Yet, after waiting over four years, the outcome of this USDA study is disappointing. What seems obvious is that USDA scientists don't yet understand mineral fines, trace elements, composts, or microbes as foundations for soil fertility. Since I wrote the original proposal that instigated this inquiry, it is my right and duty to scrutinize and judge the consummation of my initiative. And since the urgency that sparked this investigation is how to heal a badly damaged planet, what I look for isn't more favorable results, but shifts in thinking to a new awareness of the web of life, and changes in soil fertility strategy.

Regrettably, the scientists keep their narrow-vision, double-blind "skepitcals" tightly on. So, while the researcher sees this as only one unreplicated experiment, it joins dozens of studies, reports and testimonials in our files, many tracing back over a hundred years. The consequence of this near-sighted mindset is a failure to rediscover basic principles shown and known in earlier decades and centuries.

The research design itself shows narrow conception and shallow insight, and fails to focus on key links in soil nutrient cycles. The (lack of) response and recommendations indicates failure to grasp connections between mineral fines and human health, and the dimension of our endangered ecosystems. While every cautious investigator refuses to draw conclusions based on one experiment, I hoped for a more sensitive, sensible design, and a more thorough, thoughtful discussion of results.

This is only a test....

While there is much to criticize about this study, I certainly hope USDA and NAA will pursue further research into the use of mineral fines. Julius Henzel, John Hamaker, Walter Ruegg, George Earp-Thomas, and others in the past who investigated minerals and microbes in soil ecology all performed tedious, repetitive tests—not to prove a theory or fertilizer, but to understand how and why remineralization works. So, I urge any future USDA researchers to look more deeply into this subject. There is more here than chemicals and crops, and there is more at stake than disposing of industrial wastes.

The experiment is mired in a "materials" mindset that fails to see the chain of life that weaves mineral into microbe, and then into plant. The focus is on the mineral fines, not the processes and players that participate in this transformation. These researchers seem to have no clue how particles of rock are transformed to wheat straw, corn stalk, or bean bush.

Granted, the appointed task was to test by-products, not study and recommend remineralization strategy. Yet, a rule of both science and divination is that to get clear answers, you must ask clear questions. Ask ambiguous questions, and you get vague, opaque answers. Ask narrow questions; you get thin answers. Ask the wrong question, you get misleading answers. Don't ask a question, you get no answer.

Comparing Bananas to Beef

First, it is dubious design to compare mineral fines with chemical fertilizer. Comparing apples to oranges has more validity. These materials aren't equivalent as fertilizer, so comparison isn't appropriate or logical. While rock powders can reduce the need for chemical fertilizers, mineral fines can't substitute for the big three nutrients.

These two types of soil amendments aren't at all interchangable, but complementary. They provide different nutrients (1, 2, 3 below) by different strategies (4 & 5).

A more valid approach would be to test mineral fines with and without fertilizers. More appropriate would be to compare chemical fertilizers against compost, with and without fines.

Second, spraying soil with herbicide is contrary to understandings of how rock powders become plant foods. Creating fertility isn't a mere matter of pumping chemicals into plant roots, but nursing and culturing a stable living community of interacting soil organisms. Herbicides subject soil organisms to harsh, toxic chemicals that can seriously disturb and weaken this fragile community. Many herbicides are broadly biotoxic, outright kill microbes, thereby interrupting the digestion of minerals into protoplasm..

Compost is not Waste

The issue of compost highlights the confused, incomplete thinking underlying this study most of all. Repeated reference to compost as "yard waste" is an obvious symptom of a blind mindset—a choice of words that undercuts its true value, and underplays its role in soil fertility. This "soil conditioner" doesn't even rate an elemental analysis alongside mineral fines.

Compost isn't waste, but a seriously deficient—often desperately needed—soil resource. One clear study result is that compost plus any other amendment increases yields and minerals. Yet, these scientists seem to see compost as little more than a sterile potting medium, like peat moss or perlite. The notion compost is a nutrient isn't considered at all; its role as microbial inoculant isn't stated, or designed into the study.

Nor is there recognition of compost quality, yet the potency of composts varies greatly. The raw materials incorporated in a compost heap significantly affect the fertility and vitality of the finished fertilizers. For example, biodynamic composts are carefully made by precise methods with special ingredients, and "potentized" by inoculants to rapidly infest a fermenting pile or field with mineral-hungry microbes and digestive bacteria. Compost from "yard waste" probably has little of this extra kick.

The idea that compost might be made with mineral fines in the mix isn't mentioned or tested. Yet, a compost pile's plentiful populations of microbes are an ideal environment to digest raw rock minerals and mobilize them to root hairs. While the suggestion of "co-utilization" could include mixing mineral fines in compost blends, the report fails to identify this possibility or discuss it.

Whither the Microbes?

