Category Archives: Organic Farming

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“The Great Nutrient Collapse”

 

The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.

This article reveals new data that indicates our vegetables and fruits, herbs and grasses, are increasingly becoming more and more nutrient deficient due to increased CO2 levels in our planet’s atmosphere. This re-emphasizes the dire need for wholefood supplementation in our diet. It is becoming increasingly necessary, if we wish to live long and healthy lives, that we take daily dosages of wholefood nutrients, such as those grown and produced by Standard Process Labs at their huge organic farm up in Palmyra, Wisconsin. Take a few minutes to enjoy the award-winning documentary vimeo at this site and learn more about the production of wholefood supplements. Now for the breaking news story about . . .

The great nutrient collapse

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09/13/2017

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Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and a half-dozen other graduate students that scientists had discovered something mysterious about zooplankton.
Zooplankton are microscopic animals that float in the world’s oceans and lakes, and for food they rely on algae, which are essentially tiny plants. Scientists found that they could make algae grow faster by shining more light onto them—increasing the food supply for the zooplankton, which should have flourished. But it didn’t work out that way. When the researchers shined more light on the algae, the algae grew faster, and the tiny animals had lots and lots to eat—but at a certain point they started struggling to survive. This was a paradox. More food should lead to more growth. How could more algae be a problem?
Loladze was technically in the math department, but he loved biology and couldn’t stop thinking about this. The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.
Loladze used his math training to help measure and explain the algae-zooplankton. He and his colleagues devised a model that the relationship between a food source and a grazer that depends on the food. They published that first paper in 2000. But Loladze was also captivated by a much larger question raised by the experiment: Just how far this problem might extend.“What struck me is that its application is wider,” Loladze recalled in an interview. Could the same problem affect grass and cows? What about rice and people? “It was kind of a watershed moment for me when I started thinking about human nutrition,” he said.
In the outside world, the problem isn’t that plants are suddenly getting more light: It’s that for years, they’ve been getting more carbon dioxide. Plants rely on both light and carbon dioxide to grow. If shining more light results in faster-growing, less nutritious algae—junk-food algae whose ratio of sugar to nutrients was out of whack—then it seemed logical to assume that ramping up carbon dioxide might do the same. And it could also be playing out in plants all over the planet. What might that mean for the plants that people eat?
What Loladze found is that scientists simply didn’t know. It was already well documented that CO2levels were rising in the atmosphere, but he was astonished at how little research had been done on how it affected the quality of the plants we eat. For the next 17 years, as he pursued his math career, Loladze scoured the scientific literature for any studies and data he could find. The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect he had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”
He published those findings just a few years ago, adding to the concerns of a small but increasingly worried group of researchers who are raising unsettling questions about the future of our food supply. Could carbon dioxide have an effect on human health we haven’t accounted for yet? The answer appears to be yes—and along the way, it has steered Loladze and other scientists, directly into some of the thorniest questions in their profession, including just how hard it is to do research in a field that doesn’t quite exist yet.
IN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH, it’s been understood for some time that many of our most important foods have been getting less nutritious. Measurements of fruits and vegetables show that their minerals, vitamin and protein content has measurably dropped over the past 50 to 70 years. Researchers have generally assumed the reason is fairly straightforward: We’ve been breeding and choosing crops for higher yields, rather than nutrition, and higher-yielding crops—whether broccoli, tomatoes, or wheat—tend to be less nutrient-packed.In 2004, a landmark study of fruits and vegetables found that everything from protein to calcium, iron and vitamin C had declined significantly across most garden crops since 1950. The researchers concluded this could mostly be explained by the varieties we were choosing to grow.Loladze and a handful of other scientists have come to suspect that’s not the whole story and that the atmosphere itself may be changing the food we eat. Plants need carbon dioxide to live like humans need oxygen. And in the increasingly polarized debate about climate science, one thing that isn’t up for debate is that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising. Before the industrial revolution, the earth’s atmosphere had about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Last year, the planet crossed over the 400 parts per million threshold; scientists predict we will likely reach 550 parts per million within the next half-century—essentially twice the amount that was in the air when Americans started farming with tractors.If you’re someone who thinks about plant growth, this seems like a good thing. It has also been useful ammunition for politicians looking for reasons to worry less about the implications of climate change. Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, recently argued that people shouldn’t be so worried about rising CO2 levels because it’s good for plants, and what’s good for plants is good for us.

