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Eastward Missions

Soil Fertility

Whitmar McConnell

Getting the Model Right- Part 1

Okay, so in the parable of the sower, I'm sure most if not all of you have read that parable, and you may have heard sermons on it over and over.

You know the Spirit of Prophecy says there's more to be gained out of that parable than we've even come close to understanding.

I will tell you that the reason that we don't glean out of it well we could because we don't understand the soil.

And as a result, because we don't understand the soil and how it works, we really don't even understand our own character and the issues that we have to face, you know, within our own character because that's what it's talking about.

So, in that parable, what is the problem?

It's the condition of the soil that's determining what the final results are.

Whether there's fruit born, whether the plant can take root, can grow and bear fruit.

And even at that, see I was sharing last night where Jesus talks about the good soil and it talking what does he say about it that some will bear 30, 60, 100.

Well we're gonna talk about why you said 30, 60, 100 and if you didn't understand how the soil works you wouldn't even pick that up.

It's what it's 1 of those things that if without an understanding of how soil actually works.

So what we're going to do is we're going to look here at what the right model is.

Now I've been told by people there is no ideal soil.

How many methods are there to practice the health ministry?

Well, there's lots of ways you could do it.

Just like we're going to look at when we look at the different schools of thought in agriculture, there's lots of ways that you could do it.

Well, I'm going to tell you that there is only 1 model that's correct in identifying what the soil should be.

It's also telling us what our characters should be, because that's what the parable is talking about.

On Friday evening I'm going to talk about something else that's brought up in this, the parable of the sower.

And that's the disciples come to Jesus and they ask him, why is he teaching in parables?

He says because seeing they don't see and hearing they don't hear.

We're going to go into that as well, but that'll be on Friday evening.

We have lots of schools of thought in what soil fertility should be.

You've got the conventional philosophy of how things should be done.

And we're going to look at it in just a second.

You've got the organic philosophy of how things should be done.

And then you've got like the biodynamic school of thought, you've got the permaculture school of thought, you've got the biological school of thought, and what you'll discover is that just like we have so many denominations in Christianity, they all select 1 aspect and they emphasize it to the detriment and neglect of the others.

I'll save a little bit of that to get in there.

But anyway, so we're going to look at getting the model right and we're going to look at some of the guiding principles from inspiration.

If you believe this, and I'm going to assume that everybody in this class believes in God as a creator and a redeemer.

If that's true, then what he has said should be consistent with what he made, shouldn't it?

Doesn't the Bible say that what he made testifies to what he said?

Another thing that will be talked about on Friday night is, you know, Paul said that we have no excuse because the very attributes of God are testified to in nature, right?

As we go through this you're going to see why God put Adam and Eve in the garden.

It wasn't like, well, let's try this 1 out and see if it works or not.

And if this 1 doesn't work we'll try a different model out.

He put them there because that was where they needed to be in order to learn about who they were, to learn about who God was and to learn about what the purpose of life was.

So we need to get the inspiration and the science, the word and the works, we need to get them in harmony with each other.

We can't have 1 saying 1 thing and the other saying another thing, because we're going to get in trouble eventually.

And you can get in trouble on either side.

You can think inspiration says something, and the science doesn't agree with it.

And sometimes it's because the science is wrong, but sometimes it's because our understanding of inspiration is wrong.

So we need both of them to have a much deeper and a more correct conviction and understanding of what the truth is.

So we're going to cover the inspirational stuff first.

I sure hope there is because you know we live in a confusing enough world and that's the reason that there is confusion because the Bible says to seek first as John pointed out the kingdom of heaven And you'll see as we get done with this that everything flows out of that.

When you get the character right, because it's consistent with the character of God, everything else flows out of it.

I normally do, I don't have it as part of this session, because I'm going to integrate it in to the others.

Does anyone have any problems with any of those things?

If nobody in this class has a problem with that, then I'm going to come sit down and listen to them.

And the interesting thing is when I do these presentations, whenever I do that class, the population in my class doubles or triples.

Last year when I did it in Texas, I'm not kidding, the room I was in wouldn't fit anymore people, they all came pouring in.

And I told them before I started the class, you're going to be disappointed by my answer.

