Dr. William Jackson is going to speak with us. He’s from the Environmental Health Foundation in Evergreen, Colorado and he is going to speak on Humus and the Makeup of Soil and it sounds like an exciting title and I’ll turn it over to him right now.

I appreciate the privilege of sharing with you today for a few minutes. There are some very special people here today, and friends of mine, and I want to welcome them also, and to introduce to you the concept of the most important thing that we have to deal with, and that’s our soil as it relates to agriculture and production of crops.

If we don’t have a good foundation—a good basis—then we really have a serious problem. However, what I would like to suggest to you to begin with is that all topsoil which we’re going to be interested in—all topsoil basically is created one way only that I know of and that is the humus that’s developed through microbial and macro such as earthworms, microorganisms, the micro, and they have to eat. When they eat they’re one cell and they’re going to split and then we’re going to have another like one. When they do that they’re going to poop, and the plants love the poop. It’s perfectly balanced so I want you just to keep this whole thing simple.

I don’t want to start with questions at this point, but we would have an hour and fourteen minutes for questions if you would remember that one thing. All we’re aiming for is a pre-digested material that goes through this little factory and is now available for the plant to pick it up.

Please remember that if you were dealing—had a budget to handle it—you could go down and buy earthworm castings, you would have a great crop. I don’t care what it is. Houseplants, whatever. However, it’s pretty expensive if you have 1,000 acres and you’re trying to cover it with earthworm castings.

Nature has programmed it so that it works at its own rate of speed. Tomorrow I would like to share with those that are interested the concept of microbial digestion—what it does, how that balance works, etc. But for today, and we’re kind of starting backwards, okay, we’ll talk about the humus in the soil. Where did it come from and how do we use it. Tomorrow we’ll deal with how do we create more of it more rapidly in case we need it. That will give you a little clue of where we’re going.

Now, today I would like to take a couple of minutes and show you a couple of overheads that will give us a point of beginning on the things that we need to consider. I want you to keep in mind that microbial life exists, for example, in all geological soils, animal waste, etc. and under all various climates, and the microbial life is extremely under the correct circumstances, and with adequate stimulation. These microorganisms were created to be very competitive relative to performing nature’s assigned task.

You’re going to say, well, what’s the assigned task? The assigned task will vary from place to place. It will vary in the type of terrain or the geological structure, or your particular temperature, particular material available for them to exist with.

So today, what we want to look at then, are some examples. One of the things I really appreciate is that so many people are so far ahead of me already on humus and building the soil. You don’t think so? Look at the book stand.

We have some very outstanding authors who have put together ways to keep developing microbial action, yes. But what is it doing? It’s creating humus in the soil.

I’ll tell you what you want to keep in mind. There’s a savings and loan account and when we have vegetation, but we want to save it for a while then it becomes a source of plant food later on for the microbial world in building humus for that redevelopment—the growth of the next crop.

Most of you are familiar with the process of photosynthesis. It’s an incredible system, and when the energy from the sun can literally generate—can create life—stored energy. Cattle eat it. We eat it. And then that which has to create some more digested material for the plants coming back around microbes eat it.

As close as I can determine, it depends on what we’re talking about and where, but the savings and loan—I don’t know if you can see our composting here—this was residue composting squeezed grapes in Napa Valley. We go down and we’re seeing the process where it’s actually going through the scarab, etc.

Now, what I want you know is that in this savings and loan there will be anywhere from 11 to as high as 20% of the residue—the material that grows will be saved as a residue to feed plants later. It’s going to be there.

When you do a compost pile, how much is left, and how much is that relative to what had already grown? This cycle is very, very important. In this cycle you have equipment, through microbial life, to digest it—actually to preserve the residue and make it available for the existence of other microbes at a later time.

What is so important for us to remember is that there are really no substitutes for how nature had it worked out. You can help it. You can be beneficial to the system by doing several things. One is to relieve stress. We live in an situation, an age today, where stress is our first and last name, almost. But we stress our crops and we stress our animals, and of course, we end up being stressed.

When we think bottom line is so important that we can create an answer for nature, it’s only a matter of time before we are in serious trouble. Very serious trouble. Tomorrow I want to demonstrate to some degree—it’s a slight demonstration—but I want you to see how involved the mechanism of nature is, to put everything together so that there is balance.

If there is a second thing I want to tell you today it is, watch for balance, and over-stress situations disturb that balance.

Now, what I would like for us to think about is, can I keep things natural in proper balance, and can I afford to do this? Perhaps a better question is, can I afford not to?

When we talk about soil I want to take you backwards for a little ways and have you tell me later how you feel or how your experiences would tie to the little story I want to tell you.

Not to quote names necessarily or point fingers at anybody, but it seems as though the story of anhydrous ammonia was a development the beginning of WWII, and the way the story goes is that it was devised for a particular purpose and that was to actually make landing of airplanes in WWII more possible.

