NITROGEN, THE CARRIER OF AWARENESS
Part 1: Life & life processes
My 40 year love affair with the twin disciplines of biochemistry and farming have me convinced that nitrogen is the carrier of intelligence, the basis of sensitivity and its vehicle in the chemistry of consciousness.
I did not invent this hypothesis, though I predict increasingly we will see it tested along with its corollary, that the human brain is a quantum computer.
A growing understanding of quantum non-locality and entanglement seems to be closing the curtain on an era of institutionalised denial of telepathy, clairvoyance, astral travel and prayer.
At the bottom line, how we get nitrogen in our diet from infancy onward has an enormous influence on the psychic clarity and integrity of our consciousness.
The hypothesis that the nitrogen quality in the food we eat influences the development of our consciousness is a message of empowerment for those seeking enhanced self-development.
Smart nitrogen
While materialists believe we are our bodies, those who chose to explore a higher spiritual reality view their bodies as vehicles for spiritual development.
Both beliefs rest on there being a chemistry and physics of consciousness, sensation and desire.
Truly in nitrogen there is an extremely sensitive, fast-reacting and versatile element at the atomic level that can access memory so that every time it reacts it does so in a pre-determined way.
Nitrogen is the basis for DNA and the amino acid chemistry of our nerves.
It is so sensitive to the potential of sharing electrons that it easily is the cleverest, best informed of all elements. As such it is the ultimate narcissist, triple-bonding with itself to form a gas that is virtually inert.
Biological nitrogen fixation depends on seducing nitrogen away from its self-absorption. This requires nature to work cohesively and intelligently in an extremely fine way.
Despite its efficiency, natural nitrogen fixation requires abundant biological energy - which depends on
‘The good health of a farm depends on the farmers’ mind. The good health of his mind has its dependence and its proof in physical work. The good farmer’s mind and his body - his management and his labour - work together as
photosynthesis, which depends on efficient carbon chemistry.
In sum, nitrogen fixation depends on how well we catch carbon.
Industrial nitrogen fertiliser
Interestingly, industrial nitrogen fixation also relies on carbon compounds, usually methane, as a source of hydrogen, though this is neither efficient nor ecologically friendly.
Moreover, most of this ‘cheap’ nitrogen is applied to soils as urea, and roughly half vaporizes as nitrous oxide. The real rub, however, is that artificial nitrogen fertilisers consume up to 30 times their weight in soil carbon to become biological.
This keeps the carbon level in most of the world’s crop land falling. Prior to the use of artificial nitrogen fertilisers it ranged around three per cent and better, but currently the average is below one per cent.
We must get off the artificial nitrogen treadmill to re-store carbon - and thus life - in our soils.
Building soil carbon
Forests have long proven their capacity for natural nitrogen fixation and carbon capture. The rub is that forests build living carbon onto the land rather than into it as do savannahs and prairies.
When grasses photosynthesise they feed the soil via root exudation with roughly a third of the carbon they take out of the atmosphere.
Grass ecologies develop stable soil biology that fixes nitrogen, elaborates nutrients and builds deep fertility.
Fire, arguably humanity’s most formidable landscape management tool, can return the bulk of a forest’s carbon to the atmosphere; meanwhile firing grass lands only burns off the surface carbon and what was built into the soil via root exudation and manuring remains. Hence the world’s most fertile virgin grasslands - soils such as Africa’s Serengeti, the Asian Steppes and the American Great Plains - were generated by grass and grazing.
intimately as his heart and his lungs. And the capital of a well-farmed farm by definition includes the farmer, mind and body both. Farmer and farm are one thing, an organism.’
- Wendell Berry
Attaining greater clarity
While the above information may surprise or distress some, it should not distract from the social consequences associated with chemical nitrogen fertilisation. Let us not forget the role of nitrogen in consciousness.
How we get nitrogen from our food makes an enormous difference for our consciousness.
Since the widespread application of industrial nitrogen, modern society marinates in a heady stew of instant gratification that more and more is salted with personal ambition, illusions and petty jealousies.
We see this in the rise of fast foods and the loss of intellectual, political and economic integrity. Long term diseases remain intractable even though immediate concerns like trauma are dealt with brilliantly.
Science myopically divorces itself from meaning by failing to place goodness and beauty on par with truth, while more and more is catalogued about less and less.
We race ahead at 200mph with blinders in front of our eyes, merely glimpsing reality at the sides.
Global culture
There is no denying the power and immediacy of our global culture. It is, full tilt, going on; but is far from whole or even wholesome - it is divorced from nature.
Gardeners and growers of all sorts tend to hear one or another version of ‘Why build soil? Are you nuts or something? Why go to all that trouble when you can buy fertiliser? What a waste of time and energy!’
Nevertheless, when nitrogen’s intelligence comes from the living, cohesive web of nature that surrounds, sustains and shares its beauty and humour with us, that is good reason to prefer consuming natural amino acid fed foods from one’s garden, locality and region. The value of food whose protein chemistry derives from biological fixation rather than haste and greed goes beyond mere money.