“A higher concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would aid photosynthesis, which in turn contributes to increased plant growth,” the Texas Republican wrote. “This correlates to a greater volume of food production and better quality food.”

But as the zooplankton experiment showed, greater volume and better quality might not go hand-in-hand. In fact, they might be inversely linked. As best scientists can tell, this is what happens: Rising CO2 revs up photosynthesis, the process that helps plants transform sunlight to food. This makes plants grow, but it also leads them to pack in more carbohydrates like glucose at the expense of other nutrients that we depend on, like protein, iron and zinc.

In 2002, while a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, Loladze published a seminal research paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, a leading journal,arguing that rising CO2 and human nutrition were inextricably linked through a global shift in the quality of plants. In the paper, Loladze complained about the dearth of data: Among thousands of publications he had reviewed on plants and rising CO2, he found only one that looked specifically at how it affected the balance of nutrients in rice, a crop that billions of people rely on. (The paper, published in 1997, found a drop in zinc and iron.)

Loladze’s paper was first to tie the impact of CO2 on plant quality to human nutrition. But he also raised more questions than he answered, arguing that there were fundamental holes in the research. If these nutritional shifts were happening up and down the food chain, the phenomenon needed to be measured and understood.

For the rest of the story about how difficult it was for Loladze to find funding for such research and study — politics, of course, being the complicating factor — click on the link below.

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511

Here’s the conclusion of the article:

In 2014, Myers and a team of other scientists published a large, data-rich study in the journal Nature that looked at key crops grown at several sites in Japan, Australia and the United States that also found rising CO2 led to a drop in protein, iron and zinc. It was the first time the issue had attracted any real media attention.

“The public health implications of global climate change are difficult to predict, and we expect many surprises,” the researchers wrote. “The finding that raising atmospheric CO2 lowers the nutritional value of C3 crops is one such surprise that we can now better predict and prepare for.”

The same year―in fact, on the same day―Loladze, then teaching math at the The Catholic University of Daegu in South Korea, published his own paper, the result of more than 15 years of gathering data on the same subject. It was the largest study in the world on rising CO2 and its impact on plant nutrients. Loladze likes to describe plant science as ““noisy”―research-speak for cluttered with complicating data, through which it can be difficult to detect the signal you’re looking for. His new data set was finally big enough to see the signal through the noise, to detect the “hidden shift,” as he put it.

What he found is that his 2002 theory—or, rather, the strong suspicion he had articulated back then—appeared to be borne out. Across nearly 130 varieties of plants and more than 15,000 samples collected from experiments over the past three decades, the overall concentration of minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc and iron had dropped by 8 percent on average. The ratio of carbohydrates to minerals was going up. The plants, like the algae, were becoming junk food.

What that means for humans―whose main food intake is plants―is only just starting to be investigated. Researchers who dive into it will have to surmount obstacles like its low profile and slow pace, and a political environment where the word “climate” is enough to derail a funding conversation. It will also require entirely new bridges to be built in the world of science―a problem that Loladze himself wryly acknowledges in his own research. When his paper was finally published in 2014, Loladze listed his grant rejections in the acknowledgements.

I think you will agree that this study is crucial to the health of humanity. Thank you for staying with the lengthy article — and for visiting Standard Process’s website.

Until my next post, here’s to  your health and healing.

Anthony Palombo, DC, ACN

Visit my HealingTones.org blog for inspired and inspiring articles.

 

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From GMO to Organic Farming

In Dr. Bruce Lipton’s wonderfully inspiring book The Honeymoon Effect there’s a dramatic story I would like to share with my readers. It’s a story about a farming community in India that started using GMO seeds to grow their food in hopes of fending off a predicted famine. I’ll let Bruce tell the story in his own words.

Bruce and his wife Margaret went to India to Meet Bharat Mitra and Bhavani Lev who had felt called to start an organic revolution in India. They founded a loving community and company called “ORGANIC INDIA, whose philosophy embraced Gaia: ‘Creation is one. The Earth is one. We are one.'”  Here’s the story.

