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Agriculture

Soil Fertility Advanced

Whitmar McConnell

Soil: Getting the Model Right- Part 1

Father in heaven, this morning we're thankful for this beautiful new morning.

We're thankful for the rest we could enjoy.

And we're also thankful that we could be at this place and to learn about the things of your creation that you've given for a blessing and for us to help to be helped, to understand you in an even deeper way.

I just pray that you would be in this room and you would help the minds and the ears to be keen and receptive to your leading.

Okay, the first class, this morning, I'll just run down a little bit, this morning we're going to do some fundamental principles, trying to get established, okay, what should we actually be looking at?

Because there's stuff all over the place out there and we're going to go over that in the next hour and try to narrow down what are we actually supposed to be looking at.

But first off, we need to establish some biblical principles before we go any further because we could come up with whatever we want but if it's at odds with the truth then we're going to be going down a wrong path and eventually we're going to wind up in trouble and wondering what happened.

Okay, so the first question is, is there a right model?

Is there a correct model that we should be looking at to determine what we should be doing?

Or is there all kinds of ways of doing things?

So that's the first thing we have to establish.

Genesis 127, 28, the Bible says, so God created man in his own image.

In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them.

Then God blessed them and God said, be fruitful and multiply.

We're going to come back to that fruitful and multiply as another principle later.

And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being." Now, I'm going to tell you before we even go any further, that's the model right there.

Established from the beginning, and you'll see as we go along that everything that's contained in a correct soil model is in those 2 statements right there.

In this statement it says, well first of all it says, and he repeats it, that God made man in his own image.

So when it comes down here and he says he formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being, do you think God just went outside and grabbed a little bit of dust and threw it in the air and said and then blew on it and that was that.

Right, yeah, formed is like a deliberate act, it's not a random act.

So what we see here is something very specific and we're going to keep going here and you're going to see that it's going to get more and more specific.

Make yourself an ark and this is how you shall make it.

Now I didn't put the whole verse in there, you can go back and you can read the entire verse but that's from Genesis 6, 13, 14, God's telling Noah to build an ark.

From Patriarchs and Prophets page 92, God gave Noah the exact dimensions of the ark and explicit directions in regard to its construction in every particular.

Did God give Noah a catalog of boats and say, Noah, pick 1 out or build something you think might work.

And let them build me a sanctuary According to all that I show you, that is, the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of all its furnishings, just so you shall make it." From Exodus 25, 8 and 9 when God's telling Moses to build the sanctuary.

Did God give Moses a catalog of house plans, building plans and say, Moses, pick 1 out that you like.

Now this is a hard thing for people to accept.

In fact, 1 of the things that is hard for people to accept is the fact that truth is absolute.

But so far do we see any wobble room in any of this?

Did God leave anything up to the discretion of man?

The system of education, by the way, in the first few chapters of education you get a very clear picture, you don't have to read very far, a very clear picture of God's purpose.

The system of education instituted at the beginning of the world was to be a model for man throughout all after time.

Did that mean up to 1823 or 1625 or 2014?

As an illustration of its principles, a model school was established in Eden, the home of our first parents.

The Garden of Eden was the school room, nature was the lesson book, the creator himself was the instructor and the parents of the human family were the students.

Now, I'm not saying that because the word is primal to everything.

But it was the word itself who was illustrating through the lesson book of nature.

What do you think he was teaching, Adam and Eve?

Everything God made was a reflection of his character.

Now obviously we live in a world of sin, and there's some marring of that image.

But everything that God made was a reflection of his character and in fact Paul mentions the idea and I forgot to put it in here I apologize that we don't have an excuse because and I'm paraphrasing here the Let me get it the right way here.

I'll just put it this way, the things of God are testified to in nature so that we have no excuse.

Even the Godhead, And you're going to see that the correct soil model represents the Godhead, illustrates it, just like men and women illustrate, and the ability to have children illustrate the Godhead.

When you start looking at it correctly, you start seeing that it's everywhere around you in what God made.

