Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

> *ORGANIC NEWS - ROTATIONS RANT!! [big snips]
> Over the years a great many dedicated and totally committed people have 
> spent most of their lives promoting and protecting the integrity of 
> organics, often at very great personal cost. Now a new breed of  'soft 
> organic' people seem to be emerging, who think it's more important to be 
> 'media friendly' than to defend long held basic organic principles. They 
> even consider some of us people to be 'organic fascists or extremists' - 
> (which I have often been called!). Organic pioneers like Lawrence Hills, 
> Lady Eve Balfour and many others must be turning in their graves!

<<< I am probably getting a reputation of a devils advocate but I can't help 
it. I am somewhat in doubt that organic pioneers would mind much that 
rotations are not strictly adhered to if they understood the background for 
the reason of rotation as much as some of us do today.

I just a few days ago received a long article about glyphosate/roundup by 
Jeffrey M. Smith in my inbox that might make some of these reasons clear. 
The title of the article is : "Monsanto's Roundup Triggers over 40 plant 
diseases and endangers human and animal health."
The way roundup triggers disease is by chelating/binding to necessary trace 
elements in soil. Healthy plants need almost 40 different elements just as 
we do and if they can't get them they are open to attack by mostly fungal 
diseases.
A nice experiment is described in the article of plants grown in completely 
sterile soil to which roundup is added and they are only slightly stunted 
compared to plants grown in normal soil without roundup. Plants grown in 
normal soil, full of soil organisms with roundup die almost instantaniously.

Plants and especially vegetables are miners for minerals. Some groups will 
take up more copper and zink and leave manganese and molybdenum mostly 
alone. And that is the reason for rotation, if we plant vegetables of the 
same group in the same plot year after year we will get short of copper and 
zink and the vegetables will get diseased.
Plant vegetables from another group and they may mine other minerals that 
are not yet exhausted. And if we have a very rich soil or subsoil the 
exhausted mineral supply may have become replenished after a few years.

If we grow vegetables on the same land for a long time we run the risk of 
terminally exhausting all kinds of minerals and rotations of however long a 
period will no longer help. Vegetables grown today have on average 50-70% 
less minerals than 50 years ago, even organic vegetables grown in rotation.

Things get really weird when chemicals have been applied. Seems that roundup 
is not at all as biodegradable as Monsanto has always told us. In some soils 
it has been found to have a half-life (when just half the original amount 
has been degraded) of 22 years. It has bound minerals and remains like that 
for a long time. Until for instance a well meaning grower applies phosphate 
fertilizer or an organic chicken manure when the glyphosate becomes active 
again and kills the whole new crop.
Another unpleasant detail is that soil tests can indicate that there are 
plenty of trace elements in the soil while these are completely inaccessible 
where glyphosate has been applied even many years before.

Organic pioneers might indeed turn around in their graves but perhaps for 
different reasons than that people don't adhere to rotations very strictly.
john