AdAgrA 2018: Something Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Intensive: The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap

Michael Trevizo

The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap- Part 1

Okay, so I titled this presentation, The Life of the Flesh is in the Plant Sap.

Now that may sound familiar to some of you guys.

You may remember in Leviticus chapter 11, the statement, The Life of the Flesh is in the Blood.

And when we begin to study that, we also look at the spirit of prophecy and we see a number of different statements concerning to the life of the flesh, I'm sorry, the life of our blood in our systems and the importance of having healthy blood to have good health.

So I'm going to start off like I said talking about a lot of science and sometimes Folks get a little resistance to that.

So I wanted to really share with you what sister white says concerning science and agriculture There's a lot of things out there a lot of buzzwords that people say things all the times that a lot of times we don't understand.

So trying to decipher the real from the fake requires not just science, but it requires unperverted science.

So some of the statements that she makes are, again here in Health Food Ministries, page 39, it says, I have been shown that study in agricultural lines should be the A, B's and C's of the educational work in our schools.

I think most people are familiar with that quote.

Education, page 111, says, no 1 can succeed in agriculture or gardening without attention to the laws involved, And compliance with the laws governing each is a condition of success.

These laws are, again, takes you back to the sciences.

These are laws that God had put in place from creation.

And Signs of the Times, August 13, 1896, agriculture should be advanced by scientific knowledge.

Many say we have tried agriculture and know what its results are, and yet these very ones need to know how to cultivate the soil and to bring science into their work.

When it comes to Evandale and Madison College, it says, the school making, speaking on particularly Evandale College, she says, the school that is started here in Korenbong, we look to see real success in agricultural lines, combined with the study of the sciences.

She makes it pretty clear over and over again.

This was Advocate March 1st 1901 paragraph 8.

That science needs to be brought into agriculture.

And if we can bring it in and we can bring in a true, unperverted science, that we will have success.

It is my goal this morning to share with you some of that science.

Again, Leviticus chapter 11, page 17, it says the life of the flesh is in the blood.

The principle here is that the life of flesh is the current, the blood in us.

And if we look at the plant and we start thinking about the life of the plant, the life is going to be in the blood.

And then if the sap is the blood of plants, what is the vascular system of plants?

They're like veins and arteries but they're called the xylem and the phloem.

I'll show you some pictures and I'll share some more with that.

In order to have good health she makes a statement, we must have good blood.

Biblical power of herbs, to you I have given these Genesis 129, We're told that these are given to us to heal us.

In Revelations we're told that the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations.

These things are supposed to be healing us.

And if they're not properly grown, they're not going to have the effect that God had designed them to have on us.

So, with this morning, what I like to do is start with the transpiration system, because the transpiration system is essentially the vascular system of a plant.

This is how nutrients move through the plant but also get into the plant.

I remember when I first started farming and I started growing and gardening.

And I sat there and I looked at it and I remember thinking to myself, God, I have no idea how this thing works.

I was completely, you know, at this point in my life I had studied electrical engineering, I had studied mechanics, I had studied many complicated things but when I looked at God's creation I just drew a blank.

I had no idea, no clue how that thing worked.

I said, how do you get nutrients out of the soil into this thing so that it will grow and become something?

And that's what I like to teach that to you this morning, if you don't know that.

And it's my understanding that the majority of the population, and I don't have a statistic, but it's just a statement that is regularly made, the majority of the population has no idea where the food comes from.

And when we start to look at how is it grown or what the sciences of it are, even a percentage even smaller than that knows what it is.

And most farmers, I think right now, something like 50% of the farmers in the United States do not have any type of education in the sciences.

It doesn't mean that they don't know what they're doing, it just means that they don't understand the science of plants.

So this morning we're going to talk about transpiration, and what you see in this image here is a picture of a leaf with moisture on it, and transpiration is essentially the movement of water from the soil solution through the vascular system of the plant and leaving the leaves.

So when we look at this image that I have here with water In the soil, once it's in the soil, it's not necessarily referred to scientifically as water, but they call it a soil solution.

What that means is it's moisture, it's water, but in it, it has a lot of dissolved ions, it has different exudates from biological organisms that are in the soil.

And how those nutrients come into the plant, part of it is through pressure potential, which is governed by the guard cells.

These are cells that are in the leaves of the plants.

These cells control the stomatas, and this is essentially like breathing in the plant.

These cells will open and close based upon...

Based off of the detergent pressure inside these cells, it'll regulate transpiration, the movement of moisture through the leaves.

And when the plants are also exchanging gases, so this is how oxygen leaves a plant and CO2 enters a plant.

1 of the most important things to understand though is that these guard cells, they only govern the xylem.

