SECRETS
OF THE
S10) 15
New Solutions for
Restoring our Planet
“A worthy sequel to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring”-Boston Herald,
By
rel Tompkins & Christopher Bird
Authors of The Secret Life of Plantsworthy sequel to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring” — Boston Herald
Secrets of the Soil tells the fascinating story of the innovative, nontradi-
POM ccOMSt Outer eee Me Me cence aM te wet
eC Ni ome Ue cated oe creda iene necmtcn tie cmcca itn (owe
ements emitter awit alrtemten wae are (cen)
p planets, Dan Carlson's growth stimulating Sonic Bloom, and rock dust fertil-
ir to revitalize depleted soils; or gardening with the help of truly amazing new
nologies to reverse serious agricultural problems.
“With the environment in such a needy state, what.a boon to move away
m problems and hear about viable solutions. Peter Tompkins and Christopher
‘d go well beyond explaining how agricultural chemicals are poisoning our soil,
r food and us. Spanning the globe, from the Himalayas to the Blue Ridge
uuntains, they look in on an emerging breed of farmers who, with rousing suc-
ks, are kicking the chemical habit and going organic...Secrets puts the spotlight
the health benefits of ‘traditional agriculture,’ wherein the only chemicals
Siete reese ey a
— Ann parson, Boston Herald
“Truly revolutionary...a fascinating, multidisciplinary investigation of
ce cctom eco mcm cient knit ee iame Cremona aes
PER CUM euTn aol eoracu MEN m rset me corne mei
|, an organism resonating with cosmic, terrestrial, and spiritual energies. And
ey find amazing cause for hope and action.”
— Anna Bond, East West
“Anyone seriously concerned with human survival and environmental
alth will find this book required reading.
rer cin eam koi
“Fascinating and constructive...the book overflows with practical infor-
htion on how to heal our soils, our plants, our animals, our food, ourselves.”
i — Ulrich Schreiber
‘& nt
SL Ed ) |
$ 19.95 USAAn earlier edition of this book was published by Harper & Row,
Earthpulse Press
P.O. Box 201393
Anchorage, Alaska 99520 USA
Fax: 907-696-1277
Phone: 907-249-9111
ISBN 1-890693-24-3
Copyright 1998 —- PETER TOMPKINS & CHRISTOPHER BIRD
All Rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as
may be expressly permitted by the Copyright Act or in writing by the pub-
lisher.
Revised
First Earthpulse Printing: 1998
Second Earthpulse Printing: 2000
Third Earthpulse Printing: 2002
Printed in the United States of AmericaSo long as one feeds on food from unhealthy soil,
the spirit will lack the stamina to free itself from
the prison of the body.
— RUDOLF STEINERTABLE OF CONTENTS
ODO Mrnnerb ene
ee ee Ww
OPnNaAnk wn
ACKIOW]EUGEMENIS ...... cet c ee ec cece ce eee cu ee seeae
Introduction.
Cornucopia
Pulse of Life .
Moonshine
Goiden Garbage -
Mierpcosmos v.11...
Miracle Down Under
It Can Be Done ....
Heaven on Earth ...
Vortex of Life
Claws of Chelation
Sonic Bloom.......
Seeds for Survival .........
Weeds: Guartiians of the Soil
Icicles ln the Greenhouse
Dust for LY€ oc sescereens
Life and Death in the Forest.
Savory Soth.....ceccsenerienene
Biomass Can Do It...
Purified with Fire .....vill
P
ae OOD
Acknowledgements
Turning, bn £0 Nature ec ete teeee cece eteerepeereenteenneenenee 235
Towers of Power
Cosmiculture .,
Perelandra
BPG QUE ccccestisissaies oacrercasinuessossins
APPENDICES
Light from the East 0.2.0... cc ces cesses te cenees ees ce cstaenene es
Seving 1s Beleving ...,..-.0-.cee eee
Three Quarks for Muster Mark
Stetner and Anthroposophy ....
Platietary POWETS ..1..-.-.csesesensessseeeseees
How To anc Where To
Bibllagraptiy -... cece ce ccecettnetreereeetenerecseesceneranee AOUACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our grateful thanks to all those who have helped and contrib-
uted to this effort. especially for reading the manuscript and
making helpful suggestions, Eddie Albert for his encouragement
while the going was rough: Dr. Baygyla Rateaver for sharing her
encyclopedic knowledge of the soil and how to care for it organi-
cally: Christian and Joanna Campe for their invaluable assis-
tance over the years, particularty with remincralization of Euro-
pean soils; Sara Sorelle for her cheerful and indefatigable help in
researching the beok: Jerree Tompkins for the endless process-
tng of snaterial through her IBM PC: and, as always. the staff of
the Library of Congress for their invaluable facilities so courte-
ously offered—-facilites unfortunately no longer available to schol-
ars, thanks to the incumbant Librarian of Congress.
We are alsa much beholden. for their hospitality and/or logis-
tle support. to: bloscientist and author Dr. Alexander P. Dubrov.
and to historian Dr. Pavel Pommer. in Moscow, U.S.S.R.; engineer
and dowser Wlodimierz Szware: author Lech Stefanski and his
wife Helena. in Warsaw, Poland: and to Dr. Zdenek Rejdak. Prest-
dent. international Association for Psychotronic Research, and
his able interpreter Eva Roubalova in Prague. Czechoslovakia:
Ljerka Radovic. leading translator of contemporary American and
British fiction. in Belgrade, and Mr. and Mrs. Mato Modric in
Rovin|, Yugoslavia; Dr. Marla Felsenretch, fighter for eco agricul-
ture, in Ganserndorf, Austria; Lile and Hans Schulyok in Lucerne,x Secrets af the Soil
and Pierre Lehmann, nuclear physicist tured environmental
activist, in Vevey. Switzerland; Detlev Moos. publisher, in
Grifelfing. G.P.R.. Jerome Dumoulin, sentor editor, L' Express and,
Dr. F.B, Laffout, senior member of the Ecale Francaise D'Hxtreme
Orient in Paris, France: John W, Mattingly and his wife Frieda, in
Loveland, Colorado: Hannah Campbell and Davis Bird, Bison
Associates, In Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our thanks also to Mark
Medish of Harvard University and to his father Vadim Medish.
professor of Russian language and literature at American Uni-
versity in Washington, D.C., for his assistance (n deciphering
highly technical documents and tapes from the former Soviet
Union.INTRODUCTION
No creature. not even swiuc, befouls tts nest
with such abandon as does homo sapiens, poisoning his habitat
with fiendishly concocted chemicals and thelr deauly taxic waste.
A morass of rotting human flesh awaits us all unless the anti-
dotes are rapidly applied. Providentially, they exist. they work.
and as detailed in these pages. can bring us back to health.
That the earth is alling—almost beyond repair—was clear
enough as early as 1912 to Nobel Prize winner Dr, Alexis Carrel.
