THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR INTELLIGENT SOILS THROUGH TIME AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Taken from videos of Zach Bush
The destruction of our intelligent soils thru time and its consequences:
In the early 1900s, we discovered we could make oil into drugs. Because of it there was explosion of pharmaceuticals in the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s, we began an engineering process where we started to imagine a world - both at the soil level and the food level - that were also dominated by the oil and gas industry. The same chemicals that became drugs to treat our bodies, were used to treat our soils. We developed the chemical agricultural system of nitrogen-phosphorus—potassium from fossil fuel. So, we were taking fossil fuel reserves out of the ground and turning them into nitrogen fertilizer for soil systems. The NPK fertilizers became the norm to fuel the green revolution. Chemical industry became the primary input source for soil systems for first time in history.
Previous to that we had used methods like crop rotation, cover crop, composting, and the like to increase the nutrient density within the soil to encourage vigorous plant growth. But with the advent of NPK fertilizers, we realized we could be far more “efficient” in our management of soils instead of having to do compost, multiple seeding and the like. The NPK fertilizer became the primary nutrient source to create green plant. As the term NPK would suggest, its missing most of the rest of the periodic table. Our soil systems were fundamentally lacking of all the enzymes, macronutrients, minerals and other things the plants thrived on had we continued crop rotation, intense grazing practices, cover crops and the rest. We gave that up for the 3 simplified inputs – NPK, nitrogen- phosphorous – potassium and used that to go mega farming from 300 acres to 3000 acres and then to 30,000 acres. This is possible when you stop taking care of the soil and just use simplified and modified chemical inputs. Consequently, we were starting to fail to get those nutrients out of the soil into the plants. We were seeing a monotony of nutrients in the plant itself as we damped down the soil system. We were also undermining the very fundamentals of life itself through diminishing the microbiome within those soils. Bacteria, fungi and their incredible combination and co-creative capacity with plant fibernelle create something called mycorrhiza. The mycelium of the fungi and the mycorrhiza are these 3-dimensional structures that are so good at taking the periodic chart – all the minerals of the entire planet, and turning them into unique nutrient sources. The beautiful thing about the intelligent soil that has intelligent connection with its rich microbiome is that whatever the plant needs - whether it be a tree, a tomato plant, or a basil plant, the soil can figure out its optimal nutrient input.
As far back as a thousand years ago, we started over plowing. We were using methods to disrupt the soil and with the classical plow invented around 900AD, we saw the birth of what we now call the western civilization. What we were doing with that plow was destroying the 3-dimensional structures of the mycelium and the mycorrhiza and their relationship to the plant fibernelle. As far as 1100 years ago we were starting to decrease the fundamental nutrient density within food. As we went into the industrial age and the acceleration from the 1700-1900s, we saw fundamental acceleration in technology that were accelerating the death of the soil. In the USA this led to the massive dust bowl of the late 1920-30s where we thoroughly killed our top soil that it turned into just dead dust. It could no longer grow plants and it was just blowing all over the Midwest and burying towns quite literally during massive dust storms.
By the time we were hitting the 1970s, humans for the first time were eating food that were eating fundamentally deficient in the nutrient that we needed to make enzymes function within our body. The enzymes that would even create the energy from those long carbon chain fats and carbs and everything else. We were failing to metabolize energy in our bodies. Certainly, within the human cell but also in the fungi and bacteria of our gut. Our gut microbiome was starting to be damaged and oversimplified by this loss of nutrient input. Inside the human cell, the mitochondria ( tiny little bacteria that produce the energy from sugar and fats into a small molecule called ATP) in so doing release that sunlight energy inside our cells. That whole process started to get poisoned both in plants and animals. Not surprisingly, when we started to diminish the nutrient density and the vitality of metabolism in plants, the plant kingdom became vulnerable to disease and that took form of invasive weeds that would encroach on them and knock out their nutrient source or fuel source from the soil and the invasive insects would come to consume the weakened plants. Then we made a call for help to the same chemical providers to give us more versions of herbicides to kill weeds and insects instead of asking the simple question as to why our plants were more prone to disease in the 70s than they were in the 50’s.
