Do you recall that movie?  It is about a contemporary American who, coming unexpectedly close to death, is frozen and then reanimated and healed 200 years in the future.  However, our hero did not expect to die or be frozen when he became ill and upon awakening believes the explanation given to him is a put on and that his friends are conspiring to make him into a fool.  The irritated doctor in charge tells Woody to snap out of it and be prepared to start a new life.  This is no joke, says the doctor, all of Woody’s friends are long since dead.  Woody’s response is a classic line that earns me a few chuckles from the audience every time I lecture:  ’all my friends can’t be dead!  I owned a health food store and we all ate brown rice.’

Humus and the Nutritional Quality of Food

I believe that the purpose of food is not merely to fill the belly or to provide energy, but to create and maintain health.  Ultimately, soil fertility should be evaluated not by humus content, nor microbial populations, nor earthworm numbers, but by the long-term health consequences of eating the food.  If physical health degenerates, is maintained, or is improved we have measured the soil’s true worth.  The technical name for this idea is a “biological assay.”  Evaluating soil fertility by biological assay is a very radical step, for connecting long-term changes in health with the nutritional content of food and then with soil management practices invalidates a central tenet of industrial farming:  that bulk yield is the ultimate measure of success or failure.  As Newman Turner, an English dairy farmer and disciple of Sir Albert Howard, put it: 

“The orthodox scientist normally measures the fertility of a soil by its bulk yield, with no relation to effect on the ultimate consumer.

I have seen cattle slowly lose condition and fall in milk yield when fed entirely on the abundant produce of an apparently fertile soil.  Though the soil was capable of yielding heavy crops, those crops were not adequate in themselves to maintain body weight and milk production in the cow, without supplements.  That soil, though capable of above-average yields, and by the orthodox quantitative measure regarded as fertile, could not, by the more complete measure of ultimate effect on the consumer, be regarded but anything but deficient in fertility.

Fertility therefore, is the ability to produce at the highest recognized level of yield, crops of quality which, when consumed over long periods by animals or man, enable them to sustain health, bodily condition and high level of production without evidence of disease or deficiency of any kind.

Fertility cannot be measured quantitatively.  Any measure of soil fertility must be related to the quality of its produce. . . . the most simple measure of soil fertility is its ability to transmit, through its produce, fertility to the ultimate consumer.”