All through the 20th century when it seemed chemical fertilisers were cheap their stunning results encouraged us to ignore the hidden costs, even when earthworms disappeared along with the food chain that supported them.
Our soils got hard and sticky while nitrates leached away the available silicon, calcium and trace minerals.
Soils fused when wet, shed rain and eroded while we got less for more.
Presently agriculture relies on water soluble fertilisers even though around the world food production is limited to water availability.
Water, along with CO2 and nitrogen, comes from above - but how wise are we in its use?
Between hardening our soils and deepening our creeks we are speeding most of our rainfall away, making flash flooding and erosion a norm.
What follows is drought. The use of salt fertilisers on crop land scalds soil microbes, burns up soil carbon and makes crops watery, thirsty and weak - all of which invites pests and diseases and further draws us into a dangerous dance with poisons.
The results can no longer be ignored; progressive degradation of our best land along with a rise in degenerative disease.
If humanity survives, children will be asking grandparents, ‘Why did people ever put poison on food?’ Our sensible and only choice is to learn to use nature’s free gifts wisely.
Weather, droughts and floods
We have ignored hydrogen’s affinity for carbon. This fundamental attraction is illustrated by the current theory that petroleum hydrocarbons were formed from carbon inclusions within the earth’s mantle that combined with hydrogen and cooked up in fracture zones.
Though weather is hard to predict, it is clear that carbon attracts rainfall, particularly the blanket of living carbon on the earth’s surface.
When rain forests are cleared the loss of carbon coincides with decreased rainfall, and the same is true for agricultural land when it is left bare.
Not too surprisingly, in the last 150 years somewhere around 70 per cent of the world’s topsoils have been lost; and the abuse of artificial nitrogen fertilisers in most of what remains has depleted soil carbon, making rainfall more and more problematic.
About half of the CO2 vented into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution has dissolved into the
oceans and reacted with the calcium or magnesium in seawater to form carbonates which settle to the ocean deeps.
The other half has added to an insulating blanket around the earth that seems to have raised global temperatures.
Large expanses of permafrost in Russia and North America have thawed adding large amounts of methane to the atmosphere, and even larger amounts of methane clathrates lying frozen beneath the ocean may also thaw and surface.
Global warming has meant far more evaporation in the equatorial oceans even though the rise in surface ocean temperature has been slight.
Moreover, the increase in atmospheric moisture and warmth has led to greater expansion of the troposphere near the equator.
Presently there is more moisture in the atmosphere than ever in historical times - unless we count the time of Noah - and it has to fall somewhere.
By felling forests, ploughing surface vegetation over and burning up soil carbon with nitrogen fertilisers we ensure over the same while that more and heavier rains fall in fewer and fewer places.
Thus with deforestation, desertification, mining, urbanization and agricultural abuse we are seeing more of both droughts and floods.
If we want rain to permeate and cling to the soil we need to re-build soil carbon.
Soil life, which opens the soil up and makes it absorbent, is carbon based.
Moreover, if we want to slow down global warming it would be helpful to store more sunlight as soil carbon, especially when this is a fundamental necessity for nitrogen fixation.
Self-sufficiency and getting
nitrogen right
When plants take up nitrogen as chemical salts (e.g. ammonium, urea or nitrate) their chlorophyll is watered down and photosynthesis is impaired, no matter that it makes them look lush and robust.
But if they take up nitrogen as amino acids their chlorophyll is assembled without salt nitrogen interfering. Then their protoplasm is dense and photosynthesis is efficient.
This means that if we want to cool the planet down and store surplus solar energy in the soil’s biological flywheel then nitrogen fertilisers must be used sparingly and wisely to reverse soil carbon depletion and reenliven the intelligence of the soil.
Though we cannot reverse the present situation overnight, we gradually and deliberately must give up nitrogen fertilisers and restore nitrogen fixation in our soils.
This would put the current atmospheric surplus of CO2 and water to intelligent use.
We would build life and complexity back into our soils as well as the food we eat.
The fact that many environmentalists are obsessed with fighting plants that ‘don’t belong’ simply shows how far out of focus social thinking has drifted.
Nature votes for whatever flourishes where potential is going to waste.
Building natural nitrogen fixation into the food chain might well be called ‘getting nitrogen right’.
When we get nitrogen right everything else tends to fall in place.
Wherever we get nature to thrive cohesively and self-sufficiently we engage the interest of nitrogen.
One of the fundamental dictums of environmental self-sufficiency is the biological products removed from a garden, farm or landscape should not exceed 10 per cent of its total biomass production.
The other 90 per cent of what nature produces - for example crop residues - must recycle back into the soil to sustain and enhance its life.
Thus to get nitrogen right we must work toward self-sufficiency.
Tasty nitrogen
Taste a pellet of chemical nitrogen at the fertiliser store and you might be quick to spit it out.
Its flavour will yield insight into why chemical nitrogen shuts down biological nitrogen fixation.
Nitrogen is at its most inspiring whenever things are tasty.
Digestion, which provides the embodiment of intelligence, is an