Because what we want to hear is, we have these specific problems and we want solutions, what we want is interventions to take the symptoms away.

We don't want to solve the problem, we want to take the symptoms away.

Well, I'm telling you that there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of variables on those problems.

So what we're going to do is we're going to, instead of fighting off death, we're going to look at fostering life.

And you'd be surprised how fostering life just takes care of those problems and they go away.

So it again is the conditions, the conditions that are required for life to prosper.

He said that He came that we might have life and we might have it more abundantly.

Boy, I just have the temptation to veer off on all kinds of stuff when I do that.

You know, the whole idea of suffering and everything is a subject that we could spend the whole time we're going to do this on and properly understanding that.

So, In my opinion, there is a correct model, but we have to define what that model is.

Our temptation is to go and look at what the world is doing and because it's popular, that's what we want to do.

And we never ask the questions, what are the philosophical underpinnings and what are the scientific underpinnings of that approach?

When you start looking a little bit closer, you start becoming a little more disturbed about some of these approaches.

And I'll tell you up front that there's 1 common factor in all of these schools of thought.

Nobody wants to have a standard that they're accountable to.

Chemistry

We're going to look briefly at some, because we need to define some terms here, and I'm just going to use a soil test to illustrate those terms from.

And then we're going to move on to the individual elements, and we're going to look at them as individual elements in the next couple hours is what we'll be covering this here.

So who had questions I asked to ask them again?

Oh, yeah, somebody had asked, the question was, what books are there available that help you to understand, based on what's growing there, what kind of conditions you have.

1 is called Weeds Control Without Poisons by Charles Walters.

Weeds Control Without Poisons by Charles Walters.

And then there is, trying to remember to get these titles, don't want to mix them up.

That's M-C, I think it's a MC, capital C, A-M-M-E-N, I think it's 2 M's.

And then there's 1, it's by Aaron Fried Pfeiffer, the biodynamic fame.

It's the most esoteric of it, and so I don't lean on that 1 too heavily, but I'm trying to it's called weeds I can never remember the title of that but if you look at look up a book on weeds by him it's it's it starts with weeds like I said I don't use that book a lot because there's a lot of esoteric stuff in it and I get most of the value out of the other 2 books.

The question was, was there an Adventist man who went around teaching about these things?

I don't know to identify who it was, but it could have been.

What was your, didn't you have a question you were asking before?

My question was how often should you test your soil and how far apart should your test be like you get the plot of it, and what are the measures you test in regard to your good at home?

Okay, so we might as well go ahead and answer this question now.

The question is, how often, if you're gonna test your soil, how often should you do it?

And how should you determine how many soil tests to take and those type of things.

The way that I do it is that I recommend people at least, it takes 3 to 5 years to really get a good handle on what's going on and to really start moving things where you want them to be.

Depending on the condition, sometimes it can take longer than that and the resources available, sometimes it can take less than that.

But my experience has been that it usually takes at least 2 to 3 years before you really begin to have an understanding of what's going on with your soil.

The reason for that is some clays actually trap mineral nutrients between them.

It causes them to collapse and we're gonna look at that in just a minute here.

And when you actually open that soil back up, it releases that.

And things get worse before they get better.

If you know where the soil, what location a person is working with it.

If they're young expandable clays and the parent material is a granite crust or there's certain other ones, you can almost predict that they're gonna have high magnesium levels trapped between the clays.

And when you open it up, it's gonna release it and the number will go up before it goes down.

Sometimes it takes a couple, 3 years because the environmental influences are a little bit different.

And so you might take your soil test from a little bit different areas.

And so you can have a little bit of variability as a result of that.

So over a couple, 3 years, you kind of nail down what it really is.

There's a few other variables, but so I encourage people to take a test annually for at least 3 to 5 years.

Once you get it, You know, the circumstances may not warrant it going that long, and usually I tell growers, you know, okay, well you don't really need to test this every year, we can kind of tell what you're gonna need to do for a couple years.

And I don't try to take money from people, I just try, I try to, because I have people that say, Well, I should do this, do that, and everything.

I said, after they gave me the criteria, I said 1 test will work, you don't need 10 of them.

But another factor that comes into play is how intensively you're growing.

