The Wellness Revolution

The wellness revolution is happening as you read this article. So, in The next several articles, Wellness-vs-health plans to show why we think health food supplements are a necessary thing in today’s diet. Some of the information will be from first hand experience working with the soil on the family farm.

There is wellness a revolution going on between the US Agriculture department, university agriculture extension services and healthy foods advocates about whether or not today’s fruits and vegetables are lacking in vitamins, minerals and trace minerals because of depleted soil.

The claim is that the soil on today’s farms is so over worked their is a need to use chemical fertilizers to produce a decent crop. We believe that to be true. We also believe that if the soil needs help to grow crops it is also depleted of the important minerals available for absorption by those crops.

Let me tell you by means of a First hand experience why we think that way. When I was about thirteen years old my father inherited his family’s one hundred acre farm.

The farm had been leased to a commercial farmer for about twenty five years prior to my fathers taking possession. We moved in in early March and as soon as the ground thawed we began preparing the soil to plant crops.

We used chemical fertilizer that first year along with what animal manure was available. When the crops began to develop my father was worried. He knew the soil had been abused, but it was worse than he thought. You see the crops did not look healthy even with excellent growing conditions.

Then my father began to explain to me what he was taught, by his father and grand father, about farming. It was at this point that the wellness revolution for the soil of this farm began to take shape.

That first years crop yields were deplorable even with the help of fertilizers. Dad started making plans right away for the next years planting.

His favorite saying was “you take care of the soil and it will take care of you”. The very next spring the wellness revolution began, he took one fourth of the farm [25 acres] and planted it with alfalfa and several other kinds of clover.

He did nothing more with it until the next spring. The clovers he planted the previous year were chock full of nitrogen, the primary element in most chemical fertilizers. The wellness revolution begins with the soil our food is grown on.

Alfalfa and some of the other clovers send their roots deep into the ground and bring to the surface nutrients and minerals other crops can't reach

That next spring when the alfalfa and clover got about eighteen inches high, dad plowed it back into the ground, the neighbors thought he was crazy, he was, like a fox! His wellness revolution began in earnest.

Then, after cultivating that crop nicely into the ground, he prepared the soil for another planting, this time he planted buckwheat, and after it flowered and just before the seed began to fill up, he plowed that green manure back into the soil.

It didn’t stop there, he prepared the soil yet again , for another crop, and planted winter wheat to be harvested the following year.

For an entire year there was no crop taken from that soil. What it did produce was fed back into it, to build it up, make it healthy again. Plant nutrients, minerals and natural nitrogen and humus was returned to the soil.

The winter wheat that was harvested the following summer was a dramatic improvement over the previous harvest and not one ounce of chemical fertilizer was used. The straw left over after harvesting was plowed back into the ground.

Dad went on to do same thing each year, twenty five acres at a time, for the rest of his life. Without knowing it he was declaring his own wellness revolution. He was doing what he knew was best for the soil and for the produce that grew in that soil.

Production increased each year without the use of fertilizer or pesticides. In about six years, dad’s farm was out producing every farm in the area. And remember, this was without the use of one ounce of commercial fertilizer.

My dad was an organic farmer before the word organic was invented and he didn’t even know it, he farmed the way he was taught.

Unhealthy soil cannot produce healthy crops. We see it in the natural world, an unhealthy fruit tree cannot produce healthy fruit, so its cut down and burned and a healthy one planted in it’s place.

As we continue this series on the wellness revolution, the next article will talk about commercial farming today and how it affects the produce we eat on a daily basis.

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