AdAgrA 2015: Restoring the Waste Places

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Short Course: Soil Health

Whitmar McConnell

Soil Health- Part 1

Father in heaven, again, we desire that your spirit be present, that we would understand what we're hearing and be able to faithfully apply it.

I had fun as a kid because I had no responsibility towards it.

We loved, me and my brother who's a year older than me, loved running in the freshly plowed fields, scaring rabbits out and chasing them.

And we loved riding in the cotton wagon when they were harvesting and running back and forth and being bombarded by cotton balls as they were, they weren't exactly cotton balls, they had shells on them a lot of times and that was a little painful every once in a while.

When I was a child it was fun because I kind of just, I liked riding on a tractor with my uncle.

I've been an outdoors person my whole life.

I would never survive if I had to be in an office all the time.

But as I was around agriculture, I began to see what it was like, and I didn't like it.

The prices you were getting paid were going down.

The weather didn't seem to cooperate half the time.

I can remember hearing many gripe sessions of my uncle about how he was getting paid less for the cotton.

They were spending more and more chemicals, more and more dangerous chemicals in order to keep keep things going.

And to me, I saw the writing on the wall, I didn't want to have anything to do with that.

That was like it was something that was going down not up.

It was a drag and I you know I didn't I didn't have any real interest in that.

The home I grew up in was Christian but we were totally oblivious to the laws of health.

And there's a lot of folks out there like that.

They're not consciously violating the laws of their being.

But I happen to, I happened to, I was in a dental office dealing with all those things that come along because you don't know the laws of health.

I happened to pick up a card advertising the Bible stories and sent that in.

I grew up in a different church and there were things that just troubled me about it, like eternal torment, and it seemed like it was constantly threatening people with hell more than it was with offering them heaven, that people would stay in the church.

I have family members who are ministers in that church, cousins.

I learned a lot of valuable lessons about what true Christianity is.

But I began to wonder about why do the Jews worship on Saturday and the Christians worship on Sunday.

A cold porter came and I bought some books and she offered me the health books, which I, that wasn't what I sent in for, but she offered me the health books, and I bought them, I started reading them.

I started reading these things, and it's just like my eyes all of a sudden opened.

It wasn't like, you know, Truth didn't all of a sudden come into being, except it did come into being in my life.

It's like, I tell people the blessings of God are flowing all the time.

But we've created obstacles to that, receiving those blessings.

The truth is there whether we see it or we don't see it.

But I was blown away by the health message.

To such an extent that I wanted to go back to school to be a doctor.

And in the process, I won't share all the details because it would take too much time, in the process God said, no, I want you to be a farmer.

And remember, I grew up around farming, and I didn't want to have anything to do with it.

And he said, and God just kept impressing on my mind, what you want to give people, you can give them as a farmer, better than you can as a doctor.

And again, I'm not being negative towards doctors or anything else, but there's a fundamental truth here about what interventions bring healing and cleansing.

There's what I call the suppressive interventions.

You could call them time-buying interventions.

If you were belligerent, you could call them message killers.

But what they do is they suppress reality.

They cover up the effects of causes that were put into play.

And so that we tend to ignore or deny the causes that are at play by suppressing the effects.

It doesn't change the reality of what's going on.

That's 1 of the valuable interventions, to be able to clean things up, because sanitation, hygiene, and nourishment are where you get health from.

And then there's nourishing interventions.

And those 2 interventions are the key interventions that we should be using.

Cleansing and nourishing interventions to restore life.

A lot of people don't understand what those are and how to use them.

And the fourth intervention is 1 that I try to avail myself of as much as I can as divine intervention.

The direct intervention of God with his purpose into our lives.

And sometimes we need that because nothing else is going to help in time.

And God came, brought me to understand that those cleansing and nourishing interventions were more important than the time buying interventions.

I had a friend who's a doctor tell me, you know, because spirit of prosody talks about pharmaceutical drugs not eliminating the problem but just moving it.

Well he gave me, he's an ER doctor, and if I said his name you'd know him, but He said to me, I had a man come in, he was wanting to illustrate that to me.

I had a man come in who had a bullet wound to the stomach, to the abdomen.

He said I had to choose between saving his head or his legs.

In other words, he had to tourniquet his legs to cut the blood flow off there so he could save enough blood to keep it going to his head.

So he said, so I had to make a choice between, I bought him time and I had to make a choice.

Am I going to save his head or am I going to save his legs?

Well he's a good doctor and he managed to be able to do both in time.

And to tell you the truth, in the world we live in, there's sometimes we need those those time, we need some time.

And God affords us some time through some of these types of interventions.

They're not the ultimate interventions, but they have their place, and we should rightly understand them.

And then I started to see some of the reasoning behind it.

I'll leave pursuing medicine, and I'll go do agronomy.

And God said, no, I don't want you to do that.

I'm saying that this is what God strongly impressed me with.