In Man, the Unknown this eminent French scientist wamed that
since soil is the basis jor all human fe, our only hope Jor a healthy
world rests on reestablishing the harmony in the soil we have
disrupted by our modern methods of agronomy. All of life will be
eather healthy or unhealthy, said Carrel, according to the fertility
of the soil, Directly. or indirectly. ali food comes from sotl,
Today soils are tired. overworked, depleted. sick, patsored by
synthetic chemicals. Hence the quality of food has suffered. and
80 has health. Malnutrition begins with the soll. Buovant human
health depends on wholesome food, and this can only come trom
fertile and productive soils. Minerals in the sail, said Carrel. con-
trot the metabolism of cells in plant, animal, anc man. Diseascs
are created chiefly by destroying the harmony reigning among
@uneral substances present in infinitesimal amounts in air. wa-
ter, food, but most Lmportantty in soll. If soll {s deficient in trace
elements. food and waiter wil! be equally deticient,xii Secrets of the Soil
Carrel then came to the point: chemical fertilizers cannot re-
store soil fertility. They do not work on the soil, but are forcibly
imbibed by plants, poisoning both plant and soil. Only organic
humus makes for life. Plants, said Carrel, are the great tnterme-
diaries by which the elements in rocks, converted by microorgan-
isms into humus, can be made available to animal and man, to
be built into flesh, bone, and blood. Chemical fertilizers, on the
contrary, can neither add to the humus content of soil nor re-
place it. They destroy its physical properties, and therefore its
life. When chemical fertilizers are put into the soil they dissolve
and seek natural combination with minerals already present. New
combinations glut or overload the plant, causing it to become
unbalanced. Others remain in the soll, many in the form of pol-
sons.
Plants that are chemically fertilized may look lush, but lush
growth produces watery tissues, which become more susceptible
to disease; and the protein quality suffers. Chemical fertilizers,
said Carrel, by increasing the abundance of crops without re-
placing aif the elements exhausted from the soil. have contrib-
uted to changing the nutritive value of our cereals: “Ihe more
civilization progresses, the further {t gets from a natural diet.”
Our present diet consists of adulterated and denatured foods.
from which the most precious essential factors have been removed
by coloring, bleaching, heating, and preserving. Pasteurizing milk
kills the enzymes vital to nutrition, leaving only the rotted corpses
of bacteria. White bread has its germ, which contains the vital
nutrients, ritually removed, a deliberate castration.
Anyone alive before World War I!, especially in Europe, knows
that bread, fruit, vegetables, and meat bear no relation to what
they were before the war. Our crop yields may have doubled or
even tripled, but their nutritive quality has diminished progres-
sively. Visual impression of foods has become the most tmpor-
tant factor, though anyone with a glimmer of second sight will
pass up, as no more alive than the products of Madame Toussaud's
Wax Museum, the cosmetic and congealed displays of the grocery
store today.
Abundance does not mean the food contains a suffictent amount
of needed elements and vitamins. There is no doubt, says Dr.
Melchior Dikkers, Professor of Biochemistry and Organic Chem-
istry at Loyola University, that malnutrition ts the most impor-
tant problem confronting mankind at the present time. The United
States, despite its boasted food production, ts grossly undernour-
ished. And, though the per capita expenditure on health care in
the USA is the highest in the world, so is the incidence of cancer,
obesity, heart, and circulatory diseases.Introduction xiii
Amazingly, Dr. Joseph D, Weissman, associate professor at the
UCLA College of Medicine, a specialist in preventive medicine and
immunology, has discovered, after years of research, that nearly
all the noninfectious diseases that presently plague mankind are
of recent origin, developed during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, and that the billions of dollars spent on research, newer
diagnostic techniques, organ transplants, coronary bypass pro-
cedures, chemotherapy, radiation, and all the various drugs, have
not appreciably altered the advance of these killer diseases, but
instead have merely enriched the chemist and the medical prac-
titioner.
Dr. Weissman argues that most of today’s killer diseases are
caused by environmental toxins produced by our industrial soci-
ety. Many doctors agree, aware that the great increase in dis-
eases of degeneration, such as cancer and heart disease. unde-
terred by the advances of modern medicine, are primarily due to
extensive use of synthetic chemicals in our datly diet, food pre-
servatives, insecticides, fungicides, pesticides, and so on.
Most people, says Weissman, assume their ailments arise from
causes beyond their control, unaware that they can choose a life
of excellent health, remaining active, trim, and alert into their
second century. He believes that choices of diet and lifestyle in
our industrial societies play a large part, perhaps the largest, in
whether or not we remain vibrant past our prime.
But doctors in general know very little about food. Dr. Robert
S, Mendelsohn, Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at the
University of Illinois School of Medicine—described as a member
of a small fraternity dedicated to freeing the healing art from the
domination of drug companies—lays the blame on the plethora of
misinformation on nutrition put out in medical schools, suggest-
ing they might do better not to teach the subject at all.
Even more amazing, Dr. Weissman's research reveals that many
of the killer diseases have developed only within the last hundred
years, demonstrably through toxic chemicals introduced into the
environment and food supply as by-products of the Industrial
Revolution—chemicals such as chlorine and its compounds, coal-
tar derivatives, pharmaceuticals. petrochemicals, and so on.
The emergence of industrialization, with its massive toxic wastes,
coincided with the appearance of many of the new diseases. Our
ancestors may have had a shorter life span. largely owing to in-
fant mortality. says Weissman. but. like present-day primitive
Peoples, they were virtually free of “degenerative” diseases.
A hundred years ago coronary heart disease was virtually un-
imown tn Europe and America. The first case described in medt-
Cal literature surfaced in 1910. Today it is the leading cause ofxiv Secrets of the Soil
death. Cancer, which today is responsible for 3.4 percent of all
deaths in Europe and America, was responsible for only 1 per-
cent a hundred years ago. Today even newborn and very young
children are victims of cancer and leukemia. Dtabetes, the third
most common cause of death, once struck only one in fifty thou-
sand Americans: now it strikes one in twenty.
Water, in primitive lands—as was the case in developing coun-
tries before the late nineteenth century—needed no disinfection.
Where there are no industries or factories pouring waste pollut-
ants into the environment, plants, marine life, and land animals
are not tainted by dangerous chemicals. Now, not only water but
soil and air are everywhere polluted, a pollution that 1s transmit-
ted via plant and animal to man. In the developed world, says
Weissman, there is virtually no clean soil or water left: toxins are
in all the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe.
Fruits, vegetables, grain, fish, poultry, meats, eggs, dairy prod-
ucts are all affected. And some foods are concentrators and mag-
nifiers of the pollution, the greatest concentrations of toxins oc-
curring in animal fat and cholesterol. Mother's milk could not be
legally sold in the supermarket; it would not pass the government's
safety test.
Protection against disease, says Weissman, is more important,
and more effective, than later therapy. And protective medicine
starts in the soil.
Poisoning of the soil with artificial agricultural additives began
in the middle of the last century when a German chemist, Justus
von Liebig, known as the “father of chemical agriculture,” mis-
takenly deduced from the ashes of a plant he had burnt that
what nourished plants was nitrogen, phosphorous, and potash
{or potassium carbonate)—the NPK of today’s chemical agricul-
ture.
Liebig’s dicta—and he wrote profusely—led to a vast and prof-
itable commercial development of synthetic chemicals, Lulled by
propaganda, world farmers became dependent on German mines
for supplies of potassium salts, known as “muriate of potash,”
without which they were told that nothing on their farms would
grow, When World War I interrupted exports from Germany, pros-
pectors located deposits in the United States, launching Ameri-
can companies into rapid exploitation of this bonanza of unnec-
essary chemicals.
From the amount of phosphoric acid also found in the ash of
his burnt plant, Liebig further concluded that phosphorous must
be a prime requirement for the growth of plants. Since Roman
times, farmers had been using ground-up bones to obtain their
phosphorus. By treating bones with sulfurte acid Liebtg createdIntroduction xv
what he called a “superphosphate.” When vast quantities of sea-
derived calcium phosphate were discovered—believed to be the
skeletons of sea animals collected over millions of years—a whole
new industry of artificial “mineral manures” was launched.