And this is important to understand because when we start looking at different nutrients, I know that a lot of you have already been to Whitmar's classes and Gregory's classes and they talk a lot about soil balancing and nutrients etc.

And the reason why those laws, and well, they don't really share with you laws, but they give you an understanding of how you should balance your soil and what nutrients should be in there and what quantities.

The reason why you have these is because there are certain regulators that govern what's gonna enter a plant and what's not going to enter that plant.

So we have to understand, if we're gonna understand soil biology, the first thing you need to understand is the biology of the roots and of the plants, because the root system is part of the biggest biological system in the soil.

It's not the biggest, the biggest is actually fungus, fungi.

I don't remember the exact statistic, but I know that it is, in some places, as much as 90% of the biological life inside the soil.

And this is usually in a jungle forest, in the Amazon and other places where fungus is absolutely necessary.

We start looking at a cutaway of the vascular system of the plant.

On the top right, you see this is a cutaway of a leaf tissue and you can see how it comes out of the leaf and what you're looking at is in the lower portion is the is a phloem and the upper portion is the xylem.

Now the phloem is the way that nutrients move from what they would call source to sink or sink to source depending on which direction it's going.

Sometimes, in the fall, when the leaves fall off the tree, your nutrients are leaving the trees and are going to the root system.

And the method that they use to do this is by moving nutrients into the phloem.

But there's some nutrients that do not move in the plant, like phosphorus or calcium.

So understanding which nutrients move and which nutrients don't move gives you an understanding of deficiencies that you may see in your crop.

So if you're looking at your crop and older leaves are dying, maybe they're looking chlorotic or some other symptom, and the growth up on top is green, you understand that nutrients are moving from the lower leaves to the upper leaves, which are the younger leaves.

And if you know which nutrients are mobile, it really helps you to understand where your deficiencies might be in your soil.

These are again, cutaway pictures of what this looks like.

You see dicot stems, some of them are monocots, some species are dicots.

There's a lot of variety in how these things are in plants.

I won't really get into it, but if you want more information about that you certainly can find it online there's an awful lot of information in biological even high school or 100 level 200 level biology books that you can find in a library or get online for a couple of bucks.

Now we're moving down here, we're moving through the root system.

We started from the leaf, we saw the vascular system going down the trees, now we're down to the root.

When we get down to the root here, we start looking at the actual root hairs.

And the root hairs are actually epidermal cells.

And they extend out like you see in the image here at the bottom left.

And you have different pathways that different nutrients take.

And 1 of the ones that I really like to bring up is calcium, because calcium, I like, and personally, I liken calcium to Christ.

The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap- Part 2

We talked about this a little bit the last hour.

I want to get into the soil food web, but before I get into that I wanted to share with you, I think most of you know who William Albrecht is and gentleman that wrote a number of books, his name is Charles Walters.

I'm quoting the book Eco-Farming, page of, let me see, I've got it in here, page 213.

It's written by Charles Walters and in that he's quoting Albrecht.

So I'm going to quote Walters quoting Albrecht.

Okay, so it says, this is on the question of phosphorus.

She was being asked the question, how do we, since Phosphorus, the plant, the species that, the particular species of phosphorus that the plants want is referred to as orthophosphate, which is a P2SO4.

And the question was, how do we manage phosphorus?

How do we concern ourselves with phosphorus?

Again, so he starts off by saying, this is Walter saying, we ran this up the flagpole with William A.

Albrecht 1 day while a tape recorder was running.

His answer exhibited the usual patience as he repeated what he had gone over a few dozen times before.

Only this time, he made the phosphorus connection.

In the soil management, he said, we associate the inorganic nutrients calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, iron, aluminum, zinc, copper, cobalt, manganese, and others with positive ionic characteristics with the soil's colloid, humus, clay fraction.

Of the opposite negative electrical character, the essential nutrient elements, namely nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, boron, chlorine, iodine, molybdenum, et cetera, and others are empirically associated with the organic matter of the soil.

So why not envision these anions or negative elements corrected with decay stages of organic matter when a wider carbon nutrient ratio reserves as a source of energy by the carbon first to the fungi then to the bacteria in the soil.

Why not visualize the negative elements as serving simultaneously in plant nutrition as chelated and large molecular complexes of microbial origin?

Shin Chen Chang made the point in 1931 that considerable phosphorus ranging from 0.1% to 0.5% reached the soil in organic materials.

Release of this phosphorus depends on decomposition of organic compounds by microorganisms.

It is for this reason that manures, green or barnyard, or compost refinements thereof should not be valued alone for their nitrogen." This statement was made in the early 40s and it was just in the last 10 to 20 years that people are getting intelligent about compost and the effects that it has on the buildup of phosphorus in the soil.

