Soil Fertility: Its Climactic Pattern

The soil and nutrition as related to athletic prowess, the price of beef, and incidence of certain diseases and many other important truths are revealed in this the second installment of the first of two lectures delivered during the 1950 Founder’s Week observance at the Kirksville College of Osteopathy and Surgery by Dr. William A. Albrecht, Chairman of the Department of Soils at the Missouri University College of Agriculture and internationally recognized authority on soils and their relation to economics, nutrition and health. The second of Dr. Albrecht’s lectures will appear in an early issue of the Journal of Osteopathy.

Our North and South are divided much in terms of soil conditions as the East and the West. So that one can realize that as we have more rainfall starting with none of it in Western United States and coming East there is an increase in the soil fertility until we reach the midcontinent. On going farther East, there is a decrease of it. However in that area we still have the clay content of the soil going upwards. The soil also shows increase in the saturation capacity in the northeastern area. But more rain removes the nutrients from that saturation raparity. The exchangeable essentials for plants go down. The acidity of the soil begins to come in beyond about 2.5 inches of annual rainfall. In the United States at 25 and 30 inches of precipitation we have the highest point of soil construction with a minimum of destruction. More climatic soil destruction comes in as one goes further East.

Viewed as a simple process in diagrammatic form, we start with the rock and build soils with more rainfall; we build more clay in the soil until about 30 inches of rainfall. With more annual rainfall we start washing nutrients off that clay. As a consequence soil acidity comes into the soil. More weathering of the rock to make soil up to a certain limit is good. But more weathering beyond that is bad. It merely washes the fertility out and we don’t have the producing power for protein though we might have the producing power for wood or carbohydrates.

If we superimpose that diagrammatic concept on the soil map, you have the climatic pattern of the soil development and all that depends on the soil. The corn belt is part of it. In the middle of the United States there are the deep, black soils toward which our forefathers were moving. Coming Westward to that deeper soil built American independence. Our Westward movement, however, is overshooting that point now to the extent of losing some of our independence. We are asking the question whether democracy will survive. Unfortunately time prohibits elucidation of that philosophy. But it is well to realize that as long as we could come West and find food, security we could remain independent. We were not compelled to live with our social troubles. Democracy was built on the fact that each individual controlled enough of the resources he needed to let him feel independent rather than constantly be dependent on, and thereby subject to, someone else.

The pattern of the virgin vegetation, wildlife, domestic animals, our crops and ourselves in the United States as dependent on the soil, the great resource which feeds all of us, is more significant than we are bent to believe. According to the high degree of soil weathering you can see why there are forests in the eastern United States. In terms of rocks as undeveloped soil you can see why the coniferous forests are in the Western mountains. The pines are in the Southeast. The spruce forests are in the north and in the high mountains. That’s where either Nature hasn’t made soil yet, like in the Rocky Mountains, or where the soil was washed out so badly that there is little or nothing of nutrients left. Wood is all that will grow under deficient soil fertility. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, air, water, sunshine fabricated into nothing more than wood represent the soil’s productivity. Those and other elements are not synthesized into proteins that can reproduce themselves. Instead they are synthesized possibly into the starches that can serve to hang fat on an old animal if you can produce and reproduce the animal somewhere else. It is only in the mid-continent where we have the grass agriculture.

Much has been made about grass and grass agriculture. But what, after all, is grass? Grass is a crop that can stop growing in the summer when the dry spell demands it and then pick up growth again when the rain comes. Trees can’t do that. But what is more significant, grass is on a soil which is not washed out as a result of the low rainfall in total connected with the dry spells. It is that extra fertility left in the low rainfall soil that makes the grass nutritious. It is not the variety or the pedigree of the grass. Just at this moment we are on the verge of national propaganda about a grass agriculture. That propaganda would have us move grass from out of the West and put it over the East. It would do nothing about feeding the grass transplanted to the East on the same soil fertility level that it originally fed on in the West.

It was the fertility of the soil and not the variety of the grass that made the buffalo. The buffalo come only a limited distance toward the East. Where did he survive? He survived and was winter meat for the Indians in Kentucky where they have the fast horses and the fine women today. These buffaloes were also in some of the valleys of Pennsylvania. They were in the same valleys where today the German farmers, farming so well, are located. The buffalo also stayed out West where today we grow the “hard” high-protein wheat and the Hereford cattle. Is it a nonsense matter that the buffalo voted with the Hereford cattle or that the Hereford cattle voted with the buffalo? Is it mere coincidence that the race horses of Kentucky or that the best farmers of Pennsylvania vote with the buffalo for a certain soil area? We don’t think it is.

There is the basic soil fertility by which the buffalo could survive and reproduce. There is the basic soil fertility by which we build the stamina and capacity of the race horses. There is likewise the good fertility that makes possible the thrifty German farmers. So when we say “Grass Agriculture” we need to take a look at it as we need to do for other things done in the United States lest they be done under propaganda rather than under the compulsions of the basic facts and sound logic.

If we consider the native vegetation across Kansas, with its 17 inches of rainfall in the West and 37 in the East, it is clear that with more rain in the East there is more crop. But there is also the disappearance of lime from that soil and the disappearance of other fertility in Eastern Kansas also. Shall we wonder why the buffalo did not come East to the tall Kansas grass or big bluestem. He gave his name, not to that tall grass, but to the shorter grass where the hard wheat grows today. Does not that grass soil-buffalo pattern help us see the soil in control?

