1 Corinthians 3:18-20 (NIV)
18Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a "fool" so that he may become wise. 19For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written: "He catches the wise in their craftiness," 20and again, "The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile."
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Wednesday 10 October, 2007 Written by Im How Chemical Became Conventional
If you look at a bag of chemical fertilizer, you’ll see a series of three numbers, like 10-30-10 or 15-5-30. That’s the NPK rating. It’s the percentage of available Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium a fertilizer contains, which gets sucked up into the roots to build your fruits and vegetables.
NPK is the minimum criteria required to grow a plant. It has been used since the late 1800’s by farmers and gardeners all over the world. Though other minerals will have an effect on the plant’s growth and nutritional quality, we know that for the majority of edible plants, as long as the Big Three are in place, your seeds will grow up to become crops.
But NPK farming doesn’t account for the total web of Life: the complex system of exchanges between the plant and all aspects of the environment surrounding it. We have learned that nothing is truly defined in this world until its environment has also been included in that definition.
No man is an island? Well neither is a plant.
There are 92 minerals essential for thriving, abundant life. After a few seasons of “conventional” farming, most of these minerals have been sucked out of the soil, and you’re left with imbalanced crops with low nutritional value, poorer flavor, and shorter shelf life. Only natural means of replenishing the soil really do the trick.
So then...why would we choose a program that neglects quality, if the results reveal such an obvious difference?
Take a journey with me, if you will, back to the mid-1800’s. To fully understand the story of the global shift from natural farming to chemical agriculture contrivance, we take you now to Germany, to the eminent chemist Justus von Liebig.
It seems Justus burned some plants one day, and the ash was made up of nitrogen, phosporus and potash, or potassium carbonate. Justus thought he was looking at the only three important elements necessary to plant growth and well-being. He downplayed the role of humus in plant nutrition and proceeded to inform the public of these conclusions, writing profuse volumes on how to grow plants by adding cheap, chemically-derived substances. Our man Justus had a convincing way of squelching the competition, and had Big Funding on his side.
Meanwhile, smoke rises off in the horizon from the laboratory of Friedrich von Kekule, one of Justus's disciples. Friedrich discovered a fascinating phenomenon. He found that by forcing the additions of hydrogen, carbon and other elements to existing substance in a “chaining” process, one may create an entirely new substance with new uses. This hydrocarbon ring and chain technology opened the way for unbridled development "in what amounted to a heyday for sorcerer's apprentices".
So picture this epic industrial scenario. New technology is discovered and test tube creationism births a myriad of new substance. Factories are built to manifest the technology into household and commercial business, and oodles of funding is provided to surge this momentum forward.
Now comes the irony. Justus changed his mind one day, confronted with overwhelming evidence as to his error. Justus proceeded to reverse his NPK edicts, invoked ten years earlier, opining this time that the secret to fertilizing plantlife lies in organic excreta...animal-based fertilizers, cover crops and micro-organisms. However, this reversal apparently came too late- the ten years of momentum created by the sales and propaganda forces of the chemical industry, had taken the NPK of Justus and run with it. The rest is history as they say.
And the story does not just stop at the farm field. This same technology goes on to create allopathic medicine, improved explosives and large-scale warfare, turns oil (the petroleum hydrocarbon of John D. Rockefeller Sr.) into Big Oil, eventually tying John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Standard Oil of New Jersey to Adolph Hitler. But that is quite another story...
The history lessons of old, when actually listened to, are inevitably opportunities for improvement. If we find out that some of our reality programming was put in place by questionable means, are we not therefore free to change it, to model it around a base philosophy which vibrates more like us?
That base philosophy might include how we treat our precious planet and our neighbors in common trust - all members of the physical and ethereal kingdoms - which ultimately reflects in how we treat ourselves.
The preceding information was the courtesy of.
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Gulf of Mexico dead zone caused by fertilizer runoff from conventional farming. Image from NASA.
Yet another report comes out announcing that organic food is higher in nutrition (in this case, heart-healthy flavonoids in tomatoes) than conventionally-raised crops. While that’s not really surprising to me, I choose organics and vegetarianism not for the personal health benefits, which are a definite bonus, but because I know that organics are grown without soil- and water-destroying chemicals including pesticides and herbicides.
For just one example of the effects of conventional farming, fertilizer runoff from Midwestern farms pollutes the Mississippi River and has contributed to a 20,000 square mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Organic produce doesn’t use artificial fertilizers, poison the laborers who pick it, and non-chemical farming is healthier for wildlife that lives on or around crops.
But it seems to me that to get people to really care about any environmental topic, from organics to global warming, you have to make it about them, directly effecting their personal health or the health of their families, or about their safety, or as a means to save money. Why don’t people see the big picture about these issues and do the right thing because we’ve only got one Earth?
The preceding information was courtesy of.
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