AdAgrA 2014 Conference

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Soil Health

Whitmar McConnell

1- Many Voices and the Model Soil

If that wasn't the 1 you were planning on being in, then I'm not sure where the rest of them are, but that's the 1 we're going to have here.

Let's go ahead and have a prayer and then we'll get right into it here.

Father in Heaven, this morning I just pray that You would hide me behind Your cross, that Your Spirit would overshadow my thoughts and my words, that Your glory might be revealed, in Jesus' name.

Well, my technology failed me, So I don't have any of my PowerPoint presentations because we're going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

How many of you have no idea what you're doing?

At ASI a couple of years ago I was visiting a booth of a project in Charlotte, North Carolina and we were talking and he found out that I knew how to farm.

And he said to me, he said, could you come help us in North Carolina?

I just get on the tractor and I go out and go, but I just have no idea what I'm doing.

Well, God doesn't want us out there not knowing what we're doing.

He wants us to be fully informed and understand.

You'll see on some of the other sessions that they're going to talk about the big 3 problems.

Weeds, disease, insects, and various things like that.

Well, in this tract here, we're going to get at the root cause of all of those things.

Because as the Bible says, the curse causeless shall not come.

And in our modern agricultural culture, Our solution is to do what the people of Israel did to the messengers that God sent.

And so the idea is that if we kill the messenger somehow or another, the problem goes away.

But until we learn the lessons that God has for us, the problem won't go away.

And I believe that in what God has said, and also in what God has done, what God has made, his righteousness is testified to.

So in order for me, the title, we're looking at soil health.

And the title of this tract was supposed to be Some Seeds Fell, Understanding the Character of the Soil and Restoring the Image of God.

And so, there are a lot of voices out there saying, no, conventional agriculture is the way to do it, organic agriculture is the way to do it, biodynamics, permaculture, hydroponics, aeroponics, closed system.

How many of you have heard or seen or heard about the video Back to Eden?

The reality is, folks, that the devil is not going to give you the whole truth.

He's just not going to give you the whole truth.

And So we have all these voices out here, and please, if I say something and it offends you, I don't mean to offend you, but what I want to get to is what God is calling us to.

And we have to stop listening to the voices of the world, and we need to start listening to the Word of God and the truths that are there if we want to really prosper in what God's called us to do.

And so all of these schools of thought, all of these voices that you hear, which are confusing, the world is a confusing place.

And just in the last couple of years I've actually started doing consulting.

Not because I went looking for it, but because somebody came looking for me.

And unfortunately, it's taking so much time away from my growing that I'm either going to have to hire somebody or train somebody to do the consulting, or I'm going to have to hire somebody to do the farming.

But I love farming, and so it may be the other way.

I was going to try to shovel it off on Sean here, but he's now taken on a pretty big responsibility at Daystar Academy and has his work cut out for him there.

When God told Noah to build an ark, did he give him a catalog of boats and say, pick the 1 you like the best?

He gave him a pattern to follow, didn't he?

What about when Moses was told to build a sanctuary?

Did he give him a catalog of houses and buildings and say, whatever 1 of those you like, let's do that.

No, he said, build it according to the pattern.

I know we live in a world where everything goes and everything's the answer, but the reality, folks, is there's only 1 way.

And when we look at that, so what we have to do here is we're going to spend the majority of this session actually trying to get a biblical and scientific basis for what we're going to establish as a model soil.

Because that's what we want to know what God deems the correct model.

Because the truth is Christ is our model.

And so there's some criteria that we have to look at.

And then once we have those criteria, then we can look and say, okay, what meets that?

And then we're going to discuss what constitutes that model.

And we actually have to go back to the beginning, because we have to get some framework.

If you have Bibles you're welcome to follow me, but I want to go to the parable of the sower because we have to establish something else here too.

You've all heard the parable of the sower.

What is the, rather than me reading the whole thing, What is the problem in this parable?

