Infertile Soils

MANILA: Look at the image; you are looking at the infertile soil dug right next to the fertile soil with weeds. (Image posterized from my original photograph taken Monday, 02 February 2015 at 0520 hours with my Lumix FZ100 digital camera.) The green and the grey have to fuse to make a fertile soil.

The soil cannot be simply its basic components of sand, silt and clay. It cannot be bare; it must be enriched so that it can relate productively to your crops, trees and animals. Otherwise, you have an infertile soil, which does not carry the message of life.

Is the mind of your candidate President that of an infertile soil? If your candidate President cannot reduce pronouncements and announcements to a fundamental and universal message, your candidate has a problem! This one cannot relate to the people; this one does not carry the voice of the people.

Your candidate President must be thinking New Testament. Earlier, I was thinking of titling this as "New Testament, New Organic" – it's a very strange pairing, isn't it? Faith and Science. What can they inform each other? Or, can they? Is there not a Separation of Church and Science? A Separation of Church and Politics?

I had been rereading the notes to the New Testament as contained in the edition Christian Community Bible (Catholic Pastoral Edition 1994, Quezon City, Claretian Publications), and I noted on page 1:

The Christian communities then began to gather what had been written down to preserve the preaching of the apostles. They also spent time recalling significant experiences of the first Christians. Of the books thus produced, the Church approved those which expressed the faith as it was received from the apostles and rejected others which, although very commendable, did not seem to transmit the most fundamental and universal message of the faith.

That is all about how the Catholic Bible came to us; I was struck by the last phrase, "... did not seem to transmit the most fundamental and universal message of the faith." I was struck because of its intellectual import, its implication. If your Gospel or preaching does not point back to a fundamental message of the Christ, you have a problem! There are millions of poor farm families in the Philippines; if your candidate President does not preach a fundamental message of agriculture, s/he has a problem!

I'm not a presidential candidate; I'm a self-appointed preacher myself; as an agriculturist, thinker and writer, I preach nature-based cultivation of the soil. Do you have a problem with that?

My interest in that stems from the fact that, on Monday, 08 June 2015, I intuited the essence of what has been universal knowledge since the first lecture series of Rudolf Steiner on his development of biodynamic agriculture in 1924 (Wikipedia). Lady Eve Balfour launched her Haughley Experiment in England in 1939 and published the results in 1943 in her book The Living Soil, even as she believed that "mankind's health and future depended on how the soil was used, and that non-intensive farming could produce more wholesome food." The term organic farming was coined by Lord Northbourne in 1940 in his book Look To The Land. Now it's more commonly referred to as organic agriculture. I am now simplifying the essence of my personal view of organic agriculture, which I have termed The New Organic, in these few words:

The organic topsoil begins with itself.

Of course, you can build an organic topsoil with organic fertilizer, compost, vermicompost, or green manure, but each of these methods requires the farmer to add organic material despite the fact that the field after harvest has enough organic materials to build its own organic topsoil with a little help from a friend, the rotary cultivator.

As a farmer, all you have to do is pass your rototiller lightly over the field with crop refuse standing, weeds notwithstanding, being careful that the rotating blades cut only about 2 inches deep into the soil, not deeper. This insures that the soil and the vegetative matter are both cut in pieces smaller than with a moldboard plow, and at the same time that they fuse together and become the compost layer all over the field at the very instance of plowing. That becomes your rich organic topsoil. (If you don't believe me, if this sounds all theoretical to you, I challenge you: Get me to a hectare of ricefield your choice right away before it's cultivated, and I will demonstrate what I am describing here, no charge. After that, it's all farmer's practice. You will see the results at harvest time.)

Agriculture is not simple nowadays. If you cannot simplify your inorganic agriculture, or your organic agriculture, there must be something wrong with it, or with you.

"If you can't explain it to a 6-year old, you don't understand it yourself" – Albert Einstein (genius). "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" – Clare Boothe Luce (author and ambassador). "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify" – Henry David Thoreau (author of non-violence). "Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy" – Isaac Newton (author of the theory of gravity). "Any fool can complicate things; it takes a genius to simplify them" – Albert Einstein (simply genius).

So let me not be a fool and let me now follow the pattern of Einstein's theory of general relativity:

E = mc²
where e is energy equals to m, which is mass, multiplied by c², which is the speed of light squared.

My New Organic Equation is this:

eE = (vs)²
where eE is environmental energy equals to v, which is vegetation, multiplied by s, which is soil, with the product squared, to produce the synergy.

In other words, the fertility or productive energy of your soil depends on the synergy of vegetation and soil in that location during and after decomposition of the organic matter as started by shallow cut & fuse cultivation.

The New Organic builds the soil to be more accommodating of crops than before, and more productive, with its own on-site organic matter. It is more accommodating of crop roots and more productive of crop produce.

The richness of the soil comes from the humus that results from the decomposition of organic matter; the infertile cannot contribute to the wealth of the land and, therefore, to the wealth of the farmer and, therefore, to the wealth of the country.

If you cannot contribute to society, you are a burden to humanity. Without organic matter, whatever fertilizers we apply, we have infertile soils. Infertile soils are cultivated by infertile minds.

So, I go back to the presidential elections of 2016: Does your candidate President have an infertile mind? If so, s/he cannot reduce that presidential platform into a simple message that Albert Einstein's 6-year old can understand. I'm assuming s/he has a platform for the good of the people, especially the poor farmers.

I want a President who cultivates fertile minds!