Up until Liebig's time, it was believed that because virgin soils
were highly fertile, and contained much humus, the various stages
of this brown decaying organic matter must be the principal source
of nourishment for plants. Liebig attacked the notion with vehe-
mence. Of humus and of the humic acid derived from it, he wrote:
“There is not the shadow of a proof that either of them exerts any
influence on the growth of plants either in the way of nourish-
ment or otherwise.”
As William Shestone put it in his 1875 biography of Liebig:
“These were the facts and arguments by which, once and for all,
Liebig rendered the humus theory untenable by any reasonable
human being.”
That the secret to fertilizing soil lay in organic excreta, not chemt-
cals, Liebig only concluded ten years later. Too late. By that time
the chemical companies were off to such a profitable start there
was no stopping them in their headlong race to destroy the soil
and all that it supports.
The first chemical produced on a commercial scale in the in-
cipient “age of chemicals” was the sulfuric acid used by Liebig to
produce his “superphosphate,” a clear, corrosive, oily liquid still
the most widely solid chemical today, basic to the manufacture of
a host of other chemical substances, along with the production of
dyes, drugs. paper, pigments, and explosives.
Next most important among the chemicals concocted in the lab
for commercial use was alkali. a soluble mineral salt, named by
the Arabs fron the sea-beach saltwort plant from whose ashes
they first derived the substance. While it was at first primarily
used in the manufacture of soap and glass, by mid-nineteenth
century all the major chemical agents in use were connected in
one way or another to alkali. Britain's United Alkali Corporation,
Set up in 1891, became the world’s largest chemical enterprise,
with forty-three firms employing fifty chemists and twelve thou-
Sand plant workers, eventually to be swallowed up by the giant
Sovernment-sponsored amalgam of Imperial Chemical Industries.
Accidentally, a whole new branch of chemistry was developed
in the mid-nineteenth century by a young English chemistry stu-
dent working in a makeshift lab in his father’s house during the
Easter vacation of 1856. Experimenting with coal tar, William
Henry Perkin produced a mauve dye from its constituent ben-
zene, the first of the so-called aniline dyes. remarkable for the
Way it held fast and would not wash out as did natural colors.xvi Secrets of the Soil
Patented, his mauve became fashionable at the court of both
Victoria and Napoleon III, obtaining for Perkin a fortune and a
knighthood. Soon aniline red, yellow, and black followed mauve:
and millions remained to be made from synthesized indigo, the
color of jeans.
When a disciple of Liebig, Friedrich von Kekule, realized—in
what has been called “the most brilliant piece of prediction to be
found in the whole range of organic chemistry” and one that would
elevate him to the nobility—that six atoms of carbon in the ben-
zene molecule could be linked together in a circle, with a hydro-
gen atom attached to each, German chemists saw their way to
the construction of endless new compounds by artificially unit-
ing carbon in their test tubes with nitrogen, hydrogen, sulfur,
chlorine, etc., in what amounted to a heyday for sorcerer’s ap-
prentices.
Drugs were soon added to the inventory of chemical-company
products, as German and Swiss dye companies found endless
new ways of turning coal tar and other waste products tnto a
health-debilitating but highly profitable pharmacopoeia. In the
United States alone, $8 billion are spent yearly on so-called medi-
cines. And coal tar dyes had further lethal uses, chemically es-
sential to the vast expansion of explosives.
It remained for a German chemist, Fritz Haber, to discover in
1905 a laboratory process for turning the endless tons of free
nitrogen in the air into liquid ammonia, 82 percent of which is
nitrogen. By 1915 Karl Bosch, a German engineer, joined Haber
in designing the first synthetic ammonia plant in the Reich, en-
abling the German High Command to indulge in the Kafser's war.
German dye firms, banding together for patriotism and for profit,
produced explosives, chemical fertilizers, drugs, and, as a bonus,
the poison gases responsible for some 800,000 casualties in World
War I.
With the end of hostilities, the huge amounts of gas left over
were redirected to the insect—but on a wider scale, thanks to the
improved methods of dusting and spraying developed on humans
by the military. Increased doses of nitrogen, no longer needed for
explosives, were indiscriminately dumped on crops, weakening
their resistance to Insects, creating a vicious circle that snow-
balled as it endured, progressively more profitable for the few as
it polsoned soll and aquifer for the many.
German chemical companies. with money from their opposite
numbers in the United States—who had made equally enormous
profits from the war—amalgamated in 1925 to form the I.G, Farben
conglomerate, soon the largest chemical enterprise in Europe.
closely bonded with its U.S. partners. Together these conglomer-Introduction xvii
ates funded Hitler, rearming his Wehrmacht as a “bulwark against
the Soviets.” And with petroleum, courtesy of Standard Oil of New
Jersey, Hitler was enabled to roil his tanks into Poland and into
World War Il.
While loyal Gls desperately struggled with their lives to undo
this handiwork, at Auschwitz 1.G. Farben, with slave labor guar-
anteed by Hirmmler, produced a special gas to exterminate mil-
ions of unwary victims, mostly Jewish.
From World War Il, American chemical companies, which had
‘boomed between the wars, derived an even greater bonanza from
the free ammonia Bosch had prestidigitated from the air. A mil-
lion tons of bombs were dropped on Germany alone, causing mil-
Hions of dollars to be funneled by U.S. taxpayers into chemical-
company coffers.
At war's end, eighteen new ammonia factories, developed in
the U.S. at taxpayers’ expense to manufacture explosives, were
obliged to find a market for their surplus. Du Pont, Dow, Monsanto,
American Cyanamid. with their vast wartime profits, produced
ever more fertilizer to dump on the unwary farmer, who dumped
it onto his fields to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
As a by-product of the war, to keep fleas, lice, and other insects
from contaminating GI troops, one of the most toxic pollutants
ever invented was produced by a Swiss chemist, Paul Mueller,
who chose to give the secret of its manufacture to the Allies: DDT.
Derived entirely from the test tube, it was the most potent insec-
ticide yet seen, capable of killing all sorts of bugs in a broad spec-
trum with astonishing speed and efficiency. On the home front,
with manpower critically short, farmers used It against insects to
increase crop yields and save on labor.
Following the Allied victory in 1945, DDT began to be used like
water, until the toxin seeped into every animal and human body
in America. Everywhere, chemical firms reinvested their wartime
gains to launch into unparalleled growth in a massive quest for
new synthetic broad-spectrum pesticides. The farmer, fearing di-
Saster—his plants, weakened by a surfeit of chemicals, were at-
tracting more and more bugs—turned to even more chemicals.
Complacently, the companies brought out new products by the
Score, mostly chlorinated hydrocarbons similar to DDT, such as
chlorodane. heptachior, dieldrin, aldrin, and endrin: and “organic
Phosphates” such as parathion and malathion.
In an attempt to beat the game by ever greater production,
trusting farmers in America, prodded by bankers, chemical com-
panies, and the manufacturers of agricultural machinery, changed
fom a subsistence way of life to commercial enterprises, invest-
{ng large cash payments in new land and equipment. going heavilyxvidi Secrets of the Soil
into debt on fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides-and, in so do-
ing, sealed their own doom.
That chemicals were pointlessly poisoning the soil, killing mi-
croorganisms, stunting plants and proliferating degenerative dis-
ease in man and beast was perfectly clear to a whole group of
sensitive minds in Europe and America as early as World War I.