And that's what God said is completely consistent with what God did, if we understand it correctly.

So we got, are we we straying here yet at all?

To me, I think it's pretty, doesn't matter.

Well, first of all, what I'm gonna say is that God is not a wandering generality.

It's immovable, not gonna change, doesn't matter, it doesn't matter whether we agree with it, It doesn't matter whether we believe it.

Paul also said that we were under the law, you remember that?

Well because it couldn't, It's not going to change.

The laws that govern life are not going to change.

We're either in harmony with them or we're not in harmony with them.

We haven't got the soil yet, but we'll get there eventually.

We've got to get the right foundation, we've got to get the right mindset before we actually go into it and you're going to see why because there's all kinds of flavors out there, there's all kinds of choices out there and We're going to look at them and you're going to see that some of them, every 1 of them has something that's true.

Devil never give you just everything in error.

He always has to give you something that's true and it makes it sound reasonable.

A lot of you read this statement, it doesn't really have any, well I shouldn't say it doesn't have anything to do with soil, it does.

Has a lot more to do with it than people realize.

There are many ways to practice the healing art, but only 1 way that heaven approves.

Soil: Getting the Model Right- Part 2

Okay, so we're going to start in now on what I call getting the model right part 2, guiding principles from science.

So we've looked at some of the principles that we need to be taking into consideration from inspiration.

We need to be consistent with those principles and I will tell you that there is only 1 model.

Now, again like I said, you're going to have some variance of that and This is not about when I say that, I'm not saying to you, I'm going to show you what the right model actually does.

In 1 class or another, we're going to eventually get to all this.

In the last class, which I leave for the last for a reason, insects, diseases, and weeds.

Does anybody have any problems with any of those things?

We're going to talk about why they're there and what you what you do to eliminate that problem.

And a lot of people tell me, oh you that that you just can't do that.

But I'll save some of the explanation for later.

I have experienced that personally myself and it's consistent with the Bible, that's not, that's another principle I didn't bring up.

The fact that thousands will be falling at your right hand and 10, 000 at your left and what?

The Bible also says that the curse causeless shall what?

Okay, if there's a problem there's a reason, there's a deformity that hasn't been addressed in there.

So, but we're going to get the, stick with me because I can't get it all in 1 presentation, but it's kind of a tapestry and it all kind of comes together when you put all the pieces together you start to see the bigger picture.

Okay, has anybody seen that pie chart before?

Now after I said that, wasn't somebody going to say, well, how do you get that?

You know what your answer would be in most cases, even at the university level, we don't know how to get that.

Besides, you have what you have and you're stuck with it and just make the best of it.

And you'll see as we look at these different schools of thought why the soil is bypassed to a large extent.

God didn't give us permission to bypass the soil because he didn't give us permission to bypass our own character and facing our own condition but there's a reason that it's bypassed and because it's hard work.

I don't and I might as well say that now because if any of you came here thinking you were going to get a silver, a magic bullet or some quick fix, it's not going to happen.

But you get there, you get there and every step along the way it gets better.

And for some people it might take them the rest of their lifetime.

For some people it may be a little bit easier but you get there.

Okay, this is pretty much universally accepted as a model of the ideal soil.

And that ideal soil, half of the space that it takes up would be in solids.

And of those solids, about 45% would be mineral, rock fragments, rock material.

Soil separates is the technical term they call it, sand, silt, and clay.

And then about 5% of it, and that, depending on which chart you look at, some will say 40 to 45, and then 5 to 10 on the organic matter.

And we're gonna define some of these terms specifically in the next hour as we wrap these initial ones up.

But organic matter is just basically, it's testimony.

It's any plant or animal material that's decaying in the soil.

If you change the term and you put biomass on it, then it would include living testimony.

But you want about that much, about 5% organic material.

And by the way, we'll talk about that more with the carbon fertility part of it.

You can, a soil will grow something, seeds will germinate and plants will grow as long as there's at least a fraction of a percentage of organic matter.

If you lose all of it, you know what happens to the soil?

