Mark Sircus
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 Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado
We are not getting the minerals we need because modem agricultural methods, including widespread use ofNPK fertilizer, over farming, loss of protective ground cover and trees, and lack of humus have made soils vulnerable to erosion. The result is a reduced nutrient content of crops.
N P K fertilizer is highly acidic. It disrupts the pH (acid/alkaline) balance of the soil, as does acid rain. Acid conditions destroy soil microorganisms whose job it is to transmute soil minerals into a form that is usable by plants. |
James Howard Kunstler
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 American fertilizer operations closed down or moved overseas. Future prospects range from a best case of much higher prices for fertilizers to a worst case of desperate shortages of methane-derived fertilizer. Global warming can only make matters worse.
Warmer conditions are favorable for the proliferation of insect pests and plant diseases. Longer growing seasons will enable insects such as grasshoppers to complete a greater number of reproductive cycles during the spring, summer, and autumn. Larvae of other bugs will winter over more comfortably. |
Mark Sircus
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| N P K fertilizer is highly acidic. It disrupts the pH (acid/alkaline) balance of the soil, as does acid rain. Acid conditions destroy soil microorganisms whose job it is to transmute soil minerals into a form that is usable by plants. In the absence of these microbes, these minerals become locked up, unavailable to the plant.
Stimulated by the N P K fertilizer, the plant grows, but is deficient in vital trace minerals. In the absence of trace minerals, plants take up heavy metals (such as aluminum, mercury and lead) from the soil. |
Henry Hobhouse
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 But the whole of this fibrous material could be used as fuel without destroying any of its value as a fertilizer, for which purpose the ash could then be used.
Of the remaining 550 pounds, 150 pounds would produce cottonseed oil, both edible and inedible, cooking fat, soap, miner's lamp oil, and even some salad oil; 400 pounds would be cottonseed meal, or "cotton cake," for use as an animal feedstuff or fertilizer. It contained 45 percent crude protein, or nearly 7 percent nitrogen, a very valuable balancer for grain in cattle fattening, or a fine, easily used organic fertilizer. |
James Howard Kunstler
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| You can't make fertilizer or pesticides out of wind power alone. Producing hydrogen by electrolysis from nuclear power and then converting that hydrogen into chemical fertilizers and pesticides would be ridiculously expensive, and even under the best circumstances it would take at least a decade to build a new generation of nuclear power plants dedicated to the task at the necessary scale. We will just have to do farming differently, on a smaller scale, locally, the hard way. |
Andreas Moritz
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 Due to its high nitrogen content, allantoin is used as fertilizer; it leads to kidney and bladder stones in humans.
• Gentamicin, a broad spectrum antibiotic, is added to each embryonated chicken egg to inhibit the growth of bacteria (vaccine is grown in chicken eggs).
• Formaldehyde (carcinogenic), used as a preservative and to inactivate the virus.
• The toxic chemicals, tri butylphosphate and Polysorbate 80, U.S.P.
• Resin, to eliminate "substantial portions" of tri butylphosphate and Polysorbate 80
• Thimerosal, a mercury derivative, to preserve the vaccine cocktail. |
Paul D. Blanc, M.D.
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 This key discovery later freed Germany from dependence on the importation of ammonia feedstock, which was the lifeblood of both domestic fertilizer and munitions manufacture.
Fritz Haber came to chlorine as an applied chemist, not as a technician narrowly focused on the problem of bleaching. With the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, Haber led a huge team of the institute's scientists working for the war effort. At the peak of the project he spearheaded, an estimated staff of two thousand was devoted to it. |
Henry Hobhouse
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| Of the remaining 550 pounds, 150 pounds would produce cottonseed oil, both edible and inedible, cooking fat, soap, miner's lamp oil, and even some salad oil; 400 pounds would be cottonseed meal, or "cotton cake," for use as an animal feedstuff or fertilizer. It contained 45 percent crude protein, or nearly 7 percent nitrogen, a very valuable balancer for grain in cattle fattening, or a fine, easily used organic fertilizer.
The ttade in these tesidues did not develop until the 1870s, aftet which in some years the by-products were worth more than the cotton itself.
40. |
Brigitte Mars, A.H.G.
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 The plant also makes a wonderful garden fertilizer.