Distinguished, distressed, and well-informed, several authors on
both sides of the Atlantic were speaking up and propagandizing
for a viable alternate method of agriculture requiring no chemi-
cals.
Their main premise was that in soll properly nourished with
adequate supplies of humus, crops do not suffer from disease,
and do not require poisonous sprays to keep off parasites: that
animals fed on these plants develop a high degree of disease re-
sistance, and that man, nurtured with such plants and animals.
can reach an extraordinary (and in fact quite natural) standard
of health, able to resist disease and infection from whatever cause
it may derive.
One of the first to sense that the use of chemical fertilizers was
doing more harm than good, that it was destroying the life and
vitality of topsoll, momentarily stimulating plant growth but ac-
tually inviting disease, was Sir Albert Howard. As a British colo-
nial officer in India, with the high-sounding title of Imperial Chemi-
cal Botanist to the Government of the Raj at Pusa, Sir Albert had
the rare opportunity of being free to carry out experiments with-
out restraints, enabling him to grow whatever crops he liked in
any way he liked with land, money, and facilities provided by the
government.
He was thus able to observe, dispassionately, and with no axe
to grind, the reaction of suitable and properly grown varieties of
plants when subjected to insects and other potential pests, He
found that the factor that most mattered in soil management was
a regular supply of freshly made humus, prepared from animal
and vegetable wastes, and that the maintenance of soil fertility
was the fundamental basis of health.
He claimed that his craps, grown on land so treated, resisted
all the pests that were rife in the district and that this resistance
‘was passed on to the livestock when they were fed on crops so
grown. He noticed that the natives never used artificial fertilizers
or potson sprays, but were extremely careful in returning all ani-
mal and plant residues to the soil. Every blade of grass that could
be salvaged, all leaves that fell, all weeds that were cut down
found their way back into the soil, there to decompose into hu-
mus and reenter the cycle of life.
Sir Albert proved that livestock fed on organically grown fodderIntroduction xix
were disease resistant, as were his oxen, which even during an
epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease rubbed noses with infected
boring stock with no ill effects. “The heaithy, well-fed ani-
mals reacted towards the disease exactly as improved and prop-
erly cultivated crops did to insect and fungi—no infection oc-
As a result of his experiments, Sir Albert reached the conclu-
sion that crops have a natural power of resistance to infection,
and that proper nutrition is all that is required to make this power
operative. “But the moment we introduce a substitute phase in
the nitrogen cycle by means of artificial manures, like sulphate of
ammonia, trouble begins which invariably ends with some out-
break of disease, and by the running out of the variety.”
‘Crops and livestock raised on land made fertile by his methods
of humus treatment attained a high measure of immunity from
infective and parasitic. as well as from degenerative, diseases.
Farther, his treatment appeared to be curative as well as preven-
tive.
By 1916 Sir Albert was lecturing that chemical fertilizers were
a waste of money, maintaining that organic matter. along with
the good aeration it promoted, was alone enough to allow mi-
crobes to provide sufficient amounts of nutrients to feed the world.
Returning to England in 1931 after thirty years in India, Sir
Albert became known as the founder of the “organic” movement
and set about popularizing his ideas. By the beginning of the
Second World War he had brought out his Agricultural Testament,
followed. when the shooting was over, by The Soil and Health. a
book in which he warned that the use of synthetic chemical fertil-
izers leads to imperfectly synthesized protein in leaves, and thus
results in many of the diseases found in plants. animals, and
human beings. As a healthy alternative he pleaded for a simple
system in which these proteins are produced from freshly pre-
pared humus and its derivatives, in which case he averred that
“all goes well: the plant resists disease and the variety is, to all
{intents and purposes, eternal.”
In vain did such statwart supporters of Sir Albert as Lady Eve
Balfour do battle for his cause in Britain, organizing the Soil As-
Sociation, and producing a thoroughly convincing work entitled
The Living Soil It validated Howard's basic premise that humus
Confers on plants a power of disease resistance amounting al-
most to immunity, something which cannot be obtained with ar-
ficial fertilizers,
In lucid terms Lady Eve pointed out that the action of compost
{8 not due to the plant nutrients it contains, but to Its biological
Teaction, which has the effect of fundamentally modifying the soilxx Secrets of the Soil
microflora. “All these substances are merely some of the raw
materials from which humus can be made. They cannot become
humus until they have been metabolized by soll organisms.”
But the odds were too heavily stacked against her. Imperial
Chemicals forged ahead unmolested. In the United States, J.I.
Rodale picked up the banner and launched a movement with his
Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine, its tenets supported
by Pay Dirt, published in 1945. At Emmaus, Pennsylvania, Rodale
created an experimental organic farm and was active in organiz-
ing organic garden clubs throughout the United States, He pointed
out that in China organic agriculture was able to feed a popula-
tion of nine hundred million, nearly as many livestock, and, on
about the same amount of arable land as is available in the United
States, three times the number of hogs.
He quoted reports from travelers to China to the effect that
there was no starvation, poverty. or the like, all without huge
doses of chemicals, insecticides, and heavy, petroleam-gobbling
machines, but only by careful composting of all organic stuff and
a labor-intensive method.
Scientific support for the argument for organic farming came
in lapidary language from one of the most brilliant soil scientists
produced in America, Dr. William A, Albrecht, Chairman of the
Department of Soils at the University of Missouri, with four de-
grees from the University of [llinots. Widely traveled, he had stud-
ied the soils of Great Britain, the European continent, and Aus-
tralia, drawing conclusions seasoned by a farm boy's upbringing.
His extensive experiments with growing plants and animals sub-
stantiated his observation that a declining soil fertility, due toa
lack of organic material, major elements, and trace minerals, was
responsible for poor crops and in turn for pathological conditions
in animals fed deficient foods from such soils, and that mankind
was no exception. Degenerative diseases, as causes of death in
the Untted States, had risen from 39 percent of the population in
the decade 1920-29 to 60 percent in the year 1948.
Organic matter, said Albrecht, may be called the constitution
of the soil, And a good constitution, he added wryly, is the capac-
ity. according to its meaning as used in the medical profession, of
an individual to survive despite the doctors rather than because
of them. Insects and disease, he pointed out, are the symptoms
of a failing crop, not the cause. “The use of poisonous sprays is
an act of desperation in a dying agriculture. Fertilizer placement
is the art of putting salt in the ground so that plant roots can
somehow manage to avoid it!”
In sum he preached that weeds are an index to the character of
the soil. It is therefore a mistake to rely on herbicides to eradicateIntroduction aad
, since the chemicals deal with effect, not cause. Insects and
nature's predators are disposal crews, summoned when they are
needed, repelled when they are not. Crop losses in dry weather,
or during mild cold snaps, are not so much the result of drought
and cold as of nutrient deficiency. NPK [nitrogen, phosphorus,
tassium] formulas, as legislated and enforced by State Depart-
nents of Agriculture, mean malnutrition, attack by insects, bac-
teria, and fungi, weed takeover, crop loss in dry weather, and
loss of mental acuity in the population, leading to degen-
erative metabolic disease and early death.
: The vast bibliography of Albrecht’s scientific and popular pa-
reveals a lifetime of meticulous scientific investigation into
the chemistry and biology of the planet, highlighting the funda-
mental necessity for feeding plants, animals, and humans through
ministrations to the soil itself, correcting deficiencies of diet at
their point of origin: the soil.