You go into a jungle area you can grade it, you can do everything you need to do, and three days later you have greenery growing back up. What do you do to stop it? Second, there are no concrete plants out there in the middle of the jungle. There are no asphalt plant. But, brilliant scientists came up with a concept.

If we could take the ionic bond and lock particles of soil together that clay could become harder than concrete, and you still have some remainderment there to prove that it still has not degenerated yet. Can you think of that? Build an airstrip so inexpensively that all you have to do is haul loads of anhydrous ammonia on it and it literally will be so compacted—so bound, so clay like—that it cannot be penetrated by the greenery in a jungle. Is that a beautiful thought? And they were so clever, and they did a good job.

The only problem was, at the end of the war the way the story goes, at the end of the war they had such a surplus that they decided to give it to chemical companies or anybody who could find a good use for it. Chemical companies said, we have an idea. We have found that if you use a little bit of it, you can cause the humates in the soil to begin breaking down more rapidly. As it breaks down more rapidly it’s available to the plant. It really does make sense.

Except, relative to dollars and sense. Relative to the fact we cheated a little bit because nature has its own program, and that wasn’t one of the ingredients. So, at this particular point then, we have to ask are there negative consequences? Bet me—there are!

You see, my grand dad was a good farmer, and a daring one. I did not watch him plow his field with horses, but I did see the two old horses he didn’t have heart to put to death. And I’m only 29. In that situation he could plow his field.

Today, I challenge you to go out to your average field and plow with two horses. I know what you’re going to tell me. We can pull a bigger plow. We can do a 60-foot this; we can do a 30-foot that.

I want to tell you something. You go and pull the same plow with two horses and see how tired they are before they get to the fence row the first time around.

You see, what we have done very slowly, but overtime, we have begun to create concrete in our fields. The clay bonding, the soil particles are locking together until today it is incredible. I chuckle when I drive down the country roads and I see a big John Deere tractor with tires as high as my head, but they put dual wheels on now and duals over here, and that wasn’t good enough, so now we’re going to go to the front wheels and we’re going to the front wheels and we’re going to put dual wheels on as high as my head, and dual wheels over here and we’re going to make a 4-wheel drive because my two horses won’t pull it.

How big are the engines now, 400 horse? I don’t know, but they’re big. And yes, they do pull more equipment, but I challenge you to see if the soil we have today could be tilled with two horses pulling the plow.

I have an associate in Ohio. Remember now, this is Midwest and good soil in some areas. They’ve worn theirs out. You know it became so compacted. Now the equipment company says, all the things you have to do, you’re running over so many times, so we just came out last year or two years ago with new equipment that runs on tracks now, because we don’t want to compact the soil.

That’s not the problem. Compaction is not the only problem we have. Compaction is caused because of what we are putting on that and what we are eliminating. Now tomorrow, when we talk about microorganisms I want you to think about whether you want to be an arsonist and burn your factory down or if you want to let it survive. If you want to burn the factory down you’re working against yourself, but that’s what we do. We literally dissipate our opportunity, and we cheat against nature.

The first thing you’re going to say to me is, Yes, and I like these organic growers and the idea, but they can only raise half as much, and they have so many other problems, and we have to charge twice as much and the market isn’t ready for it.

What if I can tell you that you can raise more organically sustainable agriculture is not a bad subject. You can survive. You can do well, and I’ll show you in a few minutes how well.

I’m lucky. I have a non-profit foundation behind me that lets me do things I kind of like to do. So I get to do some experimenting here and there, and it’s paying off, and some of those studies will be available to you. It is working better than a chemical treatment.

Okay. So, I am going to throw a question out to you. I want you to think about it between today and tomorrow. Would it shock you—this is only a hypothesis, it’s not truth. Remember, it’s only a theory. But would it shock you if we knew that we had positive results with inorganic salts because it created toxicity and, for example, caused denytrofying bacteria to come in to rescue you for screwing up? And when they did their work they pooped? And that it was functional because it is its own electrolyte while causing a toxic situation?

Now, are you stewards of the land? Do we need to understand what we’re doing to it over time? We do. Keep this in mind. Any change that is spectacular at the beginning, and then you don’t sense over time that it’s messing you up is very dangerous. Very dangerous. Because you don’t know what’s happening to you.

Now, I’m looking at some super people with PhDs and they went through the same thing I went through, and we’re sitting here today because we said, you better not have tunnel vision. Don’t buy into everything you are taught. Watch and see what we have to restore balance to the soil—to our lives—to our plants—to our animals.

You know where we got messed up? Let’s go back to our story about the anhydrous ammonia.