The agriculture scientists still treat mineral fines as a plant nutrient, ignoring the complex interactions that occur in healthy, living soil. In the entire study, there isn't one reference to soil "bacteria," "microbe" or "fungi." They make no effort to detect soil microbes, or measure this soil biomass.

Yet, it is micro-organisms that really benefit from rockdust. It remains our belief that it is microbes that consume primary rock minerals and package them for feeding to plant root hairs. For two decades we insisted "feed the microbes"—they feed the plants, and everything else that lives in, on and from soil.

Granite and basalt are igneous rock, with dense, crystalline molecular structure. To transform these hard, insoluble stones into nutrients fit to feed plants requires the digestive abilities of microbes. Conventional fertilizers bypass this biological feeding chain to inject soluble salts right at roots. Feeding salt fertilizer to plants short circuits the natural, biological processes—like raising a kid on candy, cake and ice cream.

It is ironic that while Biotechnology engineers microbes to eat oil spills, manufacture drugs and engender herbicide resistance, little recognition is bestowed on ordinary microbes that digest rock to make minerals available to plants and synthesize special biomolecules, including enzymes, vitamins and hormones. More tragic is the fear that enables companies to sell household products as "anti-bacterial" while pushing food irradiation to reduce risks of bacteria contaminating food.

Meanwhile, agricultural science continues to ignore the role of microbes in soil and plant nutrition. So, even as "a prophet is without honor in his homeland," it seems bacteria are invisible and ignored in their one true arena: the foundation of the food chain—where geology meets biology.

Dust is Dust, but Ashes are Ashes

Including cement dust and bottom ash is regrettable. Neither is a natural rock powder, but are significantly changed by artificial processes. Glacial gravel, metabasalt and granite are natural stone, but cement and ash are changed by heat, which alters their chemical state and biological effects. While is isn't wrong to compare them all together, the choice blurs important qualitative distinctions that can confuse public perceptions.

Notably, elemental analysis for bottom ash is missing from test data. Of all the by-products, incinerator ash is most likely to contain toxic contaminants, and the most variability in chemical composition. So omission of this data is a glaring deficiency.

Today there is growing concern about farmland being poisoned by dumping hazardous wastes from industry and mining into fertilizer mixes. To include ash and cement in this study creates a dangerous potential for confusion. And to leave the ash analysis out compounds this risk of confusion. There's no comment on these issues—another serious oversight.

Facing the Dragon

In his extremely sparse comments on the study, Ron Korcak identified to main obstacles to wide use of mineral fines as fertilizer. The first is political: threading the needle of state fertilizer regulations. The other is economic: whether it is cost effective to transport and spread these minerals. While both issues are genuine and pragmatic, such a narrow analysis is a great disappointment. Such values may satisfy the concerns of industries seeking markets for their by-products, they are insufficient to the concerns that first stimulated this research.

The first purpose of remineralization is to revive worn-out, depleted soils, not to replace or be interchanged with chemical fertilizers. Nor to boost productivity and profits. Pampered soils at USDA's Beltsville Research Center don't compare to thin over-extended and sterile soils of farmers struggling to maintain profitability in an unfriendly marketplace.

The truth is that, while this strategy of mineral fines-into-fertilizer may not turn waste in wealth for industry, the real issues are health and survival—human, ecosystem and planet. We need new fertilizers much less than we need a new value system, priorities and sustainable technologies. "Sustainable" is another watchword that fails to appear in the text.

The depletion of farmland by abusive, extractive farming practices in recent decades—including soluble salts and toxic chemicals—is one of the sleeping issues of our age. The exhaustion of soil by excessive use, deforestation and air pollution are global urgencies. Right up there with global warming and nationalistic war. This USDA study gives not the least hint of recognition of this context.

What's also missing are visual images and personal impressions—subjective observations of experimenters. I mean, no one reports how the corn, wheat and soybeans taste. Data alone can be incomplete, even deceptive. Most of all, we know remineralization works—not because we read nice numbers in research data, but because we saw how rock powders affect soil, plants, earthworms, compost, and entire eco-community. The very idea of putting little bits of this and that on tiny postage stamps of soil denies the truth that "everything is connected."

If we don't see the problem, we'll never find the solution. Even if it's right in front of us. To have our brave new world, we must be brave and big-hearted enough to face our dilemma's true dimensions. Government regulation and cash flow are speed bumps in the road to sustainable agriculture and society.

So hope of favorable results is reduced to another round of spiritless, mechanical treatments. And soil remains a dumping ground for industrial chemicals, not a living matrix that must be built, nursed and sustained. Especially maddening, because our urgent need to remineralize is precipitated to significant degree by the chemical mentality that designed this study.

I certainly urge USDA scientists and industry to pursue further inquiry into the use of rock powders to restore worn-out soils, and to improve the quality of crops. But I equally hope the next field trials will be designed to really see and study what happens to transform mineral into microbe into plant.

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The Earth Renewal and Restoration Alliance — www.championtrees.org — updated 12/31/2005