In magical traditions, bladder wrack is associated with psychic ability, protection, and wealth. |
Michael Pollan
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 In the years immediately after the war, industrial agriculture (which benefited from the peacetime conversion of munitions to chemical fertilizer and nerve gas research to pesticides) also consolidated its position; there would soon be no other kind. Weston Price and his fellow students of the Western diseases were largely forgotten. No one was much interested in looking back or celebrating the wisdom of primitive groups that were themselves quickly disappearing or being assimilated; even the Aborigines were moving to the city. |
| In the wake of Liebig's identification of the big three macronutrients that plants need to grow—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK)—and Fritz Haber's invention of a method for synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer from fossil fuels, agricultural soils began receiving large doses of the big three but little else. |
Bottom Line Health
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| The US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) current definition states that organic foods are those plants produced without the use of pesticides, sewage sludge (for fertilization) or synthetic fertilizer. . .or those animals raised without hormones or antibiotics.
To read the complete definition, go to the USDA's Web site at www.ams.usda.gov/nop/NOP/ standards, html.
Organic foods, including produce, meat, milk and other dairy products, typically cost more than nonorganic varieties. |
Joerg Gruenwald, Ph.D.
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 The enclosed rainwater and insects form a mass, which probably acts as a fertilizer and has a strong odor.
Habitat: The plant is indigenous to the U.S.
Other Names: Eve's Cups, Fly-catcher, Fly-trap, Huntsman's Cup, Purple Side-saddle Flower, Side-saddle Plant, Water-cup, Smallpox plant
ACTIONS AND PHARMACOLOGY
COMPOUNDS
Piperidine alkaloids: coniine, gamma-conicein (particularly in the trapping fluid of the pitcher leaves)
EFFECTS
The active agents are sarracenia acid, tannin, resin, and the alkaloid sarracenin, which is similar to veratrin. |
Patrick Holford
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 Nitrate levels are high in vegetables grown with nitrate-based fertilizers, as well as in water, owing to fertilizer residues leaching into water sources. Nitrates are also added to some cured meats such as ham, sausages, and bacon. About 70 percent of our intake comes from vegetables grown with artificial fertilizers, 21 percent from water, and 6 percent from meat. Vitamin C may be especially effective against cancers of the digestive tract because of its ability to disarm these carcinogens, as well as its proven immune-boosting properties. |
Michael Pollan
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| From Leaves to Seeds
It's no accident that the small handful of plants we've come to rely on are grains (soy is a legume); these crops are exceptionally efficient at transforming sunlight, fertilizer, air, and water into macronutrients—carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. These macronutrients in turn can be profitably converted into meat, dairy, and processed foods of every description. |
| Because these two plants are among nature's most efficient transformers of sunlight and chemical fertilizer into carbohydrate energy (in the case of corn) and fat and protein (in the case of soy)—if you want to extract the maximum amount of macronutrients from the American farm belt, corn and soy are the crops to plant. (It helps that the government pays farmers to grow corn and soy, subsidizing every bushel they produce. |
Doris J. Rapp, M.D.
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 When used on agriculture, the components in the fertilizer can enter the ground water, the food grown on the polluted ground, and the bodies of humans who touch it. We must ask why toxic fertilizer is exempted from hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal tracking.137'140'141 The fertilizer industry claims the EPA said this waste does not generally pose a threat to human health or the environment. Does the EPA agree? |
Thomson Healthcare, Inc.
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| The enclosed rainwater and insects form a mass, which probably acts as a fertilizer and has a strong odor.
Habitat: The plant is indigenous to the U.S.
Production: Pitcher Plant root and leaves are the root and leaves of Sarracenia purpurea. |
Michael Pollan
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| In this he was not alone: Around the same time, the English agronomist Sir Albert Howard, the philosophical father of the organic farming movement, was also arguing that the industrialization of agriculture—in particular the introduction of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which simplified the chemistry of the soil—would eventually take its toll on our health. Howard urged that we regard "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject. |
Craig Pepin-Donat
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 It is a known hazardous, poisonous, toxic waste by-product of the aluminum, phosphate fertilizer and other industries. This has been known for years, but we passively accept the big, fat lie about the benefits of fluoride, pumped into our water supply and mixed into our dental hygiene products. If fluoridation is such a great idea, why have so many developed countries such as
Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Belgium, Austria and France flatly rejected the concept?15 Smile, America, we're being poisoned with toxic waste in the name of greed. |
James Howard Kunstler
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| Future prospects range from a best case of much higher prices for fertilizers to a worst case of desperate shortages of methane-derived fertilizer. Global warming can only make matters worse.
