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Hungry Soil from Starving America by Alfred McCann
(Plant Your Dream!)
Hungry Soil from Starving America by Alfred McCann by YourEnchantedGardener .....
Hungry Soil from Starving America by Alfred McCann. 1916. "We need not worry about over-population. We need not worry about bread famine. We need only worry about our failure to put our 10,000 little red school houses at the country cross-roads to a good use. We need only worry about the empty "isms" of our colleges and universities. We need only worry about continuous ignorance, denatured soil and denatured food." --from "Starving America" 1916 by Alfred M. McCann.
Date: 12/17/2018 7:31:46 PM ( 6 y ago)
INTRODUCTION
On my first ride in the vehicle of Dr. Bernard Jensen, one on one, following a lecture he gave at his Hidden Valley Health Ranch, he told me about one of his heroes, Alfred McCann. McCann was a muckraker who had great influence in his life.
Dr. Bernard Jensen asked me to follow in the footsteps of Alfred Watterson McCann( 1879-1931).
Today is December 18, 2018. I was working on correction technical issues on my Plant Your Dream website.
I am able to open some of the Pages. One is here.
http://plantyourdream.net/prophesies-and-poetry/alfred-w-mccann-the-science-of-eating-said/
CHAPTER XXV.
THE HUNGRY SOIL.
https://archive.org/stream/cu31924003711433/cu31924003711433_djvu.txt
The Nile floods raised grain for the Egyptians in
such abundance that the land of Egypt became the
"granary of the nation." Along the valley of the
Nile the staff of life sprang up out of the thin film
of mineral silt and clay which the swollen river laid
at the feet of the Egyptians. The Nile performed
a function, the significance of which was not under-
stood, but the results of which were remarkable.
The Egyptian bread was made of sound, vigorous,
undegerminated, undemineralized grain and the
soundness of the grain passed into the bodies of the
men who fed upon it.
When the Nile annually overflowed the land of
Egypt, it did not bring with it unnatural chemical
fertilizer or the putrefactions of manure. The Nile
flood brought from the hills into the valleys tons of
mineral rock in dust-like particles or held in solution
by the waters, which replaced in the soil the vitaliz-
ing mineral elements which the vegetation of the
preceding year had taken from it. With the unlock-
ing of the flood gates of the Nile the bread problem
of all ages should have been solved, and as if to
emphasize the meaning of stone in the destiny of
man, the Egyptians piled stone upon stone in pyra-
mids that will not die.
The Sphinx is no longer silent. She tells the
weaklings of the twentieth century that back there
in the darkness of humanity's cradle lies the secret
202 STARVING AMERICA
that will make men free and strong and mighty — the
secret of stone. The certainty of honest bread and
plenty of it means more to the people who live on
the surface of this planet than poet or philosopher
has ever taught. Honest bread grown from lava
rock, means for the children of men, time, inclina-
tion and power through which to express the almost
infinite potentialities of the human family. Let us
visit our quarries of volcanic stone and our beds of
volcanic mud so that we may grasp the meaning they
have for the feeble nations of the earth.
In its precious freight of fertilizing rock the
Nile flood poured lavish treasures upon the people
of Egypt which might have taught humanity a les-
son that would have prevented the bread famines
of Ireland, India, Russia and China. There can be
no funeral pyres by the roadside or on .the outskirts
of the camp, the starved bodies of men will not be
burned to the god of ignorance, the vulture will no
longer hover over human carrion labeled "offered to
lifeless bread and too little of it," when the lesson
of the Nile is learned.
Somebody has said that in England two million
people are hungry all the time and that slowly but
surely the fibre of the nation is eaten into by a sub-
tle and insidious starvation. Another has said that
England with her people struggling for bread can-
not get sufl[icient young men for her armies physical-
ly able to stand the rigors of five years' service in
her tropical possessions.
The hunger of the soil for mineral rock was not
known in the valley of the Nile, and the pyramids
tell us that the hunger of men for honest bread free
from the pollutions of the stable will not be known
in the valley of twentieth century enlightenment.
THE HUNGRY SOIL 208
It has been noted that in volcanic soil and on
mountainous lands man harvests wonderful crops.
Blindly turning his back upon these phenomena, he
takes the by-products of the slaughter house and
the dung of the pig pen in the form of ammonia and
phosphate fertilizers, and with such so-called plant
food, he rots and sours and pollutes the earth, in-
oculating the roots of his plants with the fountains
of putrefaction. The vigorous plant for a while
may resist disease just as the vigorous man for a
while may resist typhoid, but soil overfed on decom-
posing nitrogenous compounds, uric acid, etc., and
underfed on the mineral food which misguided
superstition has falsely believed to be abundantly
present in all earth, inevitably produces physiolog-
ical discord in vegetable life. The ignorant farmer,
hidebound by the traditions of his father and in-
spired by the desperate teachings of a misguided
science, looks up into the diseased leaves instead of
down at the starved roots, and believes that by
spraying his feeble plants with germicides and fancy
serums, he can kill blight and scale and fungi and
cut worms and weevils and the other morbid growths
and parasites which deprave and destroy the fruits
of the earth.
