AdAgrA 2015: Restoring the Waste Places

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Breakout Session 5

Darren Greenfield

1. Sweet Potato Production and the Adventist Advantage

So, sweet potato production and the Adventist advantage.

When we think about the Adventist advantage, we think of the health message.

If you were to Google Adventist advantage, you would come up with a bunch of articles about the longevity of Adventists and the health principles and so forth.

And you're probably wondering, well what does that have to do with sweet potatoes?

Well, you will find out as we get into it.

But as we grow and promote sweet potatoes, we're actually, it's part of promoting the health message.

And it goes really hand in hand and it provides excellent witnessing opportunities and the ability to help people many of whom are struggling with health issues.

Sweet potatoes, let's talk about the properties of them a little bit.

Sweet potatoes, by some authorities, many of them, are rated as the best vegetable that you can eat.

They're loaded with carotenoids, vitamin C, potassium, and fiber, and many other minerals and beneficial elements.

The skin has as much antioxidants as blueberries and 3 times the nutrients of the flesh.

So don't peel your sweet potatoes, buy organic ones that have not been sprayed with a fungicide.

The conventionally grown ones, you can go on and watch on YouTube how they pack them in the packing sheds.

Just before they drop into the box, they are sprayed with a fungicide to give them a longer shelf life.

I don't know how good that is for you but I would prefer not to be consuming that.

The sweet potato can absorb up to 62 minerals if they're present in the soil and that's more than 3 times most produce that we eat.

They're so good that NASA sends Sweet Potato with their astronauts up into space because they know it's going to provide them with nutrition.

Sweet potatoes have an anti-cancer protein called sporomin.

It's 80% of its total protein and it's so powerful against cancer that a person with tongue cancer that eats regularly the sweet potato, it's like a chemo treatment on the cancer that the cancer will actually go into remission from just eating the sweet potato.

Studies have been done, if you wanna learn more about that, If you go to nutritionfacts.org, Dr.

And more than just tongue cancer, actually the protein can be absorbed into our blood and apparently there's studies out there that are quite amazing as far as what it can do.

The leaves, if you grow them, you can eat the leaves.

And I'll just read to you what I read in this particular article.

It was a posting on Facebook, but it did have a reference to a PubMed study, and I went there and read a lot of the language was over my head, but this is what the posting said.

Sweet potato leaves kill 94% of prostate cancer cells in vitro.

An extract of sweet potato leaves was discovered to be extremely toxic to prostate cancer cells in a study killing 94% of them and slowing the growth of prostate tumors in mice by 75%.

Other research has shown that these super greens are also active against breast cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer, stomach cancer, and leukemia.

And the health benefits of these greens are not just for the lab.

1 study out of Taiwan showed that eating at least 100 grams per week of this super vegetable decreased lung cancer risk by up to 57%.

In other studies, sweet potato leaves boosted immunity in humans and lowered blood sugar in mice with type 2 diabetes.

And if you need an energy boost, sweet potato leaf could be just the vegetable for you.

A recent study showed it significantly relieved fatigue in mice, increased exercise capacity, and even boosted muscle glycogen levels.

They are an excellent source of potent antioxidants called polyphenols, including the unique and powerful, not sure if I can pronounce that word, but you can read it.

And alkaline diet fans, take note, these greens are 1 of the most alkalizing vegetables out there, delivering 400% the alkalizing power of pure lemon juice ounce for ounce.

So maybe instead of wheatgrass we should be out there juicing sweet potato leaves.

So I come from Wima Institute where we have the college and the Academy and it is a really good fit for us with a school program that is totally out of sync with our growing season.

So we plant in May and then through the summertime we just water and weed, keep them growing, and when school comes back into session again, then we harvest.

We could possibly start in September, but giving them more time is beneficial to getting them to a larger size.

We store them, we wash, pack, and ship them during the winter, and we use student labor for that.

It provides excellent work experience for unskilled students.

When you bring students onto the farm, there's not a lot that they can do without doing a lot of damage or needing a lot of time and mentoring.

But with sweet potatoes, you can put them to work and it's beneficial.

There's minimal damage and loss occurred by their careless handling compared with other crops.

In fact, I heard from 1 farm manager says students kill plants.

So they can be a little hazardous when they're learning.

But we have elementary kids come out and they have fun picking up the sweet potatoes and helping out.