In 1939 Louis Bromfleld, author of The Rains Came, etc., re-
turned from the India of Sir Albert Howard to his Malabar Farm
in Pleasant Valley, Ohio, to put Howard's agricultural philosophy
into practice. Working with Albrecht, he bought up several worn-
out farms and produced abundant crops with organic techniques.
In a practical way he proved that insect damage and disease could
be controlled with humus, good plant nutrition, and sound soil
Management.
Were Thomas E, Dewey to have defeated Harry S. Truman in
1948, Bromfield was slated to become U.S. Secretary of Agricul-
ture, with every intention of “derailing the fossil-fuel technology
that had taken command of the education machine, USDA, Ex-
tension, and the farm press.”
But Truman's triumph brought in the policy of deliberately ban-
ishing small farmers to industrial centers and of unleashing the
petrochemicals. Through Truman’s creation of the CIA and of a
National Security Council trained for “dirty tricks,” the multina-
tionals were able. often through the guise of foreign aid, to im-
Pose their deadly chemicals not only on America, North and South.
but on all the Third World markets. Sir Albert's Indians were brain-
Washed and corrupted into dousing their healthy plants with all
kinds of Poisons. Chemical-fertilizer consumption in India rose
1.1 million tons in 1966-67 to 50 million tons in 1978-79.’
oun the late 1960s the United States and World Bank applied pressure on
to allow Western chemical companies such as Standard Oil of California
pal international Minerals & Chemicals to build fertilizer plants on the subcontl-
Collusion fs incieated by the fact that farmers received subsidies from the
inden goremnmnent of 10 to 20 percent on fertilizers anc 25 percent on pesticides,
fon £Pvernment-backed loans to pay for them. As a result, fertilizer consump:
One area of India rose between 1969 and 1979 from 5.5 to 50 kilograms
{a hectare is about an acre and a half).xxii Secrets of the Soil
While Albrecht was the leading scientific supporter of organic
farming in America, no modern voice has spoken out against so-
cial injustice, environmental deception and commercial hypoc-
tisy as applied to agriculture more candidly, clearly and tren-
chantly than Charles Walters Jr., A Kansan of Volga Germanic
stock, Walters since 1971 has edited and published a straight-
punching and hard-hitting monthly, Acres U.S.A.: A Voice for Eco-
Agriculture, the Eco standing both for economic and ecological.
Schooled in economics by his Jesuit professors, Walters, has
almost single-handedly fought the Truman heritage of diminish-
ing the farmer, supporting instead the princtple of agricultural
parity, a concept so easy to understand that most economists
and financial writers eschew it as “simplistic.”? Walter's slogan,
“Cheap food means sick or hungry people,” dramatically empha-
sizes his belief that a Kansas farmer can no more collect a fair
price for his production than the Zulu tribesman could pay for it
so long as the price of food 1s arbitrarily kept below Its fair market
price.
‘With the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's startling exposé
Silent Spring, the public was awakened with a shock to the dan-
ger of the situation, and organics took on new meaning in America,
Great pressure had been put on The New Yorker magazine by the
chemical companies to prevent her articles from being published,
and legal action was threatened to prevent Houghton Mifflin from
bringing out the book, accusing her of being a Communist.*
Yet, in 1963, Dr. Jerome Wiesner, science counselor to Presi-
dent John F. Kennedy, reporting to a commission assembled to
examine the premises of Silent Spring, declared: “Use of pesti-
cides is more dangerous than atomic fallout.”
Carson had written: “We are rightly appalled by the genetic
effects of radiation....How then. could we be indifferent to the
? Sitting in his Raytown, Missouri offices, we heard Walters take a call from onc of
hundreds of farmers sccking to clueidate the mystery of parity, and get to the nub
of the matter in a few wards: “When there is par exchange.” said Walters, “that is
to say when the farmer gets a full and not an arbitrarily discounted price for his
produce—oit a par with the price he has to pay for all that he tmports onto his
farm—then he prospers. He can pay off his debts. He can enjoy the earnings of
the Just. On the other side of that cquation—and here's the rub—bankers arid
money-lenders must go hungry. The farmer doesn't need their loans. The inter
national manipulators jose thefr base, the munitions makers see their profits
eroded by peace. When basic raw cormmodities move across bordets at less tart
equity of exchange, armies follow.” Such talls, eminently reasonable today, in the
McCarthy era could get one inta rouble.
4 Jack Doyle, Director of Agricultural Projects for the Environmental Policy [nstl
tute, in its brilliant Altered Harvest, reports that shortly after Carson's book called
attention to the acute toxicity of some pesticides and thelr indiscriminate use
throughout the country, several members of the National Academy of Sciences
engaged In pesticide problems and related flelds attacked the book.Introduction = axa
same effect from farm chemicals used freely in the environment?”
‘The meaning of this strange language, as Charles Walters was
to point out in Acres U.S.A., proved elusive, until an Italian
scientist, Amerigo Mosca, winner of the chemistry prize at the
Brussels World's Fair, presented certain startling findings.
Mosca stressed the point that toxic farm chemicals are radio-
qnimetic in that they ape the character of radiation. The damage
yesulting from nuclear radiation is the same as the damage re-
sulting from the use of toxic genetic chemicals, said Mosca. And
the use of fungicides of organic syntheses (Zineb, Captan, Phaltan,
etc.) annually causes the same damage to present and future
tions as atomic fallout from 29 H-bombs of 14 megatons—
damage equal to the fallout of 14,500 atomic bombs of the
Hiroshima type.
Mosca computed that in the United States in the 1970s, yearly
use of toxic genetic chemicals was about 453,000 tons, which
caused damage equal to atomic fallout from 145 H-bombs of 14
megatons, or 72,000 atomic bombs of the Hiroshima type. And in
charts, graphs and statistics—all of which appeared as part of
his running story—the Italian scientist revealed that mentally re-
tarded babies had reached the stunning statistic of 15 percent of
live births. He concluded that damage to plants, crops, and soil
fertility, coupled with water pollution, was practically incalcu-
lable, Continuation of the scenario would see the destruction of
the American people within a matter of a generation.
Mosca’s full report was classified by the Italian government,
not to be revealed for fifty years—by which time, perhaps, it was
hoped that sinister allegations about Montedison, producer of
megatons of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides—would be
@lossed over and forgotten.‘
Driving over hundreds of miles of country roads, Walters could
rr
LL. Baldwin, chairman of the pest control committee, wrote a long, critical review
for Science magazine. Another member of the pest-contro! committee, economic
entomologist ‘George C. Decker-—who had also becn a frequent consultant to the
chemical industry—called the book “scicnce fiction,” comparable in its message
to the TV program Twilight Zone. At congresstonal hearings, Mitchel R. Zavon, a
consultant for the Shell Chemical Company, also a member of the academy's pest
control committee, characterized Carson as one of the “peddlers of fear” whose
campaign against pesticides would “cut off food far people around the warld.” Two
other academy scientists suggested that Carson's work suffered from ignorance
8nd bias and that she had ignored the sound appraisals of pesticides conducted
by reaponsible bodies stich as the academy!
‘
mine recently revealed in the Italian courts that Montedison had corrupted and
Ibverted Italy's leading publisher, Rizzoli, owner of Milan's leading newspaper, It
della Sera, into acting as {ts covert PR outfit with funds inan{pulated
Gyough @ phony Masonle outfit in conjunction with the Vatican Bank and thexxiv Secrets of the Soil
not help noticing increasing funerals due to death by cancer among
his farmer friends and a host of “scrambled children
tetratogenically birthed, bodily deformed or mentally retarded.”