If you're really growing intensively and you're growing high value things, I grow intensively and I grow high value things.

I have a pretty good handle on what's going on except in this 1 place now.

But if I have a high demand crop on a low CEC soil, I'm testing every 6 months.

And I'm doing leaf analysis on top of that, because I need to make sure that everything's made available to that crop, the Aneto.

So it varies, but I encourage people for the first couple, 3 years, to take a test every year.

And then there's usually criteria to how many different ones you need to take and that has to do with topography and soil color and Because that usually there's indications Was somebody fertilizing it before in this area?

They're not there's some I usually if I'm working with somebody with with consulting I usually I have an instruction sheet that I give them and there's a tutorial on how to take a good sample off of Kinsey Ag's website.

It's easier for you to go there and do that because you may need to read it 3 or 4 times before you get everything out of it you need to.

And if you need me to tell you that over the phone 3 or 4 times, it can get time-consuming.

So it's just easier to do it that way because you can go back and review whatever parts of it you're not sure about.

So it depends on how valuable it is to you and how critical the information needs to come at what you know what interval as to how often you would do it.

I also recommend that additional tests be done than a standard test like for cobalt and molybdenum because if you actually want to get to a fully natural growing system, cobalt and molybdenum are critical.

So if you want to be only plant-based in your diet, then you really better be sure that you've got cobalt in your soil so that that B12 is made available.

Now people will argue with me, and please don't go out of here and say, oh, I don't, Whitmar told them that I didn't have to take B12 as a supplement anymore, or read animal products, because this is a very, it's a very dangerous condition if you don't have it.

And I'm actually gonna probably talk about that.

Everything looked wonderful here in parts of Australia and in New Zealand, where cobalt was just naturally deficient in the soil.

And the livestock were consuming the grass and everything and they were dying.

Because there was no cobalt, so there was no B12.

And in much of Australia, it's really deficient in D-moly as well.

And so you learn those things depending on the different soil types, the parent materials.

So cobalt is important for the natural nitrogen fixers as well.

And then molybdenum is also critical for natural nitrogen fixing, both the free living nitrogen fixers and the symbiotic ones, the ones that are symbiotic with legumes that most people know about, but most people don't realize that there's a lot of free living nitrogen fixers in the soil that don't have to have that relationship with the legume.

And so if your goal is you should actually be able to get to the place where you do not have to apply a single pound of nitrogen to your ground.

That system should know what's required and the plants tell the microbes in the soil, I need this, and they go about the interaction, they go about providing what's needed.

It's not something you have to do every single year because once you know what that state is, you can address it over the next 2 or 3 years and build it and then you should probably take a test again just to see where you are.

But 1 of the interesting things, I'll say most of this when we get to the trace elements.

Once you restore some of these things, you may not touch them again for another 20 years.

Because so little of it is consumed, but if you don't have it in certain levels, it's not optimized in its availability for maximum growth.

But that's not true with most of the major elements because you're pulling a lot out.

And if you're taking it away, it has to be given back.

But most of the trace elements, once you get it replenished, I mean, You won't.

It comes, a lot of them come in the standard analysis, but you know, there's not going to be significant movement in those after you get them restored, so you don't need to worry about them as much.

But you've got to get them back to where they need to be.

So did that answer the question satisfactorily?

Does anybody else have any question about that?

It's usually better to go into more specifics with individual situations, what would be the best approach to it.

Because like I said, I have people say, well, I should probably take 10 different samples.

And so I ask them the questions like, well, what's the topography like?

Getting the Model Right- Part 2

You know, while we're waiting for everybody to get sat down, I'll tell you a story.

Do you know that you can determine how much magnesium is in your soil about how thick the mud sticks to your boot before you can kick it off?

Really, you can measure the inches of mud that sticks to your boot before you can actually kick it.

I've seen guys, their whole boot came off because they couldn't.

You can buy, how much mud, how thick it will get before it'll kick off, you can get a pretty close estimation of how much magnesium is in your soil.

When we get the magnesium, we'll see why that actually is.

People ask me all the time, well is there any other way to determine what the conditions are?

We have a heritage that's dying rapidly of people that have observed nature.

They've observed nature and I'll share some of these things.