You got to have at least a little bit of witness there, a little bit of testimony to get that to keep going.

And we're losing hundreds of thousands of acres a year because of the loss of that.

Hundreds of thousands of acres are turning to desert because of the loss of that.

Okay, so that's the solid side of it and I call it by another term, I say that's the determined side of it.

That's the solid side of it and it's the determined side of it.

In other words, it's not negotiable, okay?

Now, we're talking just in gross terms here, in general terms that that's half solid material, but it's not negotiable, it's determined.

The other half, and I'll elaborate on that a little more as we go along.

The other half of that volume is taken up in pore space and of that pore space which is half of that volume, half of that volume or about 25% of it will be air and half of it will be filled, that pore space will be filled with water.

There's no contention that I've ever heard from any source about this being the model soil.

Do you recognize something that we've already said that's the same as that?

God formed man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his mouth the breath of life and man became a living being.

We don't have a whole lot of detail on that.

Oh, but I should say on this side, I use the term random.

You remember when Jesus talked to Nicodemus and he said you had to be born again?

And Nicodemus, you know, was a little confused about what he was talking about.

And how did Jesus describe the wind that blows?

He was comparing the Holy Spirit and he said, the wind blows where it will and you don't know where it came from or where it went.

He's representing the Holy Spirit in the same way that it's represented in this model.

If that soil cannot breathe, if it does not have the breath of life in it, you have all kinds of problems.

If it has the, I'm going to put a different term on it, if you have the wrong spirit, You're going to have a lot of problems.

The key is how do you get the right spirit?

And the key is over here, getting the right spirit.

Now we can do things to cause this to be the wrong spirit even when that's right, but you really have to fight it to make that happen.

So what we need to do, that's the ideal soil, we're going to look at some of the different schools of thought and see how they stack up with this and the guiding principles that we got from inspiration.

To see, you know, is this what we should be following?

Is this what we should be pursuing as far as growing things and working with our soil.

Because we have to, this is pretty straightforward.

And by the way, if you read about the Holy Spirit, how is he represented in the Bible?

You're going to see the combination of these 2 things here when we get to that.

Okay, so let's look at some of the schools of thought.

Okay, the first 1 we're gonna look at is the conventional school of thought in agriculture.

It's pretty much the majority of what agricultural practice is, and it's based on selective chemistry.

What I mean by that is they choose the chemistry that they want to apply to achieve a certain objective and we're going to get to that in a minute and it's the difference between What do most growers what do you get paid by when you grow stuff?

By the volume of what you produce Now the assumption is well, it's not really an assumption.

It is kind of that you can't get yield and quality at the same time.

It's a difference between, and we're gonna look at it in just a second, it's a difference between photosynthetic production and biosynthetic production.

Let's just get through these and we'll get on to, I'm gonna look at that a little bit deeper.

Soil: Defining the Terms

Okay, so to move on into the meat of this and actually look at the modeling and how it's all set up, we have to define some terms so that you understand what they mean, otherwise everybody's going to get lost with what I'm saying.

And this, like I said, this is actually fundamental, but it's just foreign to most people.

It's really not that it's complicated material.

It's just that it's foreign to what most people are used to hearing.

And so, it takes a little bit to kind of surround it all.

But believe me, you can go a lot deeper in all of these.

That's why God put Adam and Eve in the Garden.

Because every spiritual truth that you need to know clearly, you can find in the Garden.

And So I mean, not in Eden terms, but in the real conditions of the world where sin has done its damage, you can still see the truth.

I just tried to pick the terms I thought were the most important.

There's other terms that would be, that I might use, and if I use it, and I don't define it or explain it sufficiently, just holler at me and say, hey, what do you mean by that?

Okay, the first term is colloid, and we've already, you know, some of these we've already used.

A colloid is a very tiny particle that has a charged surface that attracts cations.

The reason for that is because colloids have a negative charge to them.

And so positively charged cations, which you'll see as the next definition there, are attracted to that negative charge.