Okay, it did release that which had been stored. Our savings and loan—we found the password and we went in and collected in advance. Alright, now let’s do an imaginary continuum. I’ve got a transparency here I think we can use for a second. I am going to draw a picture.

Let’s imagine that we have 1,000 year continuum. Straight line. Let’s assume that this was beginning after WWII and we’re out here somewhere, but this is 1,000 years. It’s make believe, alright?

Would it be interesting to you if you could make the assumption that when we put that crop—the treatment of inorganic salts on, that we literally borrowed forward 10 years? You burned it up and everything that was, already, nature is breaking it down for you. But they had a faster way.

There is a real interesting thing that happens. We begin to burn the humus out of the soil and that worked out pretty well on that first stage because at that particular point we had some there to burn. When you go forward like that, though, look. Here’s year number two and that’s supposed to take another year to break. Here’s year five, and that’s supposed to take five years to break. Here’s year number eight, here’s nine. But we did all ten at once.

I mean, are we in the candy store? (inaudible comment from audience) They are parallel. For the rest of you in the back of the room he said, “Is this something relative to the national debt?” Absolutely worse than, because we have prostituted our ground. Let me tell you what happens.

Hey, it did work. Why wouldn’t it if you have advanced available source that humate was made available, but we squandered a lot of it. Why would you take 10 years worth and only get maybe a 12% value out of it. Did you just lose 88%? Hey, don’t worry about it. It’s okay because I’ll tell you what you can do. You put some more on next year.

Don’t worry. Don’t worry. This is working, and bottom line counts. That’s it. We’ve got to be realistic and practical.

Well, we get out here about two or three years, and you know what we do? We say, “I don’t understand why this didn’t work quite as well as last year.” Now you have to be fair with people who have house payments and responsibilities; putting kids through college and things like that . So, don’t come down hard on salesmen, okay? But do you know what the salesman would say to you when you said, “Boy that was really great. Did you give me something different two years ago?” No. “Well, it isn’t working quite as well.

“I know what the problem is we need to use a little more. A little more. A little more.”

Why? Because as we go out here breaking down 10 years that was going to be 40 years’ worth of breaking down and we have to do it in four years which means that out here at 40 years and 50 years it’s difficult. You know where we are today?

Now we did a really interesting thing. We went up and then it starts dribbling off, but we said well, we’ve got to maintain this. We bought these tractors and we bought everything else and we have to survive, however much it takes.

Things were going along quite well at the beginning. Do you know how well they went along? I’ll tell you how well they went along. It was the greatest sell job that ever happened! Because the university bought into it. Why shouldn’t they? They’re bright people, maybe.

If it’s working then you are stupid if you don’t make the change, and we don’t want to be stupid.

I want to tell you something. If the theory is correct there are a few Ph.D.’s here today who can say, “Well, I see what’s happening and I’m moving toward practicality and returning to what we can do.” But do you know what it does to all the rest of them? You know why the fight is going on? Because there may someday be a whole bunch of unemployed people whose Ph.D. isn’t worth the paper it’s written on because they didn’t wake up yet.

Why don’t they wake up? I’ll tell you why. It’s real simple. You see, in order—this would have just kept dribbling off. In order to keep it up to here you know what we did on our imaginary continuum? We are out here 40 or 50 years, but on our continuum we have blown 50% of our 1,000 years worth of stewardship. It’s gone.

Are you doing anything to replace it? No.

You know why? Because it’s kind of fun to be god with a little “g”. You see, because what I’d like to do is take a little pinch of this and I’ll put a little pinch of this. Uh, I’ve got to do an analysis. We’re coming up really short. Wait a minute. It’s a bandaid. You better get to the source. You’re going to have to someday face the fact that you can’t burn it faster than you put it on.

You know what we’re doing today? At this particular point we are reaching toxicity. You have to put too much on, and it’s very difficult to keep balance at this point and when the toxicity puts in I can take you to places that have been very rich farm areas and today it won’t grow a weed.

They say, “well, it’s chemically burnt”. So how much longer will it be till the next county is chemically burnt? And what do you do about it for restoration? Yes, it can be redeemed. I want to clue you in on that. It can, but are we doing it? No, we’re not. We’re going to wait until it’s so hard packed that you can put an airport anyplace you want to.

Now, the fun thing here is not only is the toxicity there so that the plants don’t really enjoy trying to survive, but you’ll get a lot of messing up on what nature had originally created, and fortunately for us, somebody figured out to do a little bit of gene splicing and whatever to cover up for the mistakes. Here again, we have a bandaid.

Now I want to tell you something. We have such a problem with this toxicity whether you know it or not, whether you’ve had first hand experience or not, there are areas where they absolutely want to shut the businesses down because you’re polluting the ground water and you are polluting streams and the fish are dying because there is too much phosphate, phosphorous, too much nitrogen in the water. Oh, man. I’m so sorry, because it’s sort of a mess, you know? And what do we do about a mess?