But the more important thing that I want to stress out or bring out and talk about is the soil food web, which is essentially the breaking down, metabolizing, consuming of anything that was ever alive.

Whether it's a dead person, a dead animal, a dead plant, a dead worm, a dead bacteria, fungus, et cetera, et cetera.

All of that composes part of the soil food web.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is what the Bible says.

We were all once, from the dirt we were made, everything, now to the dirt we shall return.

When we're in that process of decay, those nutrients that were necessary to build up that organic life are slowly released through the metabolizing of soil organisms.

Whether it's bacteria, whether it's fungus, whether it's earthworms, whether it's protozoa, or little rodents, or arthropods, or springtails, or snakes, or birds, or the big mean lion, or us, the human beings, whatever it is, when we break down, when we are decaying, when there is some level of decay, there's also along with it, the releasing of nutrients.

So the question was then asked, and this is kind of a, this is why I say I prepared this as advanced, level is, how do we then manage for phosphorus?

We really need to look at our organic matter because that's where phosphorus is hidden.

I shared earlier how phosphorus will combine with calcium to form bonds that are not broken by any type of plant exudate or even bacterial.

Except for 1 species, Bacillus metalitis, I think is what it's called, that can actually break down phosphorus.

And some of its exudates can break it down.

And I have some images I'll show you in the sixth hour of this presentation with respect to basalt and other minerals that were taken recently at Oregon State University with a helium electron microscope.

And it shows exactly the kind of weathering that fungal hyphae puts on basalt and other minerals that form in the soil.

But for now what I really want to share with you is that the bulk of that phosphorus is coming from your organic matter.

So as you study soils you keep hearing that word OM organic matter.

Organic matter folks there's some chairs up front if you'd like to take a seat.

So we we really need to it seems like with soil science and with improving soils, that it all goes back to organic matter.

And this is why so many people jumped on the compost bandwagon, including some of the early reformers of agriculture, if you want to call them that.

He added a lot of hocus pocus to it with some of his spiritual applications that he wanted to make, and his bullhorns and other funky stuff.

But the real thing, the real magic that was being done there was the fact that he was recycling nutrients.

None of the other occultism really favored him at all.

Yes, those early pioneers of what eventually became the organic agricultural movement were responsible for bringing in that organic matter and understanding the importance of nutrient cycling.

Phosphorus is very much necessary for any type of living organism.

It regulates the energy through ATP, phosphosynthates, photosynthates.

It is required, I showed you the image in the previous hour of the phospholipid bilayer, which is what forms the membrane of every single living cell.

Doesn't matter what it is, human, plant, animal, whatever it is, it requires phosphorus to form those membranes, and if it's not available, you're not gonna have that phosphorus.

So if you got a plant, you got some kind of phosphorus.

You can never say, you can say a plant is phosphorus deficient, but you can never say a plant doesn't have any phosphorus because if it didn't have any phosphorus it wouldn't be a plant.

For this hour what I'd like to focus on is the soil food web.

There's this image you guys have been staring at for a little while.

Another word for organic debris in the soil science community is called detritus.

Detritus is plant anything that was once alive, like leaves.

If you go out and you get a whole bunch of leaves, you put that on the ground, it's referred to as detritus.

That can be consumed by earthworms, it can be consumed by fungus, it can be consumed by actinomycetes, bacteria, protozoa.

Subsequently, as well as like a food chain, you know, protozoa will consume bacteria and then beetles, mites, and springtails will consume fungus.

Ants will consume some of these smaller organisms.

This 1 actually doesn't have nematodes in it, I think.

This picture doesn't have nematodes in it, but you got flatworms, you got rogue beetles, you got centipedes, mites, pseudoscorpions, ground beetles, all these creepy crawlies you see in the soil, they all have a certain purpose that God designed for them, and they're all part of essentially the food chain of the soil and breaking down organic matter and making it available to nutrients.

Every single 1 of these organisms consumes something and excretes something, whether it's bacteria and fungus just excreting enzymes and acids, or if it's the frass of all these small...

Frass is a fancy word for manure, for all these insects.

Here's another image of 1 square meter of soil.

On average, you'll find 1 vertebrate, which means a bird or a snake or something of that nature.

It has, on average, 100 snails and slugs, about 3, 000 potworms and earthworms, about 5, 000 insects, myropods, spiders, the pleurons, about 10, 000 rotifers and tardigrades, about 50, 000 springtails, about 100, 000 mites, about 5 million nematodes, about, oh, what's that number, 10 billion protozoa, and 10, 000 trillion bacteria and actinomycetes.

That's in 1 square meter of forest floor.

I mean, if you just stare at that and think about 1 square meter, that's about 9 square feet, roughly, maybe 10 square feet, of a forest floor has that much biological life put in there by our Creator.

