Gold Nuggets

Gabe Brown is very aware of the connection between feeding the world and maintaining and building a healthy soil food web. Gabe says even if you’re not a farmer, you can still have an impact by implementing the regenerative aspects of no-till, plant diversity, and using ground cover such as wood chips into your own home garden.

Gabe Brown focused first on the soil to build and regain his precious topsoil. Here are his Five Tenets of Soil Regeneration. Using the following five tenets of soil regeneration, Gabe maintains that you may be able to add an inch of topsoil in a five-year period

And another thing about worms is Vermicast and that once Gabe had the density of earthworms that he described, he is now literally producing tons, many, many tons – 10, 20, 30 tons – of vermicompost per acre in his soil and he doesn’t even have to move it. It’s done for free.

So then 1998 came along, and Gabe lost 80 percent of his crop to hail, making it four devastating years of crop failure in a row. But Gabe tells people that it was the best thing that ever could have happened to him because it taught him that he had to learn how to take care of his most precious resource.

Taking his farm from failure due extreme climate adversity to a world leading example of soil health and profitability. After 3 crop failures in a row due to extreme climate conditions Gabe Brown was ready for finding a solution – no matter what – that would insure his farm in the future.

Monoculture can be a farmer’s enemy as monoculture can set your farm backwards. Setting up test sites like 10 m x 10 m or 30 m x 30 m in big paddocks for grazing management to observe the benefits of diverse plant species can easily be put on the back burner by farmers and not done at all.

Farmers who are using diversity in many different ways and for different reasons are winning and are becoming more profitable. Let’s look at one example of diversity being profitable for the farmers. When the Stipa group of farmers put in 200 test sites some three years ago they were using grazing animals for pasture enhancement.

Why is there so much controversy when it comes to grazing systems? What’s the fuss about? Emotions seem to run high when graziers experience good or bad results, and cell grazing seems often to be at the centre of it all.

Why is there so much controversy when it comes to grazing systems? What’s the fuss about? Emotions seem to run high when graziers experience good or bad results, and cell grazing seems often to be at the centre of it all.

Since the introduction of GE seeds in 1996, the amount of glyphosate used on crops in the United States has increased from 12 million litres to 113 million litres in 2009 according to a report by DrAndre Leu. Correspondingly the growing incidence of thyroid cancer and bladder cancer as shown on graphs have risen in direct proportion to the use of glyphosate.

Many of our friends watched the TV report on cholesterol on ‘Catalyst’ lately and have now stopped taking medication to lower their cholesterol. We had tried over many years to share the views about the cholesterol mistruths exposed in the book “The Cholesterol Myth” only to be met with disbelief.

We can’t hear it, but scientists are finding that in the apparently silent world of plants, a whole lot of communication is going on. The roots of most land plants are colonised by mycorrhizal fungi that provide mineral nutrients in exchange for carbon.

When Soloukhin started telling others of their findings he was told of another experiment which was testing whether plants had long term memory. Already crops of beans, potatoes and wheat had been tested for short term memory in experiments in which plants pulsated in response to sequences of flashes from a xenon-hydrogen lamp.

In 1972 Vladimir Soloukhin published his book “Grass” after becoming fascinated by the magic and mystery of plants partly as a result of scientific experiments done with an ordinary potted geranium which was connected to an encephalograph.

Scientists say they have now found out the produce you buy in the shops is still alive and all those blueberries and zucchinis are still responding to the time of day. Lead researcher, Professor Janet Braam of Rice University says it could spell changes to the way produce is harvested and stored that increase the food’s nutritional value.