Kind of a fun thing. A few years ago I had the privilege of doing a study for Fish and Game in California. I don’t know if you can see that at the back of the room, but this particular area here, the problem and the project were dairy lagoons in California. In this particular situation, this area here was a picture of where the manure had already crusted over 15-16”. Dogs would run across it. And they just kept pushing that manure in there from 600 to 1,000 cows a day, and it just builds up. And whatever did, when it would rain hard along the coast north in Sonoma County, you had the risk of the lagoon breaking and then Fish and Game gets involved and they say, “Oh, we had all these little fish killed and the minnows aren’t making it because they can’t handle the ammonium nitrates in the water. What can we do? What can we do?

So, I’m saying, “well, I don’t know for sure, but maybe we could put some microbial life. Stimulate what’s there, because you put it under such stress that we can go in and maybe eat the stuff faster—digest it.

You know what? Five and a half/six weeks, number one, ammonium nitrate converted to a nitrite, nitrate, nitrite and later, tomorrow I’ll tell you what else happened to it. But basically, what happened is that within five and a half to six weeks we basically converted it to H20 and CO2 while still kicking manure in thre every day from 600 cows.

Why? We just increased the speed of digestion trying to recoop. Trying to help them get around the problem of undigested material because of the stress we put on it.

Well, we can go on and on with that. What does that have to do with humus in the soil? I’ll tell you what it has to do. I don’t care if it’s sewage sludge and you’re trying to digest it. I don’t care if it’s up at Carnagra(?) where we’re digesting the mortality of chickens at the rate of two to two and one half weeks. No odor, and it’s potting soil when you’re done. Their bones and the beaks and the whole thing are digested.

Do we need to start building humate or humus in the soil? Yes. There are a lot of ways to do it. Go through the exhibit hall. Do yourself a favor and pick the one you like the most. I don’t care if it’s fish emulsion, lanerdite(?). I don’t care. Whatever it is, it’s the carbon source that allows the only equipment that we have to begin to function and poop, because the plant wants poop—perfectly balanced poop. We have to figure out a way for our situation to generate something that will allow this to happen and happen as quickly as possible.

Now, I don’t know what your definition is of compost. I can tell you this. I have a little problem because I had some ideas, and some of you are not going to like me when we’re done. Well, maybe you will. But you can find some of the neatest, correct books written on compost, and I want to tell you. You’re on the right track. You need to do that because that is the restoration of the humus and the building up of the humus in the soil.

If you have prostituted something for 40 to 50 years—if the whole university standard, do you know what? Went in for an interview at the University of California, Davis, and I said, “we have a need for somebody to teach organic soil condition, but it’s with reservation.” And I said, “I would be interested at half time.”

“Oh, no, you can’t Why do you want to do it half time?

“Because I’m doing other research.”

“Like what?”

“Two weeks or so later they said, “Well, if you do it full time we can consider it, but you have to do the research that we give you the assignment and we own the research.”

I said, “Pardon me, but I’m not interested.” I’m not independent, but I sort of am. I know exactly what I want to do and I know exactly what we’re going to do and we’re not going to do that. It’s not going to be bought off.” And so with that in mind we start thinking a little bit the same thing my friends Blackwells are here, and we had a meeting with five department heads in Houston, and they’ve come down from Texas A and M. That discussion went sort of the same way. One guy really wanted it, four of them said, Uh, uh. You know why? What if we’re right? What if we are?

Is that a threat to the people who learn something else and it’s too hard or too late to change? So it’s going to be uphill, but when I first started out on treating waste material including hazardous waste, when we started out looking at animal feed. Universities absolutely could care less about doing any of it at all.

You know what I did? I went right straight to industry. The first thing I did was a mistake, I’ll admit that all of us can do that—make mistakes. What happened was I thought I could approach it from an environmental point of view. They don’t give a rip. Then I went to chicken houses and I said, “I can take care of the ammonia in your chicken house in three to seven minutes, and not longer than a half hour and think how much that would be of a benefit to your personal health? Your wife who is now an invalid and is house bound because of ammonia burn, and your children who work here and people you’d hire.

They don’t give a rip. You know what makes the difference? One thing and one thing only—the dollars at the end of the month—bottom line. I don’t like to say this, but I conned them a little. I really did. You know now what appeals? (Don’t quote me on it.) I figured out how to do it and now they’re happy. These people just finished with one company with layer hens.

Do you know what the facts are after one year? The chickens lay three more eggs. That doesn’t sound like much, does it, but a million and a half birds times three eggs at the end of the year. See, first test we do is 35 weeks and they said, “No, that doesn’t work because all you did is push it up and got them faster, so at the end we’re going to sacrifice something else.

