i am reading philip callahan's brilliant book about healing the soil called "paramagnetism..."

i am posting my own paraphrased version of bits and pieces of it for my benefit and the benefit of others....

most modern day farmers use fertlizer that is NPK based, n for nitrogen, p for phosphorous, and k for potassium. the first person to suggest this would be a good idea was a german chemist named justus von liebig. he arrived at this conclusion when he analyzed the ash of grain kernels and found them to be mostly comprised of those three elements. he concluded that those were the three elements being leached from the soil by plants, and thus those were the elements that needed to be replaced. he published his findings and several corporations began manufacturing NPK based fertilizer.

HOEWEVER!!!! von leibig had made a critical mistake!! he forgot to measure the ash of the discarded wheat stalk! had he done that he would have discovered that it was comprised also of magnesium, calcium, and many many other elements.

this critical error has lead to decades and decades of our crops leaching out a whole host of minerals from the soil, and farmers only replacing three of them. this creates imbalance, it alters ph, it destroys the environment necessary for micro organisms to thrive, it is sickens and kills the living soil.

and most importantly it creates crops that are severely mineral and nutrient deficient. this in turn leads to all kinds of sickness and disease that doctors never relate to poor nutrition.

but callahan proposes a remedy, more on that later.