And I said, well, how am I going to know?

And he brought me to, someone shared this quote with me, and I'm going to share it again on Sabbath.

It's from Thomas A Kempis, and it says this, if you can see things the way they really are, and not merely the way men report them to be, then you're wise and God is your teacher and not men.

What God was saying is he was gonna teach me what was truth, and as far as providing for nourishment and cleansing.

And so I said about that, people ask me, well, what book should I read or what should I do this?

Well, it kind of happened like it happened to not, it says in Isaiah.

Soil Health- Part 2

Father in heaven, this morning, once again we want to just pray that you would help us to understand and have the vision that you have for us, that we might not only benefit and be blessed by it ourselves, but we might be able to bless others with it.

Okay, we gotta finish up just a little bit on this before we can get into the particulars of it.

The model that I follow is called the Albrecht model.

And I put the Albrecht TEC model on there because what Sean had asked about a little bit ago, we're going to have to address.

William Albrecht lived, well he died in 1976, was it?

But he worked at the University of Missouri in soils for about 40, 50 years.

But he, I'll have to shorten a version of the history of this, But he began to wonder why some, because of some of his reading and everything and some of his research, why some ground would grow healthier crops than other ground would grow.

Why some animals on pasture would be healthier than other animals on other pasture?

And so his life work was really involved in answering that question.

And I believe that he answered that question.

He was a man who said go to nature and learn from nature, not from books.

And he was sincere about that, and not that he was gonna decide what nature was saying, but let nature say what it had to say.

And so He did a lot of research on trying to figure out what actually produced health and fruitfulness.

And remember, that's the admonition from the very beginning in Genesis.

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

And so that was his, how could we nourish the animals in ourselves?

This was back in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s and the 50s.

So this has been understood for a long time, folks.

It's not 1 of those things that's just a recent phenomena.

It's just, it's been heavily, heavily suppressed.

Can I answer that question after the class?

I'll answer, just come up and ask me that.

She was just asking what books could we read about it.

There are some and I'll share some of that.

I'll bring some of those books that I think are useful, useful books, there's certainly others.

The challenge is that you'll always, and almost all of them you find some deviation from it.

And we're going to have to look at some of those deviations as they affect this actual model.

So what he did is He did a lot of research at the University of Missouri, at their research farm there, to find out what combination of minerals would provide for the proper porosity that would provide for, He was a biologist, and so his ultimate goal was how can I get the biology to be fully functional?

And he came to recognize that if he got the chemistry right and he got the physics right, that the biology would then be able to thrive.

He traveled around the world and he examined, he sampled soils and analyzed soils that were growing these beautiful, places like, you've heard of the San Marzano tomato?

Well, a lot of things are grown that are called the San Marzano tomato, but it's kind of like the perseron.

Well, it's originated from the San Marzano Valley in Italy.

It was another 1 of those places with a highly fertile area.

And so it grew, You don't know what a San Marzano tomato tastes like.

It was referring not to a particular variety.

It happened to be the plum type tomato that they grew.

But it happened to be because it was a tomato that was kind of like the Jersey tomato.

I grew up northeast of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

And everybody raved about the Jersey tomato, and it was a really good tomato and everything of course I'm not sure how lower expectations are But a lot of things can be good if your expectations are low enough, but no it was a really good tomato, but but the the San Marzano tomato referred to the San Marzano Valley, a tomato from the San Marzano Valley.

So anyway, he traveled around and he looked at, he analyzed a lot of these places, and they kept coming back very similar.

The chemistry kept coming back very similar.

The structuring of the soil kept coming back very similar.

I mean how much sand, silt, and clay are in the soil.

It was based on the chemistry and the physics That were that existed in that soil because look folks some of us are clay we got a lot more clay than we have sand some of us have a lot more sand than we have clay and Some of us have combination of the sand silt and clay.

That's the That's the textural components of the soil, but it's not the structure of the soil.

And so he decided, and we're going to get into what the conclusions he came to.

He decided, well, humus is the most stable form of everything that was once living.

And so he decided, he said, that ought to come, that ought to measure similar.

If it's the right model, it ought to measure similar to that as well.

It came out to almost the same chemistry, the same proportions of chemistry.

And so then you put it to the test, and you see if you apply that chemistry, will the soil develop the right structure so it can breathe?

When I say structure, I mean is it properly constructed?

We talked about tillage, and I don't know if you saw that screen out there, the calcium, magnesium, and tillage.

How getting that soil to breathe can be achieved in 2 different ways.

In 1 way, eventually it leads to a hardening of the soil If there's never any change in the chemistry or the character that soil will ultimately lead to the hardening of that soil And a collapsing and a destruction of that soil So the real question was to put it to the test would it confer health Would it confer immunity?

That's just a word that's not used a whole lot in everyday English anymore, but it just meant the ability to bear fruit, the ability to reproduce.