No, no. Let’s do the whole thing clear to the first molt from the day they were born, 72 weeks we averaged three extra eggs. Oh, that’s nice. But we reduced the mortality by 55%. Oh, well, now, you might have something. (chuckle)

I’ll tell you what else happened that was more fun than that. You see, now their chicken manure is rapidly composted, and now it’s salable, and when eggs are down they still can survive because they can sell their manure without burning. Woah. Microbial. Very interesting.

But the most incredible thing that got their attention—didn’t matter to me too much, but it got their attention—91 cents less feed for the year per bird. That’s dumb. That’s not much. That’s just pocket change. In fact, I got a dollar. I can beat it.

Well, 91 cents times a million five, that’s bottom line. Now, where I conned them was I’m cleaning stuff up and they don’t know it. And they have better eggs and their health is better. And when their health is better and where they won’t listen to me on what I care about then we push it a little further so they make some money and they don’t have to think as hard about that. They can pay their loans off at the bank.

Okay. So, that’s the kind of thing we need to do is say, “Alright, what can we do that makes a difference, and can we do that within the realm of where we live? I am going to put this on the screen so you can take a look at it.

Plant response to humic and fulvic substance. What I want to do is shortcut those terms. Those are the terms I used in one of the books I’ve written. Let me shortcut it a little bit. Just fill in anything—the humus. It’s the carbon source. It’s the food source for microbial life, and fulvic substance—and don’t be afraid of the word even though the State of California says there is no such thing. And you can’t measure it. It doesn’t matter. I still like the word. If you like a better term, trace elements. Anywhere from 30, 40, 90 filled with the rocks. Whatever it takes to generate an energy field, and that energy field is life. And we’ll talk about that a little more in a few minutes.

What does it do? Activating materials are absorbed by the seeds and the roots and leaves. This effects the plant metabolism and growth.

Second. Researchers at the University of Georgia reported fresh weight yield increase by 13 to 170% for (shoots?) and by 122 to 477% for roots. Dry weight increased by 247 to 353%. Whoah. Is that a deal? Wouldn’t we want to do something that would even come close to that? I mean if you even leaned into it a little bit, two or three percent, maybe ten?

Of course, this was a university study, so it’s probably gospel. At least somebody had their head on straight to be willing to try it.

The positive and negative dipole charges from the fulvic acid, or trace minerals, activated on the clay minerals allowed the electrolyte to penetrate the tight clay layers and reduce the compaction of clay, thus lessening soil crust, clods, hardpan, and general tillage problems. Water management, tilth, and aeration benefit. Such a deal.

What did we want to start with? Make our work a little easier? Have a fellow sitting on the front seat here that you need to ask Dean sometime about a little project down in Arizona. You can do a test, and you can do your balance of humus versus the control and then they plowed crossways at the end of the season.

Do you know what the report was, if I remember correctly? Plowing across the big old plow settles down when it’s going across the control, and when it got to the treated it leveled out. And it hits the next one—a 20-acre stretch—and it settles in, and then it comes back up.

Did they gain a mile an hour, Dean? In plowing? Two miles an hour? Wait a minute. If you’re behind the plow or on that tractor two miles an hour is big time. If you save in diesel during that If you save on diesel during that extra time it’s a benefit. We did the same thing. I don’t see Wendell Bachman here, but we did the same thing in Iowa on corn this year.

Now we’re sophisticated enough that the Case tractor has a tow bar measurement and instead of it pulling down at four, it’s only pulling at two when it’s in the treated area, which means you can go up one whole gear with less pull than you were one gear down. Does it work? Oh, yeah. Did I learn this at the university? No, no, no.

We’re still working our way through developing compaction. (chuckle) We’re still doing this experiment of locking things together just to see how tight they can go and how smart we are. How do you loosen it?

You can do it with your trace minerals. You do it with your humates. You do it with microbial life, macro earthworms, microorganisms.

Tomorrow I want to tell you how to take that one microobrand new ones that aren’t acclimated. One of them. You have one. Do you have one? Could you make one billion in 24 hours? Could you go as high as 12 billion in one 24-hour hour period of time?

If you did, and you’re successful, and I tell you, you can be, and you have one billion this time tomorrow. Now play with it and do one billion times a billion. You’re going to run out of paper trying to figure it, but by the time that growing season is over, we can learn even in spite of stress to develop humus in our soil.

Now, there are a couple of other things. Well, you know what I did. I have too much fun doing this, because I am excited about what I do. Someone said I should be a salesman. I’m not a salesman. I don’t know how to sell. I would be afraid to ask a close, but I am excited about what I’m doing, so I want to share that enthusiasm with you.

Now that you’re sort of feeling okay I’ll hit you with my compost.

Alright, compost is a mixture of decomposed vegetation, a disassembled plant substance with no identifiable organic residues. Composting materials include the action potential to release energy upon the oxidation of carbon to carbon dioxide, and when complete it is non-toxic and non-odorous. Am I okay so far? Anybody opposed to that?