It's the character of the soil is the problem, right?

And this parable, you know, the spirit of prophecy points out that there's there's a lot in this parable that we never avail ourselves of and The reality is that God spells out where the problem is right here.

It's in our character It's the character of our hearts It's incomplete and imbalanced And so let's back up now and let's go to the beginning.

And again, we have to establish what is the basis of what I'm going to share.

And believe it or not, all of those problems that they're gonna talk about, how they wrestle with them and all that stuff, when you restore a correct model, they go away, which is what they should do.

We're not about managing disease and pest pressure and weed pressure.

And I'm sure there's some of you out there saying, oh come on, that can't be.

But I've been doing this for 25 years and I assure you when God says what he says he means what he says.

And so let's go back to Genesis, the beginning.

Then God said, Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.

2- The Three Legged Stool Part 1, Chemistry

I wanted to share another illustration that I started to share here.

Because I want to emphasize the fact that if you don't change the conditions, you won't change the outcome.

And so, God can reveal everything to us, but if we don't respond to it, it's not going to be of any use to us.

So God's not going to give us what we don't avail ourselves of.

And I could probably take up the whole 5 hours doing this.

There was a big ranch in Australia, well 2 of them, 1 was a big dairy farm, the other 1 was a beef cattle ranch, about 4, 000 acres.

And they had a big Canada thistle problem.

Canada thistle shows up when your potassium levels are high, your magnesium levels are high and your calcium levels are low.

Because what it's doing is going down � calcium is heavy and it usually leaches down deeper into the soil and eventually it will develop a layer and sometimes it will actually develop a compaction layer.

Depending on what part of the country you're in, it may be 3 feet deep, it may be 8 feet deep.

Those deep tap-rooted plants are the ones that can push themselves through that hard soil, that high magnesium, low calcium soil, that's why they can tolerate that soil and they can compete in that soil and other crops can't.

They'll go all the way down deep into the ground after that calcium and they'll bring it up.

And when that plant dies, what's happening is nature is actually restoring balance to the soil.

And we look at it as an enemy instead of a teacher, an instructor that God sent to help us to understand that we're in complete imbalance.

But anyway, you have these 2 big ranches right next to each other.

They both had a major problem with Canada thistle.

The 1 ranch decided that they were going to restore balance to their soil.

Within 4 years the Canada thistle was gone on their farm.

The ranch right next to it still had the Canada thistle.

And the owner of that ranch, this is just a funny story, so that's why I'm sharing.

How hard we'll fight against God sometimes.

The owner of that ranch, they sprayed the herbicide and the thistle came back.

And they sprayed the herbicide and the thistle came back.

And there happened to be this 1 thistle that was up close to his house that just really annoyed him.

And so he had his hired hands go out and dig it out.

And he put the dirt back in the ground and it came back.

I think they went 3 or 4 feet down and it came back.

And the next time they dug it deeper and they poured kerosene in the hole and they put a can on top of it, guess what happened?

Whereas he could have just learned a lesson of his neighbor.

Restoring balance in his soil, the Canada thistle was no longer needed as an instructor, as a teacher and a restorer of balance.

And so it's a lesson for us in character.

When we receive the character of Christ, We have to receive it.

That's the difference between belief and faith.

Faith actually embraces the truth and lives it in the life.

But if we don't avail ourselves of that, then don't change the conditions.

And we wonder why we deal with the same...

God doesn't want us suffering all the things we're suffering, struggling with it.

Sometimes I get the idea that we think that somehow or another God's glorified by our suffering.

God's not glorified by our suffering unless we refuse to blame him for it.

Then he can be glorified, even in spite of our suffering.

But it's, as Solomon said, that the curse causeless shall not come.

He's trying to restore that truth to help us to remove a lot of those things.

They go away because they're no longer needed.

Diseases and pest pressure are an indicator of incomplete, imbalanced food.

The plant is incomplete and it's imbalanced.