And so he put it to the test, and he came to the modeling that he came to, and it's consistent with the biblical requirements for providing life, an abundant life, and the bearing of fruit, fruitfulness.

And so then he started, just to make sure it was correct, he started taking and deviating from it.

And remember I was telling you earlier that he's the 1, he could take rabbits, dogs, different animals, he could take them, within 2 or 3 weeks, he could make them infertile.

And he could take those same animals and make them fertile again in a few weeks back to where they were.

He would breed animals, and you know what they do?

The same supposed species, there's pictures of this, they're rabbits, They kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

And when he reversed it, they got smaller, with each generation smaller and smaller and smaller.

So he put it through all the ringer to test it from every angle that he could, because that were his criteria.

The same criteria that we established from the Bible is that what a soil should be able to do.

If it's true science, it should be able to be applied anywhere, not just under specific conditions or specific circumstances.

Now, remember, we're going to talk about environmental influences.

That's the other part of a growing system.

And so that's the external influences on the soil system.

It's just like the external influences on us.

In the culture, We have influences that are pressed upon us all the time.

And the real question is, how do we deal with them?

Because sometimes you can't stop things from happening.

The key is the ability to move things in a way that there's enough reserves, that there's buffering there, that can offset the stresses being put on the system that are trying to destabilize it and unbalance it.

The whole climate change and environmental thing has been hammered, but there's not real understanding of it.

People put, because it's more of a political thing.

But we're not applying the right reasons to why it's falling apart.

Soil Health- Part 3

I think I said it, but I want to be sure that it was heard.

You always want calcium and magnesium to add up to 80% of that bucket.

If you have, say it adds up to 90%, that means you have more of 1 than the other.

But that doesn't mean that it's not in the soil.

This happens a lot where people have a high calcium level, but it'll be when you add them together.

Let's say you had 80% calcium and 10% magnesium.

Remember I mentioned there's a one-to-one, did I mention that?

Maybe it was an integral conversation here.

There's a one-to-one relationship between calcium and magnesium.

And for every point that calcium goes up, magnesium will go down.

If it's the other way around, if magnesium goes up a point, calcium's gonna come down a point.

Because this has to do with whether you're really getting the structuring that you think you ought to have.

Let's say if you had 80% calcium and 10% magnesium.

If you wanted calcium to be at 68 and you brought it down from 80 to 68, that's coming down 12 points.

So we call it magnesium, calcium, 80 and 90?

Well, you want them to add up to 80 total.

So you want 60% to 70% calcium and 10% to 20% magnesium.

Basically, most, And of average soils, 68 and 12 is the range that you're gonna wanna be in.

If you get lower CEC soils, that starts to change, and the calcium comes down, the magnesium goes up.

You always have to maintain a minimum of 250 pounds of magnesium in the soil to have adequate for the nutrition for the crop.

And so as you start, your CECs get lower, we're not gonna go into that, it's beyond the scope of this class, it's how you calculate that all out.

But as your CEC goes lower, your total pounds are going to go lower as well, depending on what percentage you have there.

And so it changes how you determine what that should be.

We could go over that and take a couple more classes, but I'm afraid I'm already behind where I'm supposed to be.

But I just wanted to illustrate, because of that relationship between the 2 of them, if you had 80% calcium and 10% magnesium, which is a total of 90, if calcium came down the 12 points to 68 that you wanted it to, magnesium was going to go up 12 points.

You're in an excessive level of magnesium.

And even though it's at 80-10, like if you had a soil test done, and it's at 80-10, and it looks like, well, you're at the lower end of the magnesium, you'll be fine.

The chemical impact on the physical structure of that soil is still there.

You're not gonna have the porosity that you think you're gonna have until you get to an 80% combined total between the 2 of those.

And you bring down and out of the soil the excesses of either 1 of those, if they're there.

And so a lot of people will say, well, I only had, they'll look at it and say, my soil's still tight and I only have 10% magnesium.

And I say, well, how much is the calcium?

And they usually tell me it's higher than the 70% that would have balanced it out.

So always calcium is higher than the magnesium?

If calcium ever goes below magnesium, nothing will grow.

Sulfur, it takes 2 pounds of elemental sulfur to take out 1 pound of calcium or magnesium And so you'll use sulfur to leach it out.

Now you're gonna hopefully try to do it in a way you can use most of it.

But if it's too bad, you gotta get it out of there before you can get the conditions that you need.

And we're getting ready to do potassium and sodium.

Potassium and sodium are a single plus charge, so it takes 1 pound of sulfur to get 1 pound of either sodium or potassium out of the soil.

But the thing is, the reason you have to, remember I said that you had to have a minimum of 60% of calcium before calcium will hold?

Until you get a certain calcium level, the soil is not open enough for anything to go anywhere.

And there could be other factors like high sodium or high potassium levels.

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Short Course: Soil Health

Soil Health- Part 2

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