Okay. The finished carbon product includes a high concentration of carbon available as multiple glucocytes and I want to tell you tomorrow that when you look at it, that every one of those little microorganisms break things down to do what? Create their own fuel?. And they have to eat, and I can feed them diesel oil and make them eat it. But you know what? That’s kind of slow.

When they eat it, they have to eat it so well—and I’m paraphrasing a whole bunch here. You won’t find this exact language in my textbook. But you break it down to glucose before it can fuel the rest of the furnace in that one-cell microorganism. Are we okay so far? Yeah.

Concentration of carbon available as multiple glucocytes and nitrogen balance, void of pathogens, and obnoxious weed seeds. Hey, are we winning? If we can do that we’re on our way to rebuilding the soil.

Composted material is stabilized and will no longer heat up even if stored for an indefinite period of time. It will not undergo further anaerobic decomposition until used as an aid toward soil improvement, for an energy source for micro and macro organisms. It can be used in liquid form or in dry form. Well, the scary thing is, the thing I am probably going to have to adjust to is when I say you can do it in a liquid form.

How about our water situation and our trace minerals and humates? That’s always kind of fun. Trace minerals help water penetrate and permeate the plant cells assisting nutrient uptake in water storage during drought conditions. Fulvic acid, or trace minerals, may balance water during drought and assist in the accumulation of soluble sugars helping to prevent wilt. Also will handle frost a little bit easier, okay?

You’re going to always be—better be—conscious of your pH, right? Well, now I’ll be! It doesn’t matter does it, a little bit? A half a point one way or the other? Well, it should be 6.4, 6.6, 6.7. Mine is at 7.3. I’m awful close.

Do you know how you can balance soil? I have a friend here today from Kansas who has been hauling lime on his fields for years until two years ago. Since then the microbes are balancing it for him. He hasn’t hauled any. I’m going to show you something. Very very interesting. Take a look at 7.0 okay?

How many positive hydrogen units—1,000, million, ten million. Oh, that’s nice. Okay, how many on the negative side? Ten million. So let’s just slide a little bit. When we go up to 8.0 we now have (turn tape)

…change. What is it? How important is it? Does it have to happen? Pretty soon we’re going to come into Phil Very(?) here and I should have him add when we get into the electric polarity of this whole program. Alright, but look at here.

You say, “Oh, man, you know what? We’ve got chickens we’re dealing with down in Texas where the drinking water is pushing 10.0. Oh, my word. With 10,000 positive offset by units thousand, million, ten billion negative. I don’t know how they even survive. You talk about nature being able to adapt in spite of us. So keep in mind that pH is very important, but there may be a simple answer to establishing good pH and it may not be too expensive.

My friend, Dave Taylor, gave me a copy of a paper and I don’t know what the source is. I need to find him to find the source, but here is a really interesting thing to keep in mind. Take a look here at the pH. If I am on the negative side—the anion—what’s the problem? Eight percent down to say seven, that’s where I may well find my insect problem. Why?

(too low to pick it up. From audience) But look what happens when I go below. Now I have disease attack probability. What do I want? Insect attack or disease? Or somewhere in between where it is a balance that is more practical to survive?

I want to tell you something—I have to be real careful because I’ve read your materials, Phil, and I feel like I would like to have Phil come up here and help us. But I’ll try and you can correct me after while.

Now, when we get into this field of electric and the physics of it, we have some interesting things going on, but Mr. Fuller did a little diagram and he said, here’s what he sees as to action/reaction and results.

If it’s a negative event, action/reaction results. A positive event, results/reaction/ action/results. If you put them together, whoops. You always are going to have that play between action/reaction, negative and positive polarity, and it better be balanced. But when you do it under the rule of physics you end up with equivalent of the shape of a carbon molecule, and if you put 60 of those together every which way you can that they fit, you have the bucky ball, and you’re going to have 60 of them and that is the most it can attach, and carbon is the only thing it can attach to itself.

Okay, don’t worry about it. It’s just a thought.

Now, here we go. Electrolyte. The term is a Greek term. Electro loosened, or loose. It is a substance that dissolves in water or another suitable medium to produce a solution capable of conducting electrical current. Okay, I’ll buy that.

Ion, the electrolyte must consist of at least two ions in modern use. An ion is any individual atom, molecule, etc. etc. Cation that’s the ion that carries the positive charge. While we saw the results, action, etc. a minute ago. Anion we’ve got the negative, but watch here.

Why is it so important for you to understand your cation exchange? Hey, calcium ++. Magnesium, ++. Potassium +, ammonium +, sodium +, hydrogen +.