Grieved by the untimely lingering cancer death of his sister, ex-
posed to agricultural chemicals in the factory where she worked,
he btuntly entitled one front-page article: "Is Modern Agriculture
Worth Having?”
And Walters was among the first to expose the dangers behind
the now highly propagandized trradiation of foodstuffs to kill patho-
gens and extend shelflife.
When I saw this process proposed behind the scenes, [said
Walters], I cited dozens of scientists who warned about some of
the consequences of eating irradiated food: embryonal damage,
reduced digestibility, malignant lymphomas in mice, changes in
organs, and more, Since the after-effects of the consumption of
irradiated foods on living tissue are similar to those of direct ra-
diation, the relevant problems, which inchide an eventual reduc-
ton of the resistance against infectious diseases, AIDS included,
deserved attention, but the Svengalis of sclence defend irradia-
tion as cheap,
That all this horror is unnecessary, redundant, and avoidable
has now been demonstrated by a band of happy warriors in their
battle for organic farming. Healthy and economic alternatives do
exist, though some of them appear extraordinary. To discover
what they might be, we crisscrossed the planet up and down. To
describe them we have produced this book, along with an appen-
dix on where and how to apply the knowledge. With a little effort
the planet can be saved from destruction by corruption, poison,
and pollution. The Garden of Eden is not forever lost. The secret
to its revival lies buried no deeper than the first few inches of
your soll.SECRETS
OF THE SOILChapter |
CORNUCOPIA
*e) One warm December morning, solstitial
sun sparkling on the wooded hills of southern Virginia, six of us
sat in a circle looking. no doubt, like a coven of warlocks and
witches, stuffing freshly gathered cow manure into desiccated
cow horns.
‘We were on the hundred-acre farm of a former U.S. naval com-
mander, Hugh J. Courtney, gray-bearded and easy-going in his
blue denim coveralls. For almost ten years Hugh has been devot-
ing his retirement to producing the various biodynamic prepara-
tions recommended over half a century ago by the clairvoyant
Austrian scientist Rudolf Steiner as a prime remedy for our planet's
sickening soil.
By three o'clock, as the sun slanted deeper through the pine
groves, we had stuffed 850 horns bought by our host, over a pe-
tiod of years, from a cooperative slaughter house at fifty cents
apiece. No longer foul smelling as when first collected, the horns
had been placed in fifty-five gallon drums of water until the pith
within had rotted away. The manure—fresh from a small herd of
Angus-Guernseys letsurely browsing the biodynamically fertilized
Meadows that ran down to a meandering creek—was surpris-
ingly sweet to the nostrils.
Some fifty gallons of this manure filled various crocks and pails,
awaiting processing as our host explained how he'd first gotten
into biodynamic farming in College Park, Maryland, when he
i2 Secrets of the Soil
chanced to find on the shelves of the Beautiful Day Trading Com-
pany a hard-to-find volume on agriculture written by Rudolf
Steiner.
“Many occult disciplines,” said Hugh, his smile angelically be-
nign, “speak peripherally of agriculture. But this ts the only one
I've found that puts it all together.”
Steiner's booklet is indeed quite startling, requiring more than
a single reading. Conceived in June of 1924—just a year before
he died at the age of sixty-four—it came in answer to the plea of a
group of German and Austrian farmers worried about the plight
of European agriculture, Seed stock had dangerously degener-
ated and a crippling increase in animal and plant disease was
ravaging the countryside. Steiner replied with elght lectures de-
livered in the Silesian town of Koberwitz, now a part of Poland.
Bound together into a booklet with the simple title of Agriculture,
the lectures now constitute the basic and extraordinary primer
for what has come to be known as biodynamic gardening and
farming, the essential remedy, according to its practitioners, for
the planet's dying soil.
Mosaically pointing out the danger of chemical fertilizers and
the importance of good compast and humus for a healthy agrt-
culture, Steiner anticipated such pioneers of “organic” agricul-
ture as Howard, Balfour, and Rodale. But Steiner went further,
much further, by attributing the effecttveness of his biodynamic
method to cosmic, telluric, and spiritual influences on soil and
plant. And so weird were Steiner's recipes and explanations, later
embraced and brought to America by his Austrian protégé,
Eherenfried Pfetffer, that early practitioners of biodynamic farm-
ing in the United States behaved virtually as a secret society for
fear of being accused by their more orthodox chemical neighbors
of practicing witchcraft.
“You can give people,” said Courtney, “only what they are ready
to receive.” His kindly eyes, magnified by heavy horn-rimmed spec-
tacles, darted from side to side as if testing the environs for the
approval of unseen listeners. “More intrepid souls,” he went on.
*saw in biodynamics a means of working with the energies which
create and maintain Ilfe. To them, Steiner's spiritual science is a
desperately needed human service offered to a dying earth, to aid
nature where she is weak after so many centuries of abuse. And
that's how it stands today.”
Stetner’s declared aim, as was Alexis Carrel’s, was to work with
the soil as the true foundation of human health. This meant re-
storing to the soil the organic matter it needs to hold its fertility,
and restoring to the soil a balanced system of functions by treat-
ing it not merely as a mixture or aggregation of chemicals, whetherCornucopia 3
mineral or organic, but as a tnuly living system.
Like his fellow organic enthusiasts, Steiner insisted on avoid-
ing chemicals, concentrating instead on natural composts inocu-
Jated with the product of certain revivifying herbs. These he se-
lected to help microorganisms quickly decompose the raw organic
matter of the compost heap into simple compounds, reassem-
pling them into the ingredients of a long-lasting, earth-smelling,
dark brown, light-textured, friable humus, a substance which,
because of its colloidal state, holds its structure, resists leaching,
helps fix nitrogen directly from the air, and increases the avail-
ability of minerals to the plants—the staff of life.
Stuffing fresh cow manure into desiccated cow horns, When dug up the following year,
the manure will have turned to sweet-smelling friable humus.
As we sat in the noonday sun dutifully scooping spoonfuls of
khaki manure into conical cow horns from an apparently endless
succession of burlap bags, an associate of our host, a biodynamic
herbalist, Lee McWhorter, elaborated on the essential role of mi-
crobes in the soil. “Traditional agriculture,” he explained, “de
pends entirely upon the recycling by bacteria and other microbes
of various chemical elements—principally the nitrogen, sulfur,
carbon, and oxygen on which plants are nourished. Nitrogen is of
paramount importance to life on earth. It's an essential constitu-
ent of nucleic acids and amino acids, the building blocks of both
proteins and enzymes, the source of sap and blood. But. although
it is abundant in the air above every acre of land, it cannot be4 Secrets of the Soil
tapped by most plants without the aid of microbes. Hence the
symbiotic relation, beneficial to both plant and microbe. which
must have developed many miiltons or billions of years in the
ast.”
“i “Did you know,” asked one of Courtney's neighbors, Will Chapin,
who had Joined us to help with the horns, “that more microor-
ganisms germinate tn half a cup of fertile earth than there are
humans on the planet, and that a hundred thousand or more of
them flourish on every square inch of human skin?” He paused
to let the weight of his figures make their impression, then added:
“The combined weight of all the microbial cells on earth ts twenty-
five times that of its animal life; every acre of well-cultivated land
contains up to half a ton of thriving microorganisms, not to men-
tion up to a ton of earthworms, which can daily excrete a ton of
humic castings.”
