permaculture

[venaurafarm <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

This is an excellent post from Lion Kunz, rare vintage private reserves 
Lion, from the ancient cellars of wisdom and knowledge. Here's a 
wonderful snippet that I think permaculturists will appreciate; talk 
about ethics!:

"The real proof of intelligence is demonstrating that you understand
how to integrate living systems together so that everybody's life is
improved in the whole food web. The landscapes are littered with
burned out farms and burned out rivers and burned out oceans -- that
is not any display of intelligence. Pay your farmworkers fair wages,
regardless of their species, and grow brains instead of chemical
industry fortunes."

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [SANET-MG] Fwd:  The Roots of Fertility
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 08:25:31 -0000
From: Lion Kuntz <lionkuntz@YAHOO.COM>
To: SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU

Forwarding comments made on another list, where soil fertility has
again risen as a hot topic...


The question has arisen about soil fertility. I have written on this
subject from another universe, completely outside the box.

Life on Earth arose as soon as the rocks cooled enough to permit
proteins, enzymes, DNA to not be cooked. It might not have been the
exact first day, but it was heap plenty pronto thereafter. Fossil
stromatolites are 3.7 billion years old. Those are only the ones which
haven't eroded away yet.

So, what did this new life have to eat? The answer is minerals, rocks.
That's it. There wasn't anything else yet.

Dr. Tom Gold over at Princton University wrote a paper that stood the
geology crowd on its head, titled "The Deep, Hot Biosphere", about
life that eats rocks five miles below your feet. No drill exploration,
no matter how deep, no matter where on the Earth's crust it occurred
has failed to find traces of previously unknown life deep below.

Tom Gold, after listening, to critics and getting some further
education on subtle points rewrote the paper into a book by the same
name "The Deep, Hot Biosphere". Look for the book, forget the paper.

Roland Bunch got turned on to a Brazilian authoress, Anna Primavera,
who turned him on his head. Her book has never been translated into
english from the original Portugese, but you can get Bunch's
translation of the teaching from the book by starting with his report:
Nutrient Quantity or Nutrient Access? A New Understanding of How to
Maintain Soil Fertility in the Tropics, By Roland Bunch.
http://ppathw3.cals.cornell.edu/mba_project/moist/Roland.pdf

What you are being told is that Ludwig von Biglie's "Big Lie" is only
true under certain conditions and will greatly misinform you under
another set of conditions.

The most critical piece of information was told by Biglie: whichever
element is in shortest supply will be the dominent limit on fertility.
IF N is abundant, than P or K may be the limiting element, or if all
are abundant than Ca, maybe Fe. What is left out of this equasion is
things that Lynn Margulis has spent a lifetime trying to teach us:
that life is synergy, that microbes have toolkits to replicate
toolkits (DNA) and that life swaps around toolkits across species in
hours what takes evolution millenia and eons to independently develop
through chance Darwinian mutations.

In short, a lot of what you probably know is wrong and needs to be
upgraded.

Microbes on my teeth can etch the enamel through secretion of acids,
give me cavities. Cells in my stomach can output drops of far stronger
acids. The community of life has an arsenal of toolkits for making
acids as potent as anything modern scientific laboratories can make.
Living colonies which have not seen the sun for a billion years live
by DNA toolkits which extract the necessities of life from solid
rocks, totally isolated from the atmosphere, isolated from life's
detritus.

Lithotropes, chemotropes. They have names. They are barely understood.
Based on DNA analysis, it is now proposed that ten new kingdoms of
life, each as different from each other as you are from a fern or
mushroom, be added to the five kingdoms currently recognized. (Oh, you
still thought things broke down to animal, vegetable, or mineral? Not
for decades has that paradigm been credible.)

You don't necessarily need to understand how they work. You just have
to trust Anna Primavera or Roland Bunch or me. Just try it out in a
small plot, and then trust your own eyes. It works in the temperate
zones and it works in the tropics.

Those of us whom have loved these Roots of Fertility have affectionate
names: the soil microherd is one of them. Giddyup, Giddyup, head 'em
up, move 'em out, rawhide! Yeehaw!

It may not mean a lot to you guys, but one moon lander crew left a
camera, then two years later another moon lander crew retrieved it.
Vacuum, broiling sun for two weeks than near absolute zero
temperatures at night for two weeks, harsh solar radiation flares.
Brought it back and opened it in an ultraclean room looking for moon
"bugs", but found only some earth bacteria that didn't get sterilized
before the camera went up. Those little guys then bred and populated
as soon as they were given the right conditions.

Tough little buggers. Give them water, carbon soot for air pollution,
human tolerable temperatures, and rocks and they can make a living. In
fact, you know those "acid rain" monuments being eroded at fast pace?
Not acid rain at all: lithotropes living off carbon pollution, water
vapor and rocks, clostridium, the guys that give you Botox.