The further north you go, the less viable sweet potatoes are because you need a nice warm growing season.

I have read that some people in Canada are growing them and they start them under plastic, but they probably don't get very big is my guess.

But I read this in 1 article that sweet potatoes are a marketer's dream commodity because as with blueberries and strawberries, demand keeps increasing despite harsh economic times.

And we're selling out a lot sooner every year.

And I'll share with you a little bit about the growing method.

If you have better tasting ones they sell real well and the demand increases from that.

This is a real bonus for farms because most of your income comes in through the short summer months starting maybe July at the peak of the season and then tapers off and by September and by when October comes your income's almost completed and that's when sweet potatoes kick in.

In fact, when the weather starts getting cold, people start buying more sweet potatoes.

They like to eat them hot and especially the holiday season, Thanksgiving, the sales just go through the roof.

We probably sell 3 or 4 times as many a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving than a normal week.

So it boosts your income when you normally wouldn't have an income.

So getting started with this crop, the source of wisdom.

Go to the source, go to the originator, the creator.

This particular passage, when I started farming, I claimed this promise that is contained in this particular passage.

Does the plowman keep plowing all day to sow?

Does he keep turning his soil and breaking the clods?

When he has leveled its surface, does he not sow the black cumin and scatter the cumin, plant the wheat and rose, the barley in the appointed place and the spelt in its place?

Do you think he's interested in teaching us today?

For the black cumin is not Threshed with a threshing sledge, nor is a cartwheel rolled over the common, but the black common is beaten out with a stick and the common with a rod.

Bread flour must be ground, therefore he does not thresh it forever, break it with his cartwheel or crush it with his horseman.

This also comes from the Lord of hosts who is wonderful in counsel and excellent in guidance.

So I would claim this promise from the Lord and ask him to teach me.

And it's amazing how the Lord brought into my life mentors who with experience, that got me on the right track from the beginning.

I still made mistakes and I still had to learn the hard way from some things, but I think I was given definitely an advantage from just those providences that came into my life.

In the book Education 111, we are told, in the cultivation of the soil, the thoughtful worker will find that treasures little dreamed of are opening up before him.

No 1 can succeed in agriculture or gardening without attention to the laws involved.

The special needs of every variety of plant must be studied, different varieties require different soil and cultivation, and compliance with the laws governing each is the condition of success.

So we want success, we must study and know what the plant needs are and what are the conditions for success.

Shawn Speidel

Growing Terminology: What Does It Mean?

This is the class on terminology in agriculture.

A lot of it more or less means the same thing.

A lot of it means something totally different than what it sounds like.

I've named my talk, Conventional Organic Biodynamic, What Does It Mean?

I am Sean Spidel, I'm the farm manager at Castle Valley Farms at Daystar Adventist Academy.

And I'm not the expert on this terminology, nor am I the most prepared for this talk, but it is what it is.

I hope I can kind of, the concepts is what I'm trying to get across.

The terminology can be, I mean you can spend a lot of time.

When I got into this I thought, well there's not that much terminology, but there is quite a bit out there.

It says in Matthew 10, 16, Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.

Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

Lord Jesus, we want to Thank you for blessing us, Lord, with truth, that you don't leave us in ignorance, that you do have ways, Lord, for us to be in spiritual health and physical health and not support the devil in any way possible.

We just ask, Lord, that you would guide the discussion today and what I have to share.

I just pray, Lord, that it's clear and coherent in your name.

So the way that Christ teaches us, the way he taught Adam is walking side by side.

You know, the way he taught Enoch was walking side by side.

The way Moses was taught was out there herding sheep.

He did not live in the hustle and bustle of the city.

There's a lot that can be done just with observation.

You know, he, the way he walked with the 2 on their way back from Emmaus, you know, that's how the Lord communicates, is directly.

It says, blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate day and night.

He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in a season.

His leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

The ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff, which the wind drives away.

Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish." The thing I, right now in life, the thing that I enjoy about the Lord the most is that he's only 1 God, and his ways are only 1 way.

To me, that's a great boundary in life, you know, where we can actually meditate on his law whether it's the moral code or whether it's the natural code.

There are principles, the same principles in the scriptures of following the Lord, you know, in all of His ways.

I think they work in the natural sense as well.

So to me it just explains and it exemplifies the goodness of God, how He doesn't leave us hanging.