The map of the protein in the wheat of Kansas of 1940 shows that the concentration of protein varied in that grain from a low of 10 to a high of 18 per cent. That was nicely illustrated in the lower tier of counties where in 1940 there was a gradual increase of wheat protein on going westward. Wheat is harder in the western part of Kansas some folks believe because it is a drier climate and has less rainfall. That is scarcely the correct explanation. It depends on what the soil is and does more than on the rainfall. Protein in Kansas wheat is falling with time because they are mining the nitrogen, the humus and the other essential nutrients out of the soil. In 1949, the protein in the Kansas wheat varied from 9 to 15 percent. Nine years before, it varied from 10 to 19 percent. Such are the reductions, if those data are representative. While the protein was going down Kansas was growing more bushels. But it doesn’t take much soil fertility to pile up starch and to make many bushels. It takes soil fertility, however, in balanced and ample supplies to make protein in the wheat.

This difference in crop quality according to soil development in Kansas may well be a pattern for more extensive areas. If we take the chemical composition of the crops in the western United States, or if we start with them grown on those soils which are only slightly developed in the West and analyze them for their potash, their lime and their phosphorous, the percentages of these added together amount to roughly five percent. As we come eastward to the mid-continent where the soils are more developed under more rainfall to be more washed out, the total of these three elements drops to nearly four percent. Then if the same is done for crops in the East and in the South, the total amounts of 2 percent. Accordingly as the soil fertility is being weathered or washed out, we are making crops that are made out of air, water and sunshine and less out of the fertility of the soil. Now by virtue of that declining fertility, whether by different soils or with time in the same soil, we are therefore substituting carbohydrate delivery in our crops for the protein and nutritional values that should be in them.

Crop substitutions and crop juggling are no substitution lor soil fertility. But when we can’t grow red clover we search the world over in the attempt to find a substitute. Nature does what might appear to be the same thing in the way of substitutions. She could grow grass as we would call it by pedigree or variety in the West. She couldn’t grow that grass in the East. She found a substitute but that substitute was trees which make only wood. In addition, she didn’t attempt to grow very many animals in pine or other coniferous forests. It is only in the hard-wood forests that you find some squirrels. You don’t find squirrels in a coniferous forest. Even a squirrel knows that one will not find any nuts there unless some hunter should be loud in there. We are concerned that you see the fertility in the soil as the determiner of the kind of life that is anywhere, or in the ecological pattern in general. Because we have technologies to bring foods, feeds, different plants and different animals from one place to another, this covers and blots out the picture too commonly.

If we make a map of the beef cattle of the United States then the bell cow, which is mainly protein, finds herself in greatest numbers West of the Mississippi River on the soils that still contain ample fertility. They are under only moderate rainfalls and not under high rainfalls and where the fertility is washed out. It is nothing unusual that the beef cows are in the same region where we had last year’s champion basketball teams. It was Baylor University that had the college team champions in Texas, Oklahoma had the University champions, and the Phillips Oilers of Bartlesville, Oklahoma were the professional champions. If you will look at your all-American football selections and find where they came from, is it a coincidence that they come from the same region as the beef cows come from with their protein-producing services? Growing basketball champions is a nutritional problem much as is the growing of beel. Champions are not the rule and T-bone steaks are high priced because we don’t realize that only the more fertile soil produces beef. Beef steaks are high priced because the fertility of the soil in its synthetic capacities to build up the basic essentials that can be made into protein is slipping out from under us.

If as dealers in cattle we merely want to hang on fat, or want the pig which is an animal that we must nourish for only six months before we can escape the responsibilities of good feeding by passing it to the butcher, then we can operate East of the Mississippi River. There we have carbohydrate aplenty. But with feeds grown there we are even having trouble keeping the hog living long enough with the help of protein supplements to hang on the fat. We are even marketing them with less fat than we once did. We say the housewife doesn’t like the fat. It would be more correct to say that we can’t keep them living long enough to take the risk. Such are the problems because we are not nutritionists informed enough to know that the soil has a part in the ecological pattern of even our domestic animals.

We have tried to give you this picture hastily because it will be helpful for you to realize that you can go anywhere in the world and find that this pattern stands out if you can apply these basic principles of soil production in terms of the rock and the climatic forces. The nutrition of man as the two-legged animal is no different in fundamentals than the nutrition of the four-legged ones. Unfortunately for us, however, the four legged animal has nutritionally helpful instincts to guide it. Man seemingly has thrown these instincts away which once guided him in feeding himself well. Unfortunately he hasn’t developed enough of a knowledge and understanding of nutrition to make his good judgment an equivalent of the animal instinct. Consequently, he has put himself into regions wherein the deficiencies of the soil are severe enough to undermine his stamina, and particularly when by technology he has reduced his body’s struggle requiring and developing stamina. And so he can live on limping along in terms of his legs. He can limp along in terms of his hands. Seemingly he is limping along in terms of some of his mental capacities. Undergirded by so many technologies, he apparently doesn’t know how weak he is.

Man has fought the microbes–and unfortunately so in our opinion–as enemies of his health. He has fought them long enough to convince us that the microbe is not the cause of much that is considered disease. Degeneration of his own body through failure of proper nourishment is really the problem which we ought to approach now that degenerative diseases more than those with microbes as symptoms are killing us off. Perhaps I would not be entirely out of place to predict for the 20th century that it will probably be the time when, in terms of better understanding of ourselves and our health problems, we shall emphasize nutrition. In the 17th century, we studied anatomy. In the 18th, we learned about physiology. In the 19th, we investigated bacteriology. Now probably we can piece all those sciences together until the 20th century will emphasize the fundamental knowledge on how to feed ourselves, so that we shall not degenerate, even in the absence of microbes as our enemies. As we cease to fight the microbes and turn to nutrition there is hope that we shall eventually come to understand how to feed ourselves. The climatic pattern of the soil fertility considered in a large way will give us suggestions by which we can see these seemingly subtle forces at work. As we fill out in the details of that pattern we shall get still other suggestions by which we can very probably nourish ourselves in reality from the ground up.