And we'll get down to another term that relates to it in a second.

Cation, the term cation, when I use that term, it's an ion with a positive charge to it, a positive electrical charge to it.

And examples of that which we're going to talk about are the major ones are calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium.

Hydrogen and aluminum are acid forming cations.

They have a positive charge, but they're acid forming in the soil, which we'll get into that more too in a minute.

Anion is an ion with a negative charge and so the elements in the soil that carry a negative charge don't attach to the colloids.

They are repelled by it because they have the same charge.

Now colloids do actually have some positive exchange sites on them.

They're very few and so some anions can't attach to those sites but they're very limited in their scope compared to the negative sites on it.

Could you just reiterate the 4 or 5 cations that are prominent?

We'll go through them, but the 4 major cations that are alkaline forming are calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium.

And the 2 major acid-forming cations are hydrogen and aluminum.

Illustrations of anions are, well, Nitrogen in the forms that they attach themselves or don't attach are different.

In the ammonium form, nitrogen is a cation and it can attach to the colloids in the soil.

So if you apply nitrogen to the soil in an ammonium form, it will attach to those colloids and it won't leach out.

If you apply it in the anion form, which is nitrate, NO3 minus, it has nowhere to attach.

And if water comes through, it could be leached out and lost with the groundwater.

OK, CEC, that stands for cation exchange capacity.

And it is a measure of the soil's ability to hold nutrients that are cations, whether they're alkaline forming cations or acid forming cations, it's just soils ability to hold that.

Another way to look at it is how big of a bucket do you have?

Some soils might have a gallon size bucket, as far as capacity goes, how many of those charge sites?

It's just like looking at what size bucket do you have.

You'll see the difference when we start looking at different, we talk about CCs in a minute a little more.

But in essence, it's what the nutrient holding capacity of that soil is.

And if you don't know how big the bucket is, you don't know how much material to apply.

If I, and I have a good illustration of this with a client of mine.

He has a CEC, the CECs can range from all the way down to 1 and all the way up to 100, 100 plus.

The common range is generally in the 8 to 20, 25 range, but you go up north, there are some soils that have thirties, forties, fifties, even up to a hundred.

And then there are soils that are really light.

I have a client in North Carolina that grows apples.

And prior to me, the reason I was brought in is because of a disaster.

They were told, they have a CEC of 3 and a half.

And they were told to apply 2 1⁄2 tons of high calcium limestone and 4 tons of gypsum.

First of all, you should never apply more than 1 ton of gypsum at a time.

I don't know how they came up with how much of those materials to apply, but in essence, he put enough material on for about a 100-gallon bucket.

And the result was he stripped everything out of that soil, and his trees were dying.

Because all the sulfur that came in those 4 tons, which was 1, 200 pounds of sulfur, sulfur can leach out cations.

The calcium, the magnesium, the potassium, the sodium.

And even though it comes with calcium, this is a little bit beyond the scope of the class, but it'll actually leach calcium anyway.

But in essence, if you just remember, it's how big of the bucket do you have to fill.

What is the capacity of that soil to hold those fertility elements?

Don't get too hung up on the term, which can sound confusing.

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Series

Soil Fertility Advanced

Soil: Getting the Model Right- Part 2

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Soil Fertility

Getting the Model Right- Part 2

56m

Soil Health

7- Choosing the Right Resources, The End Matters

53m

Breakout Session 3

Veganically Grown: Our Journey to Certified and Beyond

58m

Short Course: Soil Health

Soil Health- Part 1

57m

Soil Fertility Fundamentals

Soil Fertility Fundamentals: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

1h 16m

Intensive: Gardening 101

3. Gardening 101: Steps to Productive Soil

1h 2m

Breakout Session 2

The Ideal Soil: Water

1h

Breakout Session 5

Growing Terminology: What Does It Mean?

51m

Meeting the Master Gardener

Spiritual Insights from Plant Health

50m

Soil Health

6- Good Information, Good Decisions, Good Outcomes

1h

Sound Doctrine