You know, as it says in Proverbs 22, I believe, it says, the curse causeless shall not come.

I mean, I'm not, maybe I have terminal cancer, and maybe I have no idea, you know, but we have a friend that has cancer.

And these things, they're kind of the nature of the world that we live in.

But some of these things, I believe, can be avoided.

So some disclaimers is, I'll just kind of read them.

It says, I have formed an opinion on the various growing disciplines from my journey from chemical farming to organic slash compost tea.

That was more of an interest, you know, for a couple years, to the Reams method, to the biology enabling Albrecht side of things.

So I've come out of, I grew nursery stock at 1 nursery in Washington State and it was a very, It was a chemically driven nursery.

I've managed an orchard in Michigan in college and it was chemically driven.

A lot of our revenue went right back into buying chemicals for the next year.

None of this focuses on what's causing the problem in the beginning.

The organic mindset thinks, well, it's just the biology and you got all these toxic chemicals, and once you solve all that, then health will come.

Some of the worst produce on the shelves from what grocery store owners say is organic produce.

They say their best produce could be, about 20% is the organic stuff, and the worst, the best stuff, the worst stuff, 80% is the organic stuff.

So just because something is organic does not mean it's safe.

So I am not against using compost as it will sound and may sound, but it is just a tool in the tool kit needed to fix the soil, not the entire tool kit.

Sometimes it should be used with varying degrees and sometimes another tool should be used.

So this standpoint is backed by the predictability of colloids in the soil, believe it or not.

So a colloid is just a little particle in the soil that has charged surfaces, the nutrients attached to them, and depending on the nutrient and the size of the nutrient will determine whether that colloid separates or whether it compacts it together.

So if you have a compacted soil, regardless of whether it's organic or whether it's conventionally grown, biology can't thrive.

So air and water have to be able to enter and exit fairly freely.

Another disclaimer, be open and cautious to new truth, but typically truth is simple, logical, and even mathematical and predictable.

And then as with all error, there is a measure of truth.

So there's a number of growing methods out there that, boy, they have a lot of truth in them, but they don't have some foundational things.

Like, for instance, 1 of our foundational truths is the righteousness of Christ.

I mean, how do you do Christianity without that?

There's some things like that that are just so invigorating and provide so much life and air into our souls that you just can't do without it.

You know, it's the Christ our righteousness is, you know, lifting up Christ is the biggest thing that we have as a church to do.

So there is 1, There is some truth in all methods, but I believe there is a singular truth as there is 1 true God.

You know, just the way that we as parents work with our kids and kind of teach them.

I think the Lord wants to sit with us and kind of teach us some of these things because he doesn't change.

He's the same yesterday, today, and forever.

So there's this controversy out there and I see this coming into the Adventist church.

I wanna kind of make it a little clearer what's going on.

It seems like there's a local and organic crowd, and then there's, you know, viewing all chemical conventional growers as like everything is totally toxic and nothing you could eat could ever be nutritional.

But the fact of the matter is some of the, I'm not ever gonna say that chemicals are safe, they're not safe, but some of the fertilizers like ammonium sulfate, I just gave a class on nutrients, some of these fertilizers are not toxic.

They're not toxic in any way, shape, or form, but we lump them together because we call them man-made.

Well, there might be some things off-gassing, but I'm not gonna get into the details about that.

I mean, maybe there's formaldehyde out of sheet rock.

I guess there's no sheet rock, but, You know, there's some of the, you know, I've heard this from several soil consultants that I've sat through and listened to and asked these questions, but where they, I ask them, you know, who are your best growers?

And they almost always say those, the conventional growers that are focused also on making sure the biology has what it needs.

So if you have a compacted soil and you're pushing an NPK, whether nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, if you're pushing it into the plant in an organic fashion or a conventional fashion, I mean, both are wrong.

You know, both are honestly equally wrong.

Like this picture here of the Pharisee who's saying, you know, thank you Lord for that I'm not like this other man.

And he's pointing his finger, you know, and this can be the organic purist, pointing his finger back at the conventional grower saying, boy, you've got it all wrong, you've got it all wrong.

But in reality, he's just as wrong, if not more so.

You know, the devil, he doesn't want to see the church be a stronghold of truth.

And even if it's a 1 to 5 percent level of confusion, that's still confusion.