I won't share it all here but the problem is that if you want to wait 10, 15, 20 years until you get enough observation in, If somebody has already observed those things, if somebody already knows how to measure those things and determine what the conditions are, well it's up to you if you want to do that that way.

But I would much rather have the information as fast as I can get it so I can make the corrections as quickly as I can as well.

Okay, got everybody here, or most everybody?

Let's start on the second part of this, which is looking at the soil and getting the model right, which is the guiding principles from science.

What God said is consistent with what he made and sometimes we want to take what he made and determine what he said but we don't understand what he made.

Or sometimes we want to determine what how things should be in real life but we don't understand what he said.

Again, we're back into a world of confusion.

You know what the difference is, by the way?

The Bible says that God is not the God of confusion, but the God of peace.

What do those 2 things have to do with each other?

They're not really, you know, contradictory adjectives, I guess you could put it that way, opposing ones.

When you have confusion, do you have peace?

I mean, you have disruption and everything.

When you have peace, that's because there's understanding, there's knowledge, and there's understanding.

We're going to look at that, you know, nature abhors instability.

It wants balance, it wants stability, it wants peace, and it will do everything in its power to do that.

The problem is that we've taken a lot of its means of doing that away through the curse of sin.

I'm not getting a very good color, but anyway.

Here is what is probably considered the universal model from a scientific standpoint.

It is about 45% mineral, about 5% organic matter, which we'll talk about, and then, or in other words, half of it, half of that soil is solid, and the other half then is pore space, air, And of that half, about half of the pore space is filled with water, 25% of the total and 25% is air.

This is universally considered the ideal soil.

I've never come across anybody that disagrees with this model?

Has anybody seen this before, by the way?

So let's say you're, I don't know if Ian asked this question when he was in any of his classes, but say you're a freshman in college and you're taking agronomy and you're looking at this and your professor tells you this is the ideal soil.

And you raise your hand and you say, okay, well, if I don't have that ideal soil, how do I get it?

You know what his answer, does anyone want to hazard a guess what his answer will be?

Did they ever, Do you ever ask that question?

They don't even bring it up anymore because they can't answer the question.

They're gonna tell you, well, you're just stuck with whatever you have.

We don't know how to get this I feel so so you're just stuck with whatever you have in other words you're just whoever you are and there's nothing you can do about it just enjoy life yeah you're an individual right yeah well we're gonna touch on that when we get to the organic school of thought here.

So they're going to tell you, would that give you hope?

I know there's enough things about me that I don't like the way they are and I would like them to be a different way.

In so many ways you are being told this is the ideal But it's really out of reach.

When I put organic material there, what I'm actually saying is, and we're going to get into it when we get into carbon fertility, I'm talking about stable humus, stable organic matter.

Not total organic matter, but it's really representing what's called humus or stable organic matter.

You'll see some models will have 5 to 10% there and 40 to 45% mineral.

And you'll see why when we get on to those things.

Do you believe that that statement is true?

The truth is that a lot of people don't want you to know what to do about it.

Not only in spiritual terms, but we know how to do it practically.

And this has been demonstrated for, this now has been demonstrated for nearly a hundred years all over the world Not just in any 1 place and it's been demonstrated in every major food crop has been demonstrated in every minor food crop It's been demonstrated in agroforestry.

There is no area that it hasn't been demonstrated in.

You've heard of it, but you may not know what it actually is.

And let me give you a little bit of background about it.

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Series

Soil Fertility

Soil Biology

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Special Interests

Integrating Cover Crops Into High Tunnel Production Systems

1h 2m

Special Interests

Cover Cropping: A Tool to Rebuild and Restore Your Soil

1h 12m

Level 2 Home & Market Gardeners

Cover Cropping and Its Benefits

1h 8m

Advanced Track

Deep Dive into Cover Crops: Developing a System that Works for You

1h 1m

Advanced Track

Deep Dive into Cover Crops: Developing a System that Works for You

1h 1m

Basic Gardening

Planting a No-Till Garden

1h 8m

Starting a Market Garden

A Bird’s-Eye View of Market Gardening

1h 3m

Home Gardening

Beating the Botanical Besiegement

1h 14m

Session 4

Cover Crops: What? When? and Why?

54m

Sound Doctrine