Fertilizers alone are not the key to nutrition. We eat plants to get the vitamins and minerals locked in the phytochemicals where nature puts them. It should be no surprise that it’s the soil in which plants grow that provides these minerals. Plants can only use mineral ions, individual atoms, but after time all that is left are minerals too large in particle size to be absorbed by roots.
Centuries of farming – each year removing more and more of these micro sized minerals and trace elements, and decades of commercial factory farming with petrochemicals that kill the soil micro organisms, have left many of our fields stripped of the very micro-minerals that are necessary to enable plants to provide nutrition in our foods. Without minerals food may grow to look normal and attractive with fertilizers alone, but is empty of what nourishes us - and why pretty fruit in the store lacks taste. There are products on the market such as ASAP Plant Minerals that put these macro minerals back in the soil.
Organic farming is an obvious step in the right direction to reverse this trend. I would add that the missing link in organically produced food is Re-Mineralizing soil: to activate the production of nutrient content in food.
By providing macro-nutrient and micro-nutrient minerals that regulate all the functions of plant biology, food becomes infused with nutrients. The foundation of this process is the micro organisms in properly prepared organic soil. These organisms are releaser's of naturally occurring nitrogen, but more importantly the producers of fulvates; electrolyte molecules that move minerals in soil to the roots and are critical for both plant and animal life. Without fulvates minerals are not absorbed as readily and easily by roots. Without minerals and fulvates, roots cannot grow to their potential mass to gather more minerals and fertilizer.
So minerals are specifically for micro organisms and root development and vitality. The down-stream effects of re-mineralizing, are; nutrients for micro organisms; micro-organism provide nutrients for the plant; plants create nutrients in the food to ultimately provide nutrient rich foods for animal and human healthy. In many ways, re mineralization of soil is the foundation of nutrition in food.
But it’s also the cure for many problems, because there is a societal cascade effect by eating food with no nutrition. Eating food that is devoid of nutrients requires that you take supplemental vitamins and minerals. This lack of nutrition in food creates an unnecessary industry - chemical vitamin and mineral supplements, which creates a need for petrochemical producers, requiring federal agencies to regulate them – also unnecessary.
Without vitamins in food, and if you cannot afford supplements, then health fails and the medical industry is provided work and federal agencies for oversight - also unnecessary. In short, forgetting to feed the micro organisms the minerals they need at the first steps of organic growing creates the very problems in society we complain about. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
Sustainable Living Articles @ http://www.articlegarden.com
August Dunning is the head Research Director at www.asaporganics.com
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