You better get the balance in the field and that’s what we talk about and what the people will be talking about on balancing the exchange. That’s all I want to talk about on that subject. There are too many pros who know more about it than I do. Well, I have something I can show you tha

Your phosphorous, for example. It really is a negative. You can have a couple negatives on it. Your sulfur you have a couple negatives on it. So how do we balance this whole thing and is it even necessary? Yeah, it’s necessary.

Now let’s go beyond this. I’m doing a textbook now on the concept of life being electric. It’s all electric. If there’s no electric, there’s no life. And it’s a dipole battery, positive/negative just like the battery in your pickup or your car. It has two posts—absolute.

For the sake of confusion we’ll use a brain cell. There’s a brain cell. Now watch. Right there is the positive post; the nuclei. Right here is the cytoplasm or the plasma. It will be the same in a plant. It will be the same in an animal, and it’s the same in you. And you will be building energy in that positive post—just like the battery in your car—and it builds and it builds, and there’s a real fine little membrane around this, and it has to penetrate it. And it builds, and it’s like a capacitor. It fires. It builds, and it fires, and fires, and it builds and fires and fires and fires. And that is energy. Would I love to find a trickle charger?

You know what aging is? Aging is when my battery—my bolt, every cell, every single cell is a battery and it comes up to charge. As I get older it won’t come up as high—the charge. And so the …

Okay, this situation is diagram showing the brain cell, and you can see under stimulation, it’s very easy under the microscope to determine. It’s about a 6,000 times enlargement. What you can see here is the nuclei/nucleus the plates in our battery that store it, and then the cytoplasm. That’s wonderful.

Look here. Under normal situation you still can see the nuclei—good energy. You see it building up and it’s functioning well. But you know what, anybody—I don’t want to ask anybody if they’ve had a hangover, but anybody ever go two nights without sleeping and worked all day between? How do you feel? I mean tired! Your energy, your battery just went down. You want to lift your arm, you’re driving, you doze off. You’re not up. What do we do? Oh, a couple of good meals and a night of rest and we recharge. We’re ready to go.

Alright, look here. Fatigue. Is that interesting? Fatigue, you can barely make out the nuclei. The positive post is almost nonfunctional. And you know what, under stress a bunch of us operate fatigue. The breakthroughs for the animal feed additives that we have come up with are relative to one thing that’s very basic, and that is, take enough stress off so that they aren’t functioning at fatigue and get them back up so that nature can function normally.

Okay, what happens here? Oh, my word! Complete exhaustion.

I’ll tell you how serious it is on complete exhaustion. Not only can you not define it, but the cell wall literally begins to disintegrate—to tear, to pull apart. How exhausted would you like to be? How susceptible are you to disease? How long does it take you to recover?

I didn’t put the fifth one on. The fifth one is lights out. That’s death. It’s over. No electric energy. You see now why trace elements are so important? Because it is life. No electric, no life. That’s an extremely important part of the equation.

I need to really hurry. You’re going to laugh at what I am going to tall you next maybe because you’ll be sympathetic for me. You’ll need to help me a little.

I made a presentation to the international master gardeners in July of this year—two different days; two presentations, then some of them asked that we make several products for them.

I said, “This is something I need to think about and then I decided the easiest way to communicate the message is to pick an example and follow through on it. So today, what I want you to do is to think about (this is the book I’m writing now—a short little book, Think like a Tomato.) That’s kind of silly. I have a brother who is an attorney in San Diego so you’ll have sympathy for him also.

He lives out at Coronado, and I don’t think of him as being a gardener. But he did call, and I was getting ready to do this thing for Master Gardeners. He said, “Bill, I would like to have some instructions on raising some tomatoes this year.”

I said, “David, where are you going to put it? You don’t have any garden spot.”

“Well, no. But I just want two or three plants so I said, “Okay, tell you what lets do. Take a piece of your flower bed and we sill develop some tomatoes for you. I have an experiment I want to do. So we wanted to do a little bit of foliar spray, little bit of root treatment. Go down and (we’re doing this by telephone) to a nursery and buy two or three little starters—tomato plants.

He calls me the next morning and says, “Well, went down and we bought all they had. They only had one left.

I said, “What was it? The poorest one left.”

“Well, probably. Does it have any blossoms on it?

Yeah.

“Does it have any tomatoes on it?

Yeah, one. I said, “Okay. What I want you to do now is I want you to plant it, and there is something I’ve already sent to you at the beginning of our conversation. I want you to mist a little bit of it on the foliage, and pour the rest of the little mixture around the roots. First of all, pick the blossoms off. Take that one tomato off. My wife said that we bought this and we’re going to have at least one tomato. That’s okay.

Now, this plant has a center and two branches. And it was the scabby left over. He says, “I think I better go down and buy some more.”

I said, “No, let’s do the experiment and see if we can’t give you all the tomatoes you want for this year.

