Food as medicine - Farm as healer

This was the title of the conference of AcresUSA in Indianapolis, the periodical I wait for impatiently every month. Close to 1000 farmers and ranchers from all over the world attended these 6 days of virtually life changing information and Gigi and I met a lot of wonderful people.

I want to share with you just some of the insights we gained from this world class panel of speakers. Jerry Brunett, Michael Ableman, Arden Andersen, Bob Cannard, Walter Goldstein, Elaine Ingham, Richard Olree, Vinny Pinto, Sherill Sellman, Bob Shaffer, Bruce Tainio are just a few of these outstanding experts. Gigi and I have been interested in nature, a clean environment and healthy food for more than 35 years (which makes for 70 years of combined experience  ) and take it so seriously that we moved to Canada. And now we learned in one week so much more about our food and the fundamentals to produce it, that we want to share it with you.

I will just make a list of the topics as they enter my mind, not necessarily in order of importance. If you want more information, please contact me.

- our food lost 25 to 60% of its nutritional value (e.g. vitamins, minerals, trace elements) in the last 50 years

- in the same time we added poison (e.g. pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer salts, GMO material)

- our body needs minerals, trace elements and vitamins to flush out these poisons. The imbalance causes cancer (30% of our children experience cancer), diabetes, Alzheimer, Parkinson, dementia, autism and the list goes on and on

- nutrient dense food with a Brix reading above 12 (where do we buy it?) is proven to prevent these diseases or even reverse the process

- an apple with a Brix of 16 is heavier than an apple with a Brix of 4! More minerals!

- we should have 4 Trillion bacteria in our guts to break down the food and create the amino acids, which are the basis to our health. But most of us destroyed a lot of them or created an imbalance between good and bad ones by taking antibiotics or creating the wrong pH

- in the soil under our feet are more living creatures by weight and numbers than above. Only through the action of these bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, ciliates, microarthropodes, spiders, ants and worms are the nutrients and trace elements in the soil available to the plants.

- commercial fertilizers are salts. The common application rates are high enough to kill these little critters. Now we depend just on the nutrients applied with this same fertilizer, which in most cases is only NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potash) or sometimes some sulfur. This is why food fills you up, but you are missing all the good stuff (trace elements)

- bugs and fungi on plants are not pests! They are indicators telling us that this plant in this spot is lacking something. It is weak; another plant could perform better here.

So Mother Nature created all these "pests"� to take the suffering plant out of its misery as fast as possible to make room for a more adapted one (what we call a weed ).

- we apply a fungicide or pesticide or herbicide and kill even more of the soil food web which alone is able to make the soil nutrients available to this poor plant

- compost tea or biodynamic preparations supply beneficial microorganism and food for strengthening the soil food web (aha, that is how it works. And I thought it is a kind of voodoo...)

- compost of the right kind is good

There is so much more information, I could go on and on.

The disturbing fact is that some of the research is more than 50 years old, but we just did not know about it because the information we get is filtered.

Back on the ranch we are studying our 15 inches of  new books and listening to the 10 lecture CDs we bought at the conference and are trying to fit it all together.

At least we got the confirmation that not applying commercial fertilizer on our land since 1999 was a good decision (since then our earthworms multiplied by a factor of over 10000! and this year we cut 1.5 ton/acre of hay and grazed the same field 8 weeks later).

Grass fed beef and pasture raised pork eating nutrient dense forage from healthy soil is one step in the right direction towards a healthy nutrition.  

We will buy a Brix meter and let you know the readings in spring. We are also very curious about our own vegetables!

We finally have to admit it: The winter has come to the Cariboo.

We wish you all a beautiful winter season!

Today Charlotte arrived, a purebred Tamworth sow from our friends Jennifer and Steve Henry in Kamloops. She will enjoy the winter in the beautiful Cariboo and have fun with Boris the Breeder and hopefully a healthy litter.

Charlotte already enjoys the company of the weanlings from Speedy and Stripe.