Along the foothills of Maine and in all land con-
tiguous to volcanic formation where the rains carry
the digested or broken mineral stone to the soil,
nature produces crops so lusty and vigorous that
they resist plant-sickness and men fed on the unre-
fined or unjuggled crops of such soil resist body-
sickness. Mineral rock of volcanic origin abounds
all over the earth, rich in iron, calcium, magnesium,
potassium, phosphorus, silica, manganese. The
rock formations of Washington, Oregon, Colorado
and Maine emphasize the secret of the Nile
204 STARVING AMERICA
Why is manure fertilizer impossible on an ex-
tended basis ? For the reason that no farmer is able
to grow enough forage on poor land to feed enough
stock to make enough manure to make that poor
land rich. Any farmer, who on any farm in the
United States can produce enough feed and forage
to feed enough live stock to produce enough manure
to turn that farm from a non-productive stale into
a high state of cultivation, can raise the dead to life.
One farmer may procure enough feed, cotton seed
meal, bran and shorts from another farm to feed
animals which will produce manure to promote in
his particular farm a high state of fertility. What
is taken from one farm may produce temporary re-
sults in another farm, but in the meantime where
are the farms that thus squander their own manure
going to get sufficient soil-food to keep their own
soil from exhaustion? By the unnatural manure
method of fertilizing, one farm may be maintained
in a state of fertility at the expense of ten adjacent
farms which are required to exhaust themselves in
order to lend their strength to the invalid farm.
Dr, C. G. Hopkins says, "In nearly all sections
of the country a farmer can be found here and there
— sometimes one in ten, and sometimes only one in
a hundred — who feeds all the crops that he raises
and also all that he can buy at reasonably low prices
from his neighbors, supplementing all this with pur-
chased bran, shorts, oil meal, cotton seed meal, etc.,
and is thus able to produce sufficient manure to
maintain or even to increase the fertility of his own
farm at the expense of some othel farm."
If keeping live stock with its continuous per-
formance method of eating the fruits of the soil in
order to produce manure for the soil, constituted a
natural method of bringing up bad soil to good
THE HUNGRY SOIL 205
condition, we would have no soil problems; but
when the products of a number of farms are required
to artificially increase the fertility of one farm,
where is the nation on an extended basis to get the
manure necessary to bring back to life all the farms
that exhaust themselves in an effort to help their
feeble neighbor? Is he not foolish, who in order to
strengthen one piece of land, is obliged to sap the
strength of another? By such "farm-foolosophy" an
endless chain of degeneracy is maintained not only
at the expense of the soil health but also at the ex-
pense of the public health; The farmer must learn
that in sickening the soil with manure and the para-
sites that flourish in corruption, he is contributing to
the process of decay which is now eating at the
heart of man.
The Bureau of Soils, United States Department
of Agriculture, has done work for the nation of suffi-
cient importance to send us back to the pyramids for
wisdom. The politicians have not seen to it that
the lessons have been applied.
Why should we talk of over-population or of in-
sufficient food when we look at Japan, Germany,
Italy, France and Spain ? Japan, including the island
of Formosa, embraces less than 150,000 square miles.
In 1910 that little stretch of land supported
over 51,000,000 people or 350 to the square mile.
The United States with an area of more than 3,-
600,000 square miles in the same year supported
93,000,000 people or 20 to the square mile. A sig-
nificant ratio of 17 to 1 !
The State of Texas alone contains 262,290 square
miles and if populated like Japan could support all
the people of the United States leaving all the other
states with their abandoned cities and plains as
birth places for a new race. If the United States
206 STARVING AMERICA
were populated as thickly as Japan she could to-day
support 1,265,789,400 people.
Why go to Japan for a contrast?
Germany with an area of a little more than two
hundred thousand square miles supports 64,000,000
people, an average of 305 to the square mile. Italy
with an area of 110,000 square miles supports a
population of 33,500,000 an average of 304 to the
square mile, France supports an average of 188 to
the square mile; Portugal an average of 155 to the
square mile.
Yet in the United States com is dear because
producing but 26 bushels to the acre there is not
enough to go round. In Germany with her fertilizer
of lava rock the farmer who does not produce 50
bushels per acre is ashamed.
We need not worry about over-population. We
need not worry about bread famine. We need only
worry about our failure to put our 10,000 little red
school houses at the country cross-roads to a good
use. We need only worry about the empty "isms"
of our colleges and universities. We need only
worry about continuous ignorance, denatured soil
and denatured food.
The book is also available from
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Starving-America-Classic-Reprint-Watterson/dp/1331687764
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