You probably don't know enough about microbiology to do you real good,
but if you can follow a recipe you can probably feed yourselves for
the next few thousand years until you do get that education passed
around. I mean, the leading edge is just figuring out that the
microbiology is far more complex than than was believed just a decade
or so ago. Who knew there were 5,000 different species in a teaspoon
of forest soil? Who knew there was a mostly different 5,000 species in
a teaspoon of intertidal zone muck? The DNA tests which sorted this
out are still brand new, and not yet really cheap.

Right now nobody knows the complete toolkits in the DNA of even one
single one of those species. Not one! There;s a big difference in
knowing the genome and knowing what all the genes do. So don't dwell
on what you don't know. What is known is that living soil can pluck
Nitrogen out of the air, making your soil lab tests into liars about
how much N there is available for all the things N is used for (amino
acids, DNA, RNA, hormones, proteins, vitamins). We don't know all the
toolkits, but we some of them, and some mighty important ones too.

We know that you want to have soil that has a good mix of very well
digested ingredients, and we know you don't want to dig it or plow it
any more than is absolutely required. Fragile strands of mycorrhizia
may be passing by bucket brigade from an acre away some essential
nutrient microfactor, and you don't want to bust up those little
hairlike threads. Think of the mychorrizia as the phosphate pump. Some
25 known species are also N-fixers with nitrogenase genes, so those
are N-pumps too. A man's got to be plumb loco to chop all that into
bits.

That's why Anna and Roland and me are telling you to feed through the
mulch and forget about buying and hauling all those tons of stuff
around. You are working too hard and you are not working smart. Hire
some farm workers that really like to work, like earthworms and their
bacteria entourage. Pay them well in the currency they can spend and
your soil will be more fertile than all the Miracle-gro money can buy.
Don't plow, don't dig, don't double-dig -- pay the worms their wages.

Any lifeform that has nitrogenase has the toolkit for nitric acid.
Don't learn soil chemistry before you learn legumes and their
symbiots. Don't bother spending money on soil tests if your land has
deep rooted legumes -- lucerne (alfalfa) has hairfine roots that drill
fifty feet deep through hardpan. Your soil test will report what is in
the surface layer and mean nothing to plants whose roots tap fifty
feet of minerals until they collect from the richest pockets and bring
it up top. Your prowness with technobabble cannot outperform living
soils which no scientist on earth even truely understands -- some
campesino who learns to eyeball the different stages of growth of
legume plants knows far more about plant fertilizing than academics
still deluded by the Big Lie.

Soil pH? Soils with high humus and living communities average 6.5 to
7.5 pH regardless of the mineral contents of the local geology. When
it gets too acid the microherd mines more salts, get's too alkaline
and they generate HCl, H2SO4, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), acetic acid
(vinegar). Goes too extreme, halophiles predominate until their
predators come in and spread around their partially eaten body parts
for the decomposer crew. It goes back to homeostasis without a
blueprint. Just life being life. All the time eating, being eaten,
spitting out molecules they can't use, like ammonia, urea, which
plants love.

Plants on their part convert sunlight to sugar. Cells at the tips of
growing roothairs live for mere seconds as they drill between the
interstices of the soil. Shed cells are devoured by the hungry
microherd. Plants shed entire roots, leaving food supplies and tunnels
behind for rainwater to percolate -- next season the microherd will
have converted those leavings into new plant food.

You need to get away from the chemical paradigm -- you are just not
that smart. 1970 no anoxic dead zones in the world's oceans, 1990
there are 75 seasonal or permanent dead zones, 2002 the UN finds 150
of them. Previously one of the world's most productive fisheries, the
Mississippi River delta outflow is now dead every summer for months.
You are not that smart. Put away those chemicals, you are not a
chemist, not even a botanist, you don't know enough to use those
chemicals.

Stop pretending you know more than you do. The people who make those
chemicals are the same ones who make the landmines, who make the
rocket-propelled grenades, who put the munitions in the hands of
children in bush wars on several continents. Weapons-grade nitrates
blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, and once failed to take
down the WTC years ago. These people who sell you this stuff are not
your friends, are not even good guys. Walk away from the weapons-grade
agro-chem paradigm if you want to live. You are not smart enough to
use that stuff in any way that actually improves your life.

The real proof of intelligence is demonstrating that you understand
how to integrate living systems together so that everybody's life is
improved in the whole food web. The landscapes are littered with
burned out farms and burned out rivers and burned out oceans -- that
is not any display of intelligence. Pay your farmworkers fair wages,
regardless of their species, and grow brains instead of chemical
industry fortunes.

-- Lion Kuntz
Santa Rosa, CA, USA.
--- End forwarded message ---