One of the most profitable corporations in the world encourages their employees to spend one third of their paid time taking further education. Most professionals (doctors, lawyers, dentists, professors, etc.) proudly display their graduation class picture framed on a wall of their office. The smartest ones never stop learning and take courses regularly to update what they learned at college.

When I attended college half a century ago, farmers were encouraged to use the most modern chemical fertilizers and crop sprays, and pharmaceutical companies were beginning to develop injections that allowed milk cows to continue producing milk for several years without giving birth to another calf. Those same companies were also developing crops and crop sprays that worked together so the spray could kill every weed except the crop it was designed not to kill.

Students and farmers were encouraged to adopt this new technology which saved labour such as doing extra tillage in the field which dried out the soil and used a lot more fuel. Too much tillage also disturbed the worms and other life in the soil that lived at different depths and with different amounts of air and moisture.

These new crop sprays were more cost-effective and saved the farmers money which encouraged fast acceptance of their use.

As years passed, farmers began to notice that more and more weeds were not killed by these new sprays. Natural selection was happening when the occasional weed escaped being killed by the spray. Then the seeds from that tough weed germinated a whole crop of new resistant weeds. Farmers who continued to use a combination of chemical weed control and conventional tillage didn’t observe these new spray resistant weeds. A little cultivation had killed those weeds that were resistant to the spray.

Our class at college in the late 1960s was also told that it was less expensive to dump manure over the hill rather than spending money spreading it, and to buy chemical fertilizer instead.

In the 1960s, chemical fertilizer was only $50/ton. A few years after I graduated from Agricultural College, a class of local farmers were given a practical demonstration about the efficiency of different blends of chemical fertilizers by planting a couple corn seeds in different flower pots and using different amounts and blends of fertilizer. One local farmer asked if he could use manure instead of chemical fertilizer. Everyone thought that this would be a great experiment. Within a few weeks, it became obvious that the corn planted in the pot with manure instead of chemical fertilizer was greener, healthier, and a foot taller. Both the class and the teacher learned that there was something in that manure that could not be replaced by chemical fertilizer.

The Bryson family from Ormstown, Quebec won the competition for Canada’s largest pumpkin (2,006.6 lbs) and it was grown without any chemical fertilizer. Local giant pumpkin growers will also tell you that the biggest pumpkins are all grown organically.

Forty years ago, nutritionists learned that proper nutrition for the bugs in an animal’s digestive system was the key to the most efficient milk production, animal health and growth.

Recently, it was revealed that a healthy bug population in the soil is also the key to the most efficient crop growth. Reduction in chemical fertilizer and chemical sprays not only improves bug life in the soil but also the nutritional value of the crop. The presence of certain weeds is an indication that soils are in need of different elements. The presence of different crop pests is also a sign that the soil is out of balance.

Both veterinarians and medical doctors know that most health problems are related to nutrition. Our soil scientists are telling us that the health of our soil is also determined by how we feed and treat it. Soil is the number one asset for a farmer. Everything that you eat directly or indirectly came from the soil. Let’s demand that it’s looked after by everyone from our lawmakers to the man on the soil.

Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.

gladcrest@gmail.com

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