More and Better Proteins

Unlike carbo­hydrates and fats, but more like vitamins and minerals, proteins are required in the nutrition of man and animals as specific chemical structures. None of these will substitute for any of the others.

As for proteins, the body demands them as certain very specific chemical arrangements of the constituent elements. While the list of vitamins–still growing as a set of specific chemical structures–is a recent matter of the last 20 years, the known 22 amino acids composing the proteins represent evolutionary knowledge extending over a half century. Ten of these are specifically required for the survival of the white laboratory rat. Eight are absolutely essential for man if he is to live. It is the provision of these specific parts of the proteins–more than of mere compounds carrying nitrogen–that has probably become the major part in our struggle for good nutrition.

Problem

Proteins have become a problem of creation in agricultural production. Proteins can be propped up either in quantity, or in quality, only by soils more fertile in terms of both the inorganic and the organic respects–many known and possibly unknown.

It is this significant fact connected with the soil that the declining protein production by our crops ought to be calling our attention more universally.

Mystery

Just how plants make proteins is still one of Nature’s mysteries. We have given little thought to the possibility that plants are struggling to make their necessary proteins, just as animals are ranging far and wide to collect theirs. Nor have we thought that healthy man must be highly omnivorous and that all of these are efforts to make certain that each form of life is getting the complete list of the required amino acids.

Only recently have we become concerned about feeding our crops in place of merely turning them out at seeding time to rustle for themselves until “rounded up” at harvest time.

Unfortunately, for ourselves, in connection with the protein foods and the protein-supplementing foods, we have already too long called anything protein when it contains nitrogen in some organic combination.

More specific

To date we have made sharp distinctions about the quality–for our nutrition–of the nitrogen in our organic compounds, when little more than half of the organic nitrogen we feed, or eat, is really in the amino combination for which we emphasize the amino acids. We must become more specific in our thinking about proteins, by considering them a balanced combination of their component amino acids as the human or animal body requires them.

Alfalfa grows well with little added fertility on soils blown by the wind from out of the Missouri River bottoms. It grows well on such soils representing deposits of soil materials brought from much farther West. But alfalfa is in trouble on some of the Western volcanic soils of such recent deposit that they are deficient in sulfur because of volcanic ignition.

Not widely realized

While we are slowly recognizing the declining concentrations of proteins in our corn and in our wheat, the seriousness of that decline is not yet realized widely enough for much to be done about it.

In the case of wheat, pre-harvest protein surveys–taken by counties over the State of Kansas by the Crop Reporting Service of the U. S. Department of Agriculture in 1940 and 1949-1951–tell of the declining concentration of the protein in this food grain.

Slipping lower

When our corn and our wheat crops are slipping lower in their creation of proteins in total; when these food essentials are already known to be incomplete in the essential amino acid, tryptophane, for example, in corn, and lysine in the case of wheat; and when those originally more fertile soils produced higher concentrations of proteins in these same grains once upon a time, isn’t it high time for us to look at our national protein problem?

Shall we not view it as one of soil fertility exhaustion under two of our most extensively grown grasses, which corn and wheat are? Shall we view our meat problem and our milk problem as merely matters of economics? Shall we not recognize the great natural forces which are responsible for the bad economics?

Grass agriculture

Shall we believe that a different kind of agriculture, called grass agriculture, will solve the problem? It ought soon to become clear that the human’s struggle for meat–the choice food protein–is merely part and parcel of the struggle by all life for its proteins.

There will be no escape from that struggle by asking our animals to eat grass grown on any soil and to give us the relief from that struggle by their solution of the problem. It is not solved when our farm animals ask the plants on less fertile soil to provide them with protein. The abundance of this nutritional necessity in our crops, in our larger numbers of domestic meat animals, and in the markets for ourselves will become possible, not because we juggle crops or systems of agriculture and economics, but only because we prop up the whole biotic pyramid consisting of microbes, plants, animals, and man by means of the most completely fertile soils as the foundation of it.