NOURISHING THE SOIL

Nature provides everything for humans to live bountifully. If we nourish the soil that nourishes our food, we can produce foods that nourish our healing bodies. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. If we focus on three minerals while poisoning our soils with pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides and other chemicals, we gradually poison our societies through undernourished and toxic foods. Bio-dynamic, permaculture and organic farming methods are strategies to halt the future use of all chemicals used in agriculture.

The revival of nutrient rich soils will give rise to nourishing vegetables, healthy animals, and ultimately, healthy humans. The health of human populations depends on the health of the soil at the root level. Humans have mistakenly placed themselves at the top of the food chain. Actually, maggots are above us on the food chain, for once we die, the health of our fleshy corpse determines whether the maggots reap the benefits of a nourished body or one of nutritional deficiency. This fact describes the circle of life. There is no tiered hierarchy, but rather a food circle which makes inseparable the soil and its micro-organisms, maggots, insects, plants, animals and humans.

THE POISONS IN THE SOIL

The Silent Spring was instrumental in bringing widespread awareness to the ill effects of many chemical pesticides. In it, Rachel Carson catalogued the short and long-term environmental impacts of the indiscriminate spraying and application of DDT in the US. It brought regulators and the general public to question the logic of releasing large amounts of chemicals into the environment without fully understanding their effects on ecology or human health. DDT was banned in the US in 1972. Unfortunately, the movement requires ongoing effort because commercial farmers continue to apply chemical pesticides of other types to their land.

Pesticides are known to accumulate in the fat tissues of the body. Mothers who consume produce from non-organic sources will transfer these chemicals to their infants via breast milk.

Pregnant women also pass pesticides to their fetus in utero. In 2007, approximately 33 million pounds of organophosphate pesticides were sprayed on US farming soils. Two of these, malathion and chlorpyrifos, have been linked to cancer and neurological defects in humans. Despite their ban for home use, they are still used commercially on a variety of crops in the US. Organophosphates work by poisoning the nervous system of pests. Unfortunately, they do the same in humans. The research of Mark Purdey, an organic dairy farmer in England, made clear that the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) epidemic, also known as mad cow disease, in England occurred in areas where farmers were forced to treat their cattle with organophosphates in a program to eradicate the warble fly.