Woody's response is a classic line that earns me a few
chuckles from the audience every time I lecture: 'all my friends
can't be dead! I owned a health food store and we all ate brown
rice.'
Humus and the Nutritional Quality of Food
I believe that the purpose of food is not merely to fill the belly
or to provide energy, but to create and maintain health. Ultimately,
soil fertility should be evaluated not by humus content, nor
microbial populations, nor earthworm numbers, but by the long-term
health consequences of eating the food. If physical health
degenerates, is maintained, or is improved we have measured the
soil's true worth. The technical name for this idea is a "biological
assay." Evaluating soil fertility by biological assay is a very
radical step, for connecting long-term changes in health with the
nutritional content of food and then with soil management practices
invalidates a central tenet of industrial farming: that bulk yield
is the ultimate measure of success or failure. As Newman Turner, an
English dairy farmer and disciple of Sir Albert Howard, put it:
"The orthodox scientist normally measures the fertility of a soil by
its bulk yield, with no relation to effect on the ultimate consumer.
I have seen cattle slowly lose condition and fall in milk yield when
fed entirely on the abundant produce of an apparently fertile soil.
Though the soil was capable of yielding heavy crops, those crops
were not adequate in themselves to maintain body weight and milk
production in the cow, without supplements.
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