Warmer conditions are favorable for the proliferation of insect pests and plant diseases. Longer growing seasons will enable insects such as grasshoppers to complete a greater number of reproductive cycles during the spring, summer, and autumn. Larvae of other bugs will winter over more comfortably. Any upset of an established ecologic balance is an invitation to previously unwelcome organisms. |
Devra Davis
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 The committee also tested various parameters in tobacco growing and cigarette production: nicotine content, fertilizer application, artificial substitutes, paper porosity, pesticides and such additives as sugar and cocoa. They tried homogenizing tobacco, removing nitrates and adding nitrates. From all that came more than 100 experimental cigarettes that were tested on mice against two control cigarettes, a standard experimental cigarette and one developed at the University of Kentucky.
The mouse experiments proved nothing the industry didn't already know. |
D. Lindsey Berkson
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 In Gore, Oklahoma, for example, a uranium-processing plant gets rid of low-level radioactive waste by licensing it as a liquid fertilizer that gets sprayed over 9,000 acres of grazing land.
Many industrialized nations regulate fertilizers, but the United States doesn't. There are no laws to prevent wastes from the incineration of medical and municipal wastes and from heavy industries to be mixed with fertilizers. Nearly 30 percent (80 million pounds) of the toxic wastes sent to farm and fertilizer companies come from the steel industry. |
Dr. Abram Hoffer, MD, FRCP (C) and Dr. Harold D. Foster, PhD
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 This additional niacinamide would probably nearly return the daily dietary intake to that experienced centuries ago before the advent of widespread artificial fertilizer use and food processing.
This public health strategy would not be new. During the Second World War, the United States government mandated the enrichment of flour with niacinamide. However, current dietary levels are still too low. Increasing the intake of niacinamide would carry no known risks, since it is not addictive, nor is it a narcotic, euphoriant, or analgesic. |
Mike Adams
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| Fertilizer is made up of three primary nutritional ingredients. When it is spread on lawns, those ingredients are absorbed through the root system of the individual grass plants that make up the lawn where they are put to good use by the grass to enhance its health, vibrancy, and appearance.
Everybody knows this. No one would question this and say, "No, there's no such thing as a link between fertilizer and healthy lawns." Yet when it comes to human health, there are a lot of people that continue to deny the link between nutrition and human wellness. But we'll get to that a little later. |
David R. Montgomery
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 The first commercial fertilizer imported to the United States inaugurated a new era in American agriculture when John Skinner, the editot of the American Farmer, imported two casks of Petuvian guano to Baltimore in 1824. Within two decades, regular shipments began atriving in New York.
Figure 24. Lithograph of mountainous Chincha Islands guano deposit, circa 1868 {American Agriculturist [1868] 27:20).
The guano business boomed. England and the United States together imported a million tons a year by the 1850s. |
| Not only was nitrogen necessary for plant growth, but liberal additions of inorganic nitrogen-based fertilizer greatly increased harvests. He saw his work as fundamental to understanding the basis for scientific agriculture. His peers agreed, electing Lawes a fellow of the Royal Society in 1854, and awarding him a royal medal in 1867. By the end of the century, Rothamsted was the model for government-sponsored research stations spreading a new agrochemical gospel.
Now a farmer just had to mix the right chemicals into the dirt, add seeds, and stand back to watch the crops grow. |
Thomson Healthcare, Inc.
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| Vitamins: including among others ascorbic acid (vitamin C, 40-155 mg/100 g)
Nitrates (depending on the fertilizer, 0.3-0.6%)
EFFECTS
No information is available.
INDICATIONS AND USAGE
Unproven Uses: Spinach preparations are used for ailments and complaints of the gastrointestinal tract, to stimulate growth in children, as an appetite stimulant, for fatigue and for supporting convalescence.
PRECAUTIONS AND ADVERSE REACTIONS
General: No health hazards or side effects are known in conjunction with the proper administration of designated therapeutic dosages. |
David R. Montgomery
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| Lawes patented his technique for making superphosphate fertilizer enriched with nitrogen and potassium and set up a factory on the Thames River in 1843. The dramatic effect of Lawes's product on crop yields meant that by the end of the century Britain was producing a million tons of superphosphate a year.
Bankrolled by substantial profits, Lawes split his time between London and Rothamsted, where he used his estate as a grand experiment to investigate how crops drew nutrition from the air, water, and soil. |
| The new practice helped prevent the nitrogen-depletion that had plagued tropical farmers because the sluggish water nurtured nitrogen-fixing algae that functioned as living fertilizer. Rice paddies also provided ideal environments for decomposing and recycling human and animal wastes.
A phenomenally successful adaptation, wetland rice cultivation spread across Asia, catalyzing dramatic population growth in regions ill suited for previous farming practices. Yet even though the new system supported more people, most still lived on the brink of starvation. |
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