With his gloved hand he pared the excess manure from a freshly
stuffed horn,
“But producing humus,” interjected our host. raising his spoon
for emphasis, “is only part of the solution. As basic as is the pres-
ence in the soil of teeming microorganisms for the creation of
good friable humus, it is merely an {ndication that more powerful
forces are creatively at work, both cosmic and telluric. That, in
essence, is what Steiner’s book on agriculture is really all about.”
As we rested from our Augean efforts, Courtney's wife, Liz, a
cheerful and attractive teacher of dramatic arts, announced a
break for lunch. During the course of it, Courtney described the
true purpose of what we were doing: preparing the first and per-
haps most important of Steiner's remedies for a dying earth, arbi-
trarily called “preparation 500,” an alchemical rather than a chemi-
cal potion. Our cow horns, like so many ice cream cones filled at
a Tastee-Freez emporium, were to be buried in the ground for the
winter, during which time our host assured us that cosmic and
telluric influences, called by Steiner formative forces, would trans-
form or even transmute the manure to a dark, earthy, and odor-
less substance, a third of a cup of which, stirred into three gal-
lons of rain-water, in extremely dilute, literally homeopathic,
amounts, would be capable of revivifying an entire acre of dying
land.
The rest of the preparations, as Courtney described them, BD
501 to 508, sounded arcane enough to have been added to the
“eye of newt, toe of frog, finger of a birth-strangled babe” stirred
into a potentizing cauldron by the witches in Macbeth to ensnare
the Thane of Cawdor. BD 501, perhaps the least exotic, is simply
quartz crystal ground to a fine powder. It too is buried in a cow
horn, but throughout the summer, not the winter. A quarter tea-Cernucopia 5
spoon of it, stirred into three gallons of water, is sprayed in the
spring or early summer on one acre of growing plants. Its func-
tion, according to Steinerians, is to “enhance light metabolism in
the plant, stimulating photosynthesis and the formation of chlo-
rophyll.” it is intended to influence the color, aroma, flavor, and
keeping qualities of crops.
The next five preparations—502 to 507—were explained as be-
ing designed strictly to be inserted into a compost pile to help
microorganisms transform ft quickly into fertile humus, some-
how drawing on what Steiner calls etheric_ formative forces. Con-
siderably more exotic, 502 and 506 are usually treated as a pair,
prepared together: the first consists of blossoms of yarrow stuffed
into the bladder of a freshly killed buck deer. The bladder, ob-
tained from a hunter, is blown up like a balloon and allowed to
dry before being stuffed. BD 506 is the flower of dandelion to be
inserted into a cow's mesentery—that tenuous membrane which
surrounds the animal's internal organs. It is essential, or so our
host insisted, that the dandelion be placed in the inner side of the
mesentery. Reversed, it is inclined to putrefy. Bladder and me-
sentery, Suitably stuffed, spend the winter buried beneath the
Soll, there to be worked on by the mysterious forces of the cos-
mos, which Steiner describes as pullulating with life beneath the
snowy frozen soil of winter.
BD 5038, the flower of camomile, is stuffed into a bovine intes-
tine, as with sausage meat—‘a charming operation” according to
Steiner—and must be buried all winter in a sunny spot where the
snow will remain over it for long stretches at a time.
The stinging nettle, annoying in the field, turns out to be a
boon to its neighbors, according to Steiner, as a great enlivener of
the soil, stimulating its health and helping to provide plants with
the individual components of nutrition they most need. As prepa-
ration 504, it is buried without benefit of sheath, preferably be-
tween layers of netting—iron netting, warned our host. not cop-
per. Iron, he explained, {s related to the planet Mars which goes
well with the nettle, whereas copper {s less good because of its
association with the planet Venus—strange astrological notions
later to be validated scientifically by a variety of supporting sources.
BD 505 is the bark of an oak tree, preferably a white oak, ground
up and placed in the skull of a domestic animal—cow, sheep,
goat, pig. or cat. Put into the earth under a layer of peat moss, it
is to be irrigated with rain water to acquire a coating of slime.
Last of the cormpost inoculants, 507, is also the simplest, being
merely the juice of valerian blossoms, a wild plant that grows
abundantly in the northeast United States, especially in Massa-
chusetts.6 Secrets of the Soil
Finally there is Stelner's preparation 508, which does not go
into the compost. It is common or garden horsetail, Equisetum
arvense, brewed into a strong tea to be sprayed onto plants and
trees in the spring and summer to prevent fungus molds.
Our host, aware that his explanations were straining our cre-
dulity, relented and informed us it was time to bury the horns, a
performance he wished to carty out while the sun was still up,
before the ground began to freeze.
Stacked in wooden crates, our handiwork was loaded into a
Ford pickup and driven down to a spot in the valley by a stream
where a circular hole twelve feet wide and two feet deep had been
dug into the soft alluvial soil.
Starting from the center, one by one, the well-stuffed horns
were placed tip down in a growing circle until all 850 stood neatly
stacked, The lot was then covered with about eight inches of dirt,
and we were invited to return in the spring to see for ourselves
how the tellurian forces of winter had miraculously transformed
this cow dung into manna.
As Courtney leveled the fresh soil on the pile, he fortuitously
struck a small horn left over from the previous year. Shaking out
asmail amount of dark friable matter into the cup of his hand, he
assured us it was sufficient to bring new life to a whole acre of
land. But first it would have to be stirred homeopathically into
Lee McWhorter and Will Chapin burying same 850 cow horns filled with cow manure.
‘They will stay below the ground from shortly after the Winter solstice until St. John’s
Day or Midsummer Day {June 24} the following vear.Comucopia 7
three gallons of water for an hour, twenty seconds one way, twenty
seconds the other, in order to be “potentized with the required
forces of the cosmos.” Arcane as it sounded. this too would be
explained in terms to satisfy the orthodox."
Back on the hill by the house site, in a root cellar dug into the
earth, walled with stone and roofed with cement, our host opened
deep bins to show us by the light ofa lantern the various Steinerian
preparations—500 to 507—lying in earthenware crocks sur-
rounded by damp peat moss to keep them moist and protect them
from such noxious effects as gasoline fumes or electric current.
The 500, in a forty-gallon crock, seemed to radiate energy, while
the others lay tranquilly waiting to be potentized by homeopathic
stirring.
Such a wild alchemical approach to gardening and farming made
it easier to understand why early biodynamic farmers had cho-
sen to do their stuff on the q.t. But it was a challenge to us to find
out if and how such homeopathic wizardry might actually work
in practice to effect, as claimed. a revolutionary approach to mod-
ern agriculture.
To show us his own quiet method of performing this apparent
magic, Lee McWhorter invited us to his herb farm in the
Shenandoah Valley, strangely named La Dama Maya, in honor,
as he explained it, of a Californian biodynamic flower girl he had
met and married in Mexico, motivated, he believes, by some
metempsychotic Mexique past.
* The essence of homeopathy—generally deserved as a system of medical prac-
tive that treats a disease by administering minute closes of a remedy that would in
a healthy person produce the symptoms being treated—is that the smalier the
saat of matter the more powerful the force exerted, as if power were a prisoner
matter,Chapter 2
PULSE OF LIFE
One gray day between Christmas and New
Year's we set off across the Blue Ridge Mountains to the McWhorter
farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Our objective was to learn to
make regular biodynamic compost and its homeopathic substi-
tute known as “barrel compost.”