I don't think you can study soil science and in any way, in any facet, come to the conclusion that the world just evolved.

I don't understand how they come to that conclusion.

And the thing is that if you remove even just any 1 of these layers, you really disrupt the soil.

If you remove the bottom layer especially, without bacteria, somehow you can manage to get in there.

And these are some practices that they use now to go in and fumigate soils.

They'll treat them with steam or other real strong chemicals and they just want to kill everything.

I forget the name of the product that just recently came out and it's supposed to kill everything and I mean everything in the soil.

The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap- Part 3

Our Heavenly Father, we thank you once again for being able to meet here.

We thank you for everything we get to discuss.

We pray that you continue to be with us and help us to get through this material.

And we pray not only that you would help me to present it, but give those understanding that are here that you give me the right words and clarity to cover these things.

The next 1 here is a real heavy 1, I'm sorry.

I mean if you're gonna farm, garden, whatever you're gonna do, you really gotta understand the nitrogen cycle.

And this is the 1 that has been studied probably extensively because a lot of money has been put into research both by the federal government and state governments, universities, chemical companies, all kinds of people.

But I'm going to talk about the nitrogen cycle.

If we can put it all in the picture, this is the best picture that I could find.

But, and this image I posted on the website.

You can find it on the Google Drive if you want to pull it up.

Well let's pretend we're atheists, right?

Let's pretend we're atheists and let's pretend we're Darwin.

I'm gonna pretend I'm Darwin We'll start from the top.

There's nothing in the world Right world was void and empty like Genesis 1 1 And somehow it all evolved right well before anything can evolve right doesn't matter how simple the species is, it needs to have some kind of protein.

So either whenever the world somehow came together, Somehow there was already nitrate and ammonium available.

But if it wasn't, we have this challenge, this real difficult challenge.

You see, I wish I had a point and stick of some type, but I don't.

Anyway way on the top where it says atmosphere, That's atmospheric nitrogen.

If you look at the bottom corner right here, these are all the oxidation states of nitrogen.

NH3, which is the negative 3, we refer to that as ammonia.

We've got NH4, which is a negative 3 as well.

That's also referred to as ammonium because it's positively charged.

Then you have diatomic nitrogen, which has no charge.

You have nitrous oxide, N2O, which is an oxidation state of 1.

You have nitric oxide, which is NO, oxidation state of 2.

You have nitrite, which is a NO2, oxidation state of 3.

You have NO3, nitrate, oxidation state of 5.

For some of those of you that haven't taken chemistry, I'm sorry, but you really got to understand rate of reactions and redox reactions.

That's moving the charge of any given element.

Sulfur and nitrogen vary substantially in their oxidation states in the soil.

The thing is that microorganisms have the capacity to do things that mankind just does not have.

And a lot of the research has gone into trying to figure out how does rhizobium or well more importantly nitrogenase which is an enzyme that is excreted by rhizobium which is a type of bacteria or Francia which is another type of bacteria associated with alder trees, if you're familiar with them, or to actually fix nitrogen.

That is to pull nitrogen gas out of the atmosphere and convert it through immunization and then eventually a modification down to NH3 which through species of organisms known as nitrobacter can take that from nitrate to NO3 I'm sorry nitrite to nitrate and be used by plants and organisms.

It requires understanding of the sciences.

If you remember in the first presentation how Ellen White said over and over and over again, science must be brought into agriculture.

And I'm sorry, folks, but if you haven't taken any chemistry at all in your life, I don't know how to even say it.

So it's gonna be a little rough, it's gonna be hairy.

That's why I said this is definitely was prepared as advanced, that's what was requested of me at first when they asked me to put it together.

That's how I put it together and when I arrived I saw the sign and I said, oh boy.

Series

Intensive: The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap

The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap- Part 2

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Session 2

What is Soil?

53m

Intensive: Gardening 101

3. Gardening 101: Steps to Productive Soil

1h 2m

Breakout Session 2

The Ideal Soil: Water

1h

Short Course: Soil Health

Soil Health- Part 1

57m

Home Gardening

Beating the Botanical Besiegement

1h 14m

Intensive: Greater Efficiencies for Home Gardens

Greater Efficiencies for Home Gardens Part 3

57m

Soil Fertility

Getting the Model Right- Part 2

56m

Special Interests

The Sabbatical – Binding Burden or Bountiful Blessing?

56m

Level 1 Homesteading and Home Gardening

Soil 101

1h

Soil Fertility

Chemistry

47m

Preparing to Make the Jump

Methods of Urban Gardening

48m

Full Circle Garden

Full Circle Garden #1

1h 14m

Sound Doctrine