highly weathered soils of the South. It is these different levels of plant nutrients that bring about correspondingly different chemical composition of the crops and move them from the category of animal forage feed in the case of alfalfa to those of no feed value in the case of cotton plants.

So in our crop juggling to overcome the loss of fertility and to maintain our yield, too much emphasis has been put on volume rather than upon value. This tendency has been decidedly aggravated by the fact that the advent of the machine has made food a market commodity and farming a business.

These new crops, Albrecht warns, may help to give us a supply of energy, or “go” foods, but they are not as helpful as “grow” foods which carry the essential soil elements elaborated into complex organic compounds of high nutritive value. We can see what soil erosion has done to our land, but we fail to appreciate what soil depletion has done. We do not seem to realize that our stewardship of the land calls for the return of that which we have borrowed.

Unconsciously, therefore, we have gone from a proteinaceous condition and a high mineral content in plants growing in soils under construction to a carbonaceous condition with a mineral deficiency increasing in soils under destruction. The nutrition of our animals and of ourselves at the same time tends to go from a level of bone-building, sound construction of good teeth of superior quality, and good muscle-building to obesity, weakened bones, and flabby muscles to say nothing of decayed teeth, alveolar bone disintegration and other troubles. So far as the people of the United States are concerned the most common sign of malnutrition is overweight and obesity. We need to see the connection between soil and nutrition.

To the pioneer the climates were considered “good” or “bad” in relation to health. He often considered a “change in climate” as a remedy for bad health. Warm climates were the “cure” for tuberculosis at one time. But such temperatures with less rainfall and the foods on those less-weathered, mineral-rich soils were much better for health than warm climates with more rainfall and the resulting mineral-poor, protein-deficient foods grown there.

The food, in terms of the more or less fertile soil which is the result of the climate acting on the rocks, is what makes or breaks the body rather than the comforts of the climate in terms of how wet or how dry, and how cold or how warm. The differences in the climate make differences in the fertility of the soil. The soil differences make the differences in the foods which either feed us or fail us. Those differences are in line with the proteins which the soils produce, or fail to produce.

Our own United States are a good case for study of differences in climate. If one excludes the narrow Pacific coast area and starts from the east side of the coast range with its desert to go Eastward, there is a gradual increase in rainfall. There is a gradual increase in natural vegetation and in crop production. As a result of that observation, one is apt to emphasize the increase in water as responsible, rather than point out that the rocks are weathered more to make more soil and more nutrition from that source. Starting with the rock, this increase in rainfall represents increase in weathering of it to make more soil with more clay in it. As there is more rainfall so is there more soil construction in terms of its having enough clay to hold the essential nutrients. and to have enough of all of these to stock the clay for plant growth of the high protein nature, like legumes. This is our West. It is dry too often to support trees widely. It can grow grass since this crop can stop growing in a dry spell and then take off again. So our West is the plains country with its grass because the soils make it and not vice versa.

More significant in our West is the soil construction in terms of its being well stocked with fertility. It has mineral-rich, lime-rich soils. Our West, beyond about the 97th meridian of longitude, has the soils with much lime. This nutrient is in the surface soil, often in the subsoil as a layer of “caliche.” Other nutrients too are still there if the lime remains. Rainfalls are high enough to give soil construction, but not soil destruction to wash out the lime and make the soil acid. Rainfall isn’t enough to make massive grass growth. That very fact has left fertile soils which cause every little bit of grass to be protein-rich, mineral-rich, and highly nutritious for protein production within the grass, in the wheat grain and in the bone and brawn of every little buffalo that soon became a big one and was able then in turn to make many more little ones.

In our East, that is, east of the 97th meridian which divides our lime-rich, protein-producing soils from our acid, carbohydrate-producing soils, the increasing rainfall represents soil destruction, even though the clay content is high. Unfortunately, the soil is weathered so highly that the carbonic acid from decaying vegetation had already taken most of the nutrients out and put acid, or the hydrogen ion, in its place. Plants putting their roots into that soil and offering to exchange their root acid, or hydrogen, for calcium, magnesium, potassium, ammonia, and other nutrients get little but their own acid back in the exchange. As a consequence, they can make carbohydrates–woody, starchy growth–but they do little to convert those into proteins. Protein-producing crops, like the legumes, starve unless we fertilize the soil.

The Pilgrim Fathers found our East covered with forest trees. This woody crop was all the Creator himself was making of those washed out, so-called “acid” soils. More washed out as they were in New England, the forests were conifers, not even hardwoods, giving a little protein crop in their seeds. And still more washed out by the higher temperatures on going South, again they made only a coniferous forest crop possible even when Nature was dropping all the leaves and their fertility reserves back annually to decay there and to rotate through succeeding crops.

Much rain to grow much vegetation may mean soils so washed out, or so low in fertility, that more bulk means less protein. It means less of the foods that really build the body by making muscles and other proteins. Big yields of vegetation may therefore be deceptive in terms of building the body and guaranteeing the reproduction. Higher temperatures added to much rain aggravate the situation all the more even though we may point with pride to big yields of tons and bushels per acre.

The pattern of woody growth of forests in the East, and of nutritious grass in the West, is an expression of the soil as fertility for protein production rather than an expression of more rainfall for bigger yields in the East and less in the West. That pattern puts our preferred high-protein meat animals for beef in the West. It puts our short-lived, fat producer, the pig in the East. “Grow” foods in the West, and only “go” foods in the East is an expression of differences in climate, yes, but more because these differences in rainfall make differences in soils representing either construction or destruction in terms of their growing crops that feed us (protein) or fail us (fat).

Soil for creation of new life more than for the fattening of an old one is a challenge to our knowledge of managing the soil fertility. Nature suggests that if grass is to be nutritious, this crop cannot be moved about and serve to truly feed us merely because it grows. It will fail us if we merely move it from the West to the East. If we move the grass that once made the buffalo, and makes the beef today, we must duplicate the soil fertility to feed the grass as well as this forage plant was nourished by the soils in the West. Plants, like seals, will not perform well unless we feed them well. According as the soils feed or fail our crops, so will those crops feed or fail us in good nutrition.