Lee and his wife, Maureen, were waiting in their two-story Vic-
torlan farmhouse with a Jug of herbal tea. Our various astrolog!-
cal signs determined to the satisfaction of Lee, a Virgo, and
Maureen, a triple Scorpio, we were led to a greenhouse that
stretched the length of the house. Trays of nursling herbs lay in
phalanxes, redolent with the scent of rosemary, wormwood, myrtle,
thyme, Greek oregano, golden sage. salvia, santolina, and a deli-
cate winter savory, all vibrantly alive and flourishing despite the
season.
And so began the lesson in how to brew the prime and most
important ingredient in biodynamic farming: Steiner's prepara-
tton 500. Into a five-gallon bucket containing three gallons of rain
water, Lee poured half a handful of the black 500—enough, he
assured us, to spray a whole acre. Rhythmically he began to stir
it with a long stick, first clockwise to create what looked like a
deep vortex, then counterclockwise to create a seething, bubbling
“chaos,” followed by another swirling vortex.
“I use this special stick,” said Lee, “to get the vortex to the
bottom of the bucket. It's just a plain old stick. But it has a curvePulse of Life 9
that helps. You have to get the outside moving. Steiner claimed
the vortex was the rhythm of life, that a lot of seeds have the
shape of a vortex. This particular motion seems to energize the
water.”
He was sitting on a milk stool, silhouetted against a backdrop
of snowflakes falling gently beyond the greenhouse door. “I stir it
Jess than a minute one way before reversing, When I get the ri 1
1fust sit and contemplate what 1 am doing. The important thing
is to put your thoughts and determination into what you are do-
ing. Steiner says you should put your very life into it, so that
what comes back out of the earth is a reflection of your own effort
and spirit. The foundation of Steiner's thought is that all aspects
of the physical world are permeated and guided by the spiritual.
He believed that the soil, in addition to being supplied with nutri-
ents, microorganisms, and humus, needed to be affected by the
will and spirit of the farmer, or gardener, as well as by intangible
forces stemming from the moon, the other planets, the sun, and
the stars. I'm putting energy into this stirring. I know I'm turning
the stick; but what’s turning me? Perhaps the bluefish I ate for
dinner last night. It goes around and around. the same basic
rhythm in the universe, a pulse that I can only call life. If Steiner
is right, that vortex I'm looking at in this bucket is drawing the
Lee MeWhorter creating the vortex to suck cosmic and planetary forces into three
gallons of water to create BD 500.10 Secrets of the Soil
forces in from the air, from the cosmos. Those are life-giving forces,
not death-dealing. Somehow they're there: kinetic, potential.”
He paused, reflectively, then went on stirring. “But an hour tsa
long time to keep this up.” he said with a sigh. “It's not so bad if
you've got three or four people to help. Steiner envisioned getting
his guests to do it after Sunday lunch, as a form of entertain-
ment. If you'd like to participate I've got some other sticks, and
you can see for yourselves which you prefer. It's easier with a
longer stick. You can make a smaller circle and get a bigger vor-
tex.”
When the hour was up, Lee paused to admire what looked like
a bucket of plain water with a few dregs of dirt in the bottom.
“This is it!" he said. “The magical potion. But it’s not all that
powerful ail by itself. We've learned that it's more effective on soil
that has been treated with compost made with the other preps
from 502 to 507. or sprayed with an infusion of the barre! com-
post which already contains all the preps. So I'm going to mix
into this 500, homeopathically, an ounce of barrel compost. It
will only take another twenty minutes.”
We had seen the compost he was referring to, dark and earthy,
at Hugh Courtney's lying in a barrel dug into the soil down by the
stream: but we had not understood its function. Lee explained
that it had been developed by a German follower of Steiner, Maria
Thun, who had observed and experimented with plants for some
ten years on a German government research farm near Kassel.
The barrel compost was a simpler method for getting ail the
Steinerian preparations into the soil, homeopathically. Not that
one didn't want to spread normal biodynamic compost, he added
quickly. It was a question of acreage: if one had too much land,
and couldn't afford to make that much regular compost, the bar-
rel mixture had a great effect, especially good for the changeover
from orthodox chemical fertilizing to the biodynamic method.
“Steiner,” said Lee, “explicitly stated that as a result of the con-
centration and subsequent dilution of the preps it was what he
called the radiant effect that was doing the work. No longer the
substance itself.”
Maria Thun’s barrel compost is made by inoculating a gram or
so of each of the preparations 502-506 into a mixture of cow
manure, fresh eggshells, and ground-up basalt, a volcanic rock
that contains all the elements that become clay after dissolution.
Its advantages, Lee explained, are that ft can be prepared at
any time. It needs less incubation than regular biodynamic com-
post to be complete, perhaps two months instead of six, and is
not only powerful as a fertilizer but is said to put the earth in a
state of defense against the pernictous intrusion of radioactivity,Pulse of Life Wi
especially against the fata! fixation of strontium-90/2 in the bones.
Eggshells, he said, add to the soil the clement of calcium, and
plants grown in high-calcium soils have less radioactivity, espe-
cially in Europe. Suitably stirred, for a good hour, the mixture of
cow dung and additives is placed in a barrel—open top and bot-
tom—which has been buried in the earth to its waist, then banked
with earth to within an inch of its top, there to spend the winter.
“A barrel of this compost, when fermented,” said Lee.”can con-
tain anywhere from fifteen hundred to two thousand ounces of
the finished product, each ounce of which will care for an acre of
land. That means that one barrel can take care of a pretty big
spread, some thousands of acres. Just the essence of the prepa-
rations, even in the tiniest doses, appears to have a regenerative
effect on the soil and make the 500 more productive. In a pas-
ture, everywhere the cows have dropped their dung there will be
dead things. Those dead things will biodegrade into healthy hu-
mus much faster after you've sprayed with the essence of the
barrel cornpost. If you have a lot of acreage you can't possibly
make enough actual compost. jet alone spread it: it might take
tons and tons. But an ounce—or 100 grams—of this barrel com-
post stirred into water and stimulated by the forces freed through
the compost, can generate a billion microbes in each teaspoon of
soil, You get an idea of what's happening tf you realize that each
and every one of those microbes has a mouth and ts eating debris
on the ground, then laying down its corpse as organic residue,
often in a matter of minutes. Pretty soon your fields are rich in
humus. But Steiner, mind you, was perfectly clear that the pres-
ence of abundant microorganisms in the soil is merely an indica-
tion that cosmic forces are at work. It's like flies: they only come
if there's dirt. Ditto with the microorganisms: they only prolifer-
ate if the forces are there. And the preps mediate the forces.”
As soon as he'd finished stirring the potion of barrel compost
into the bucket of 500, Lee took a piece of cheesecloth and strained
the contents into a backpack sprayer, leaving about a quart of
liquid in the bucket. “I don’t want any residue to clog my nozzle,”
he explained. “I'm going to spray one acre of my outdoor herbs,
as an autumn spray. In Steiner's day, before they invented the
backpack sprayer, they used a pail and a big brush to swish the
stuff onto the ground. Maureen still likes to do it that way, and it
works just as well.”
Pail and brush in hand, Maureen looked like an Andrew Wyeth
painting as she set off into the fleld.
“We spray in the autumn after everything is clear,” said Lee:
“when the earth fs still exhaling, before the ground freezes. I want
to get the farm sprayed so that when the earth breathes in again