Not surprisingly the human chronic epidemic came in at the same time our plants were starting to fail in their immune system. We started to see the advent of obesity in the 70s and 80s as we got more and more aggressive with our chemical inputs. We were learning to manipulate the building blocks of carbohydrates and fats within our foods to create completely new compounds we had never seen before in human diet. We developed things like margarine - a fake butter, and high fructose corn syrup - an extract from sucrose molecules in corn into an abnormal ratio and structure of fructose and glucose. We created this fundamental new building blocks that had never occurred in the human body before. We did not have the metabolic pathways to correctly process these new chemical molecules.
The herbicides took a revolution in 76 with wide spread use of ‘round-up” which was the first wide spread use of glyphosate which has a compound that chelates or locks up minerals within soil and living systems so they never become bio available. We started spraying our soils and our plants with a compound that locks away nutrients. Any nutrient left from the dead and dying soil were further locked up by the glyphosate compound. In addition, glysophate blocks the production of amino acids which are the building blocks for proteins. In a single chemical application starting the 70s, we were taking the building blocks for proteins and enzymes for our bodies and everything else in our bodies and diminish their fuel and nutritional sources at the micronutrient level by chelation and poor soil management. Consequently, when you start to undermine the amount of nutrients within any gram of food, the body consumes more of that food to get the same nutrient result.
In the process food system, we had things like high fructose corn syrup, the artificial oils and all those things packing calories inside our food artificially. We had gotten away from the whole food system. If you consume whole foods whether it be a whole plate of vegetables, squash, legumes withall the incredible milieu of nutrients – you can eat thousands of calories of that and get a massive download of micronutrients in a day. But, if instead your plate looks more like a simplified genetically engineered potato and a big hamburger infused with hydrogenated oil, extracts and flavoring – you can get thousands of calories with almost no micronutrients in there as part of the diet.
As we were starting to get more calories without nutrients, for the body to function, it was needing to eat more calories to get more micro-nutrients. The experience of eating from your back yard: home grown lettuce, mints, herbs &spices thrown in your salad is its hard to finish because your body has so much nutrient density in that food contrary to going to a restaurant and ordering a salad which is a pile of iceberg lettuce grown hydroponically, never even touching soil and completely deficient in nutrients grown under a conventional chemical farming method. You can eat the salad in a few minutes and be ready for the next dish because there was no nutrient density for your body. Your body is whipping that into your small intestines, wanting for something real, waiting for something nutrient dense to put it to work and get the extraction process going.
At the same time, we started to discover the use of purified sugars like hi fructose corn syrup, and purified salts like sodium chloride, combined with drug like qualities of fat molecules to create a cocaine-like response in the brain. So, when that highly processed sugar, fat, and salt combination hits the stomach it creates a neuro chemical event in the brain that looks like cocaine and it encourages the person to eat more. It shuts down the satiety center, it creates a pleasure experience and suddenly the person starts to eat with two hands instead of one. You can observe this quite easily when you put on the table a bowl of salad, homemade bread and a pitcher of wine; how the group of people enjoying it are in conversation, feeling a sense of relaxation, a sense of joy that energies the social and food magic that happens there. In contrast, take the same group of people and go to a fast-food chain and observe that after the food is served, there is almost no talking. Everybody moves quickly to a 2 handed eating approach. The group no longer are tasting the experience of each bite. They are no longer communicating in a spiritual space. Instead, as soon as the cocaine response kicks in – the body says give me some more of that – all the attention is used to consume as much of that as possible. The amount of conversation decreases. This, led to the obesity epidemic in a lot of ways. Famous coffee fast foods started creating the sugar-fat-salt combination that trigger that cocaine response early in the morning with the first cup of coffee - 900 calories as the consumers first intake in the morning.
The devastating effect of this is that people started to eat more and more alone and loose community around food. Other social changes started to happen- Television, cable Tv with 400 channels and many others. We started to create content demand same time we were creating drug experiences. In the cocaine setting you really don’t want social interaction. You want more stimulus. So, we started to create faster and faster content and if you look at the news now, they have a cut every 2-4 secs where your brain is getting inundated with stimulus and we have become drug dependent in the whole experience of food. At the same time, we became a drug delivery system through media content and more than 50 per cent of people now eat alone in their cars or couches. So, in answer to the question why the obesity epidemic happened; the answer would be the transition from nutrient intake to drug intake; from community around food to consumption in isolation.