And hopefully as we go along, we'll illustrate some of those things so that you'll understand what brings them in.

They're attracted to the plant because it's dying.

And these certain organisms are coming in and they're dismantling it.

They consider it dead and they're dismantling it.

There's faith in God and life because God is the God of life.

He's not the God of the dead, but of the living.

And there's the religion of death, appeasing and fending off death all the time.

Look at it sometime, Look at the religions in the world.

So let's get, so what we want to do is, okay, what is this model?

In the 1920s, a soil scientist by the name of Dr.

William Albrecht wanted to understand, Now he was inspired, I want you to see that the chemical revolution started in the 1840s.

Does that date, that time frame have any significance?

It was in the early to mid 1840s, a whole lot of things happened in that time frame.

The devil started up a whole lot of things to counter because I see the devil understands the truth just like we do.

And so he always preempts what God's gonna do.

And so he always preempts it and he always starts some movement off to divert our attention from reality.

3- The Three Legged Stool Part 2, Physics

Father in heaven, thank you for the nourishment that we enjoyed at lunch.

Just pray you would continue to nourish us at every level, not just physical, but spiritual and emotionally, socially, mentally.

We just ask your continued presence in our discussion today in Jesus' name.

Okay, I want to be sure you got a couple of things and then I'm going to back up a little bit and go over some of it a little bit more.

Yeah, let me get the, try to get this up again.

Do you all understand the concept of the cation exchange capacity?

In other words, that a soil has a certain capacity to hold fertility, to hold nutrients.

And I brought the buckets and I put them out here just to kind of, you know, to help you to see.

If you have a 5 gallon capacity and you fill it with 5 quarts you're not full are you you got a 5 quart and you try to put a 5 gallon you try to fill it with 5 gallons that won't gallons, that won't work either, right?

So it's through the colloidal exchange system that nutrients are actually made available to the plant to grow.

And the point is here is we want a balanced level of those mineral nutrients.

We're looking at the mineral part of it right now, of this overall ideal soil.

We're looking at the mineral part, and we have to understand how the soil actually works to provide those mineral nutrients to the plant.

This is the dust of the earth, by the way, the earth elements that are provided in the very beginning that God formed man from.

So we have to know how that works, which is the cation exchange system.

That's a pretty well understood, as far as – It's a well-documented, well-established model.

It's just not commonly used for reasons that I shared before.

But we have to know what the – and so what it's talking about, of course, we said was the cations that have the positive charge to them which are the alkaline elements, the calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium.

But we need to know not only how big the bucket is or what the capacity is, but then we need to know how much of that bucket should be filled with each of those things.

Now I put on there, let me put those numbers up again.

I erased them because I wanted to add other stuff there.

You want the bucket to be filled all the way, so 100% of the bucket full.

If you add those numbers up, do they add up to 100?

Now, the reason they don't is because there's other microcations that are part of that bucket, And they're part of the saturation of those colloids in the soil.

And they include things like iron, manganese, zinc, copper.

And they're actually measured, When you're doing a soil test, these major cations are measured in pounds.

It's called the Ideal Soil by Michael Astera.

Now I know Bob Jorgensen has some copies of this here.

It's probably the most distilled down version of understanding this model that we're talking about.

And it could be gotten off of Amazon, Acres USA has it, and Bob Jorgensen, I'm sure, can get it for you.

So if you don't get all of this I mean there's a he goes into a more detailed step-by-step explanation and how they come up with the numbers that they come up with and if you want to understand the whole process and everything So this is probably a really good book to have.

There's a lot of different books you can have, but as far as getting the basics on it, this is probably the best book that's out there.

And I don't agree with everything philosophically in the book.

He doesn't come from the same perspective, but the model that he applies is the correct 1 and he's trying to explain in here.

So they don't add up to 100% because you have to add, and this is where it gets tricky if you're trying to find a lab to do this analysis for you, is because not all labs actually measure all of these things.