You know, Not until in Acts, what is it, Acts 2 or 3, you know, where they came together and they prayed in 1 accord and they confessed their faults 1 to another.

Not until they did all this where they have 1 accord and had the same mind.

Whitmar McConnell

The Ideal Soil: Insects, Disease, & Weeds

Moisture, that would be how much water, moisture you have, obviously.

If you're in a situation where you don't have enough out west, I don't know if any of you are from out west, but when you get out west, in Colorado where we were, we got about 12 to 15 inches of rain a year.

It's a net, what they call a net evaporative area.

In other words, water evaporates out, it doesn't percolate down, it doesn't infiltrate and go down into the ground water, it evaporates out.

The problem with that is that whatever mineralization, whatever breakdown of minerals happens, when the water evaporates out, the water leaves the soil and it leaves all those minerals behind.

And so you wind up with way more minerals than you need.

And you can talk to somebody, if you run into them, Sean Spidel at Daystar Academy, their farm there, Castle Valley Farm, they have way more minerals than they need in some respects, and in other respects, they don't have enough.

It actually, the plow layer, the plow layer out west is actually a little, they use a 2 million pounds as the average weight of a plow layer when they're doing soil analysis, but out west a lot of those soils actually are heavier.

It's probably more like 2.2 million pounds per plow layer because of the higher mineralization that's taking place in those soils because they're not weathered as much from the rain as they are out where there's higher rainfall.

But we only had about 12 to 15 inches of rain, so we had to irrigate using groundwater to achieve, you know, to provide enough water.

And if we didn't put enough water on, remember, I personally, where I was last, our home was at 7, 000 feet in elevation.

And the solar intensity at 7, 000 feet in elevation, where we had 300 days of sunshine a year.

It was, you know, we very rarely had a cloudy day or if we did it wasn't for very long.

So the solar intensity was pretty intense.

When somebody would say, well, you need about an inch a week, we need 2, just to try to keep the hydration, the proper hydration of the soil and the plant.

But we needed even beyond that to keep water moving down as much as we could because we otherwise it would come up and it would bring minerals up and leave them in it up on the surface and so you have different challenges when you get out west in a low rainfall area that's a stress on the growing system and you come out east here where you're in a higher rainfall area, you've got the opposite stress.

You've got the combination of cloud cover, which is reducing light, and so it's reducing energy production through photosynthesis.

But you also have saturation of the ground more often.

And if you were in here for the water 1, you want capillarity.

What capillarity is, is it means the water, it's at its optimum level in the soil, but it also, it's not just the optimum level, it can move.

As water is pulled by the root, off of the, out of that capillary water, the water will move because of the electrical attractions there.

It'll move and equalize along those electrical gradients along there, and so water can move.

And the other reason you want capillarity like that, and the porosity to get as deep as you can because of the tidal influences, the gravitational influences.

When water comes up, it pushes air out, you know, with the tidal influences, and when it goes down, it pulls air back in.

We were just, I was just talking to somebody about the yellow and white planting method and whether they needed to put the tile in the bottom.

Well, 1 of the reasons for putting that tile in the bottom of the hole is so that soil, it's like you, us breathing in and out.

That enhances the breathability of that soil to breathe.

And so when the pull of the Earth is heavier, gravitational pull of the Earth is heavier, it breathes in.

And then when the gravitational pull of the moon has its influence with the sun, then it breathes back out.

There's more pull this way, and so it pulls the water up a little bit, and it creates a breathing effect of the soil where you can keep air in that soil properly.

You're going to see when we get to the end of this that proper soil construction and proper porosity and capillarity are the solutions to conferring life.

And to the extent that you have them, you have more life.

To the extent that you don't have them, you have less.

And these are just all factors that are influencing that.

The chemistry influences it, and the environmental influences also play a role in it.

But you also have saturation of the ground.

Depending on how porous that soil is, It was just shared with me, you know, they were out doing the hole for the, for planting the tree and they filled it with water and it didn't go anywhere.

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Series

Breakout Session 5

The Ideal Soil: Insects, Disease, & Weeds

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Parts

1. Sweet Potato Production and the Adventist Advantage

32m

Growing Terminology: What Does It Mean?

51m

The Ideal Soil: Insects, Disease, & Weeds

56m

Epigenetics- God’s Design

52m

Irrigation

58m

2. Sweet Potato Production and the Adventist Advantage

29m

Sound Doctrine