Dr. Bruce Lipton

Dr. Bruce Lipton

The Story of Azamgarh — From GMO to Organic Farming

They started their revolution in 1997 in the town of Azamgarh. In the ’60s, many farmers in this community had embraced the high-tech “Green Revolution” farming methods that Western corporations had introduced to India. They mortgaged their farms and lives to buy the promise of costly genetically modified seeds; and then had to borrow more to pay for the synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and modern irrigation projects required to grow the genetically modified plants. The goal was to fend off the country’s famines that had once been considered inevitable, and at first it seemed to work. Yields increased and formerly poverty-stricken towns and the farmers who lived in them prospered.

But by the time ORGANIC INDIA started its work in Azamgarh, many farmers had become disillusioned and desperate. Their fields had indeed turned green but in the process had sucked up so much groundwater that they needed to dig deeper and deeper wells and borrow more and more money. The genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and petrochemical sprays produced an environmental disaster with devastating conse-
quences. Monsanto’s GMO “monster crops” accelerated depletion of soil nutrients, creating plant blight, which in turn led to an invasion of destructive insects. The
farmers had to borrow more money to buy more and more chemicals to grow their crops to fend off pests that had become resistant. In the last decade, nearly
200,000 Indian farmers, unable to continue to work their depleted land and unable to make loan payments, took their own lives-many by drinking the very pes-
ticides they had been told would ensure a good livelihood for them and their families.

Unsurprisingly, when ORGANIC INDIA arrived in Azamgarh, farmers were suspicious of more Westerners asking them to radically change the way they work. And just as a practical matter, they were leery of becoming organic farmers, because it takes at least three years to certify a field as organic.

Despite these suspicions, one farmer named Kailash Nath Singh decided to take a chance by going organic on his small, three-acre farm. That small step couldn’t have
been more symbolic; not only was Singh going back to the way his ancestors had farmed but he was doing it with the ancient crop tulsi (also called holy basil), a
wild medicinal herb that has been used for thousands of years in traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda) to heal body and mind.

Now, thanks to ORGANIC INDIA’s subsidies during their transition, 15 years later there are 1,000 organic farmers in Azamgarh and 20,000 around the country. The stories these grateful farmers tell are incredibly moving and a testament to the sustainability of organic farming-constant enrichment of the soil, healthier livestock, fewer miscarriages, and thriving children. Says Kailash Nath Singh, “Organic farming has come as a real blessing for our family. Our succeeding generations will reap the benefits and realize how the land has not lost its fertility due to heavy use of chemicals.”

I can’t tell you how inspiring it was for Margaret and me to see women and men working in organic tulsi, psyllium, and intoxicatingly fragrant rose fields (used
in their fabulous Tulsi Sweet Rose Tea), cultivating their crops in a sustainable way. They are literally healing the Earth one field at a time. Says Bharat Mitra, “It’s not
only that they have sustainable income, not only that, the environment is healthy, not only that their livestock is doing well, not only their own health has improved so
significantly, but they have the dignity of being farmers again. How beautiful. How natural. How simple.”

The farmers’ crops are processed and shipped from Lucknow all over the world to consumers (like Margaret and me) clamoring for organic products, which means
that ORGANIC INDIA is now making a global impact as well. The company is committed to its vision of being a vehicle of consciousness; it is running its business in a way that benefits everyone who works at the company and the consumers who buy its high-quality products. Says Bhavani, “Unless we all experience that we are all of the same consciousness we’re going to treat each other as if you don’t matter.” 

Here is America, the GMO corporate farming industry lead by Monsanto cares about one thing and one thing only: profits. It treats us as though we don’t matter. Our GMO crops are being denied entrance into more and more foreign countries. Why is our government not only allowing but empowering Monsanto to produce and supply our grocery shelves with GMO foods?  

Here’s an updated video clip on the class action suit against Mondanto for those who want to know more about what’s happening with GMO in this country

 

Please share this blog around. Monsanto and its GMO farming practices need to be stopped.

If you haven’t read Bruce’s book The Honeymoon Effect, do yourself a big favor and order it today. ‘Till my next post,

Here’s to your health and healing.

Tony's picture 2 from PeggyAnthony Palombo, D.C.

Visit my HealingTones.org blog for more insightful reading. The current theme is “Our Electromagnetic Universe: The Body Electric.”