And so you'll have a lab that says they do CEC for you, and they may only measure calcium, magnesium, or potassium.

They leave out sodium a lot of the times, and they'll leave out what's called the other bases and that includes those micro cations that I was telling you about, the iron and manganese, zinc and copper.

And in the rest of the bucket, there's a certain percentage of acidity or hydrogen ions, even though they're a cation, a positively charged ion, they actually are acid forming.

There's a certain percentage of that acidity you want in the soil, and So there's going to be a certain percentage of hydrogen.

And when you add all those things up, that adds to 100% of the bucket.

You don't want the bucket 100% full with these.

You want a little bit of the acidity there, because that's how the soil actually works to provide the cation nutrients to the plant.

And we haven't talked about the anions yet, and we are.

I want to put up these other micro cations here, and then we're going to see how those others relate to it.

Now We need to get to a little bit of what these nutritional elements actually do.

But when we get down to the microcations here, they're measured in parts per million because they're not pounds.

The type of quantities that there are pounds of it.

I mean the quantities that you have are the major cations there.

And so they generally on a soil test be measured in parts per million.

And the simplest way to find out how many pounds that is, you multiply it by 2.

And you'll have how many pounds they're actually talking about.

On iron, depending on the CEC of the soil, you're shooting for around 300 parts per million.

And I'll write these out as soon as I go down through them.

On manganese, you want to be about half to two-thirds of iron, which would be between 150 and 200 parts per million.

Now the numbers I'm sharing with you, if you went out and talked to an organic certifier, they'd have a heart attack when we get into these because they're not going to shoot for 1.

They may be used in a different analysis, and so the numbers may look different.

But they generally don't shoot for anywhere near the levels that I'm sharing with you.

But if you want the soil to really thrive, once you get those major cations in the balance that they need to be in.

The micro-cations need to be brought up to levels that most people are not used to bringing them up to.

Now what we're talking about is what they do is they have extraction methods to kind of mimic the ability of the biology of the root of the plant to be able to exchange those off of those exchange sites, those colloidal exchange sites.

They have to put an acid out in order to be able to transfer it.

What they really do is they breathe out CO2, carbon dioxide, it breathes out of the roots.

The CO2 combines with water and you get carbonate.

And then the carbonate, the hydrogen ion goes to the colloid in exchange for the others.

This chemistry, I probably shouldn't even have shared that.

It's the way the plant root actually does it, by breathing out, giving out carbon dioxide.

There's other dynamics that are going on in order to get what they want.

They want a specific, they might want a specific element in specific quantities.

And so they have this ability to interact with the soil chemistry and the soil biology to get what they want out of the soil in an exchange system?

Now, we didn't talk about that, but what they normally do is if you want 6, so I put the 60 to 70 or 10 to 20, you'll take the percentage you actually want there, and you take the exchange capacity.

So it's how many units of exchange capacity there are, and you'll multiply, well, there's a, we didn't do the milli equivalence thing, this is the chemistry they used to calculate it, but each element has a different atomic weight, and their equivalence, the numbers they use are equivalence to hydrogen.

In other words, the number you would use for calcium is 400, the number for magnesium is 240, the number for potassium is 780, and the number for sodium is 460.

And what you do is you multiply the exchange capacity or how big the bucket is by the milli equivalent number, depending on which 1 it is, and then you multiply it by the percentage you want there.

So let's just take calcium, for example, and we want a 60% calcium on a cation exchange soil of 10.

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Series

Soil Health

6- Good Information, Good Decisions, Good Outcomes

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

1- Many Voices and the Model Soil

58m

2- The Three Legged Stool Part 1, Chemistry

54m

3- The Three Legged Stool Part 2, Physics

1h

4- The Three Legged Stool Part 3, Biology

43m

5- Environmental Influences, the Other Part of the Growing System

1h

6- Good Information, Good Decisions, Good Outcomes

1h

7- Choosing the Right Resources, The End Matters

53m

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