So he said, “I don’t understand this pick all the blossoms off.” And I said, “You need to pick them off.” He said, “Why?”

I said, “You need to start thinking like a tomato.” It doesn’t go over with them at times. We may have been called names when we were kids, but tomato head ain’t gonna cut it. So what he did, he started picking them. Two or three weeks he picked them off. And he said, “Bill, I’m getting tired of this. This isn’t productive, and besides, the middle stem the one that had the tomato has died. I only have two shoots left.”

I said, “Yeah, and how high is it?”

He said, “Well, it’s almost up to my shoulders, and I want tomatoes to grow.”

An I said, “No. we’re doing an experiment, remember? You have to hang in there with me for another week or two.”

Well, it’s kind of an interesting thing then that developed, because he called and pleaded with me that he needed to get some tomatoes. I said, “okay. What’s the problem?”

“I’m on a ladder now picking blossoms.”

I said, “Well, okay. It’s time. Now let’s stress it.” Now, thinking like a tomato. What does a tomato want to do? A tomato wants to reproduce. That’s all it wants to do. But so is that true for all of your plants or animals, sometimes people. But the problem is we go to the store to buy this little tomato plant and you know what we do? We want to pick the best two or three, so we get the one with all the blossoms or two or three tomatoes. Woah, that’s the worst one. You know why? Because a computer already went off when they were thinking like a tomato and they said, this is going to be a very bad year. We’ve got to survive, and we’ve got to hustle or we’re not going to be here. This little box is confining. I don’t have the proper food in here anyway, so what I’m going to do is quickly go to seed, do my responsibility and get out of here. It’s over.

So, what ends up happening is we’re stifling it. I told my brother, “We’re going to con this tomato plant. Give it everything it wants and make it think this is going to be the greatest year in history for tomatoes. What’s going to happen is what you see. We ended up with a plant. Now this is a 9-foot fence and this is one tomato plant. The goofy one I told you about. This is my brother over here trying to stand on a ladder which he had to do to pick his tomatoes later.

Nine foot fence—I said “tie it up to the fence.” He has props under it. He has everything going along, and that’s 14 feet wide. You pick the stems up above the 9 feet. It’s 12 feet tall. This is what was frustrating him.

He says, “When are we going to pull the switch on the computer and tell it it’s time to go on.

I said, “today is the day.” Now what I want you to do is stop watering it. Stuff it. And it’ll say, woah, I’m not going to stock anymore. I’ve got to get serious. I just got a wake up call and I don’t have a seed being produced yet. At that point the blossoms came on incredibly and the fruit set. As of December 1 (and you have to remember he’s in San Diego. It’s not like out here where we would have frost.). 709 tomatoes on that puny little plant, but it’s thinking like a tomato.

I can give you a clue. If you are in a frost area, and you want—you’re going to think like a tomato and you say, it’s going to think like a frost and some of my tomatoes are this size and some of my tomatoes are like this. Stuff it again. Stop watering it and let it go and it will say woah, everything we have must turn red. The birds have to pick them up, carry them where they will. We’re going to reproduce, and it will be the greatest year of our life.

So that’s where it ends up. Well, he complained because he was picking 40-42 tomatoes in a day. He said, “I didn’t know what I had to start with and they were Romas, but I’m getting them the size of a great big lemon. So I said, “Well, give them to your neighbors.”

He said, “No, I want to pull the thing up.” I said, “No, just give them to your neighbors” He said, “Bill, they don’t even want to see me coming anymore. Seven hundred nine. We’ve made every kind of Italian sauce. We’ve made everything we can think of. My daughter is sick of eating them sliced. I don’t want to do that again.

I have not talked to him as to whether we’re going to do two or three plants next year. I don’t know if he’s into selling organic tomatoes. But the situation is kind of a fun one in that we don’t have to be told by anybody that organic growing won’t work. It does work, but you have to start thinking like a tomato or whatever else it is that you want. And as you begin to sense what their goal is you can more into that. What we have to do is remove the stress as best we can, keep the electric energy up and tomorrow we’ll talk exactly how those little microbes work because they are incredible little factories, and I challenge you this.

How many of you ever owned a franchise for a McDonald’s? I don’t even know when they started. I wish I would have, but I didn’t inherit a thing, so that wasn’t one of them.

But what if you would have bought one 35 years ago? You had one of the first 10 franchises. Would that have been fun? But what if I told you that with that franchise there are five of us that have a secret and we can make one billion of them between today and tomorrow at this time.

You’d say, “I want in on it.” I mean we’ll blow the stock market, you know? We can do that agriculturally. Please remember that the humus in the soil is mandatory. It is the food—the carbon source that feeds microbial life. Topsoil is made by micro and macro organisms. What they eat, how fast they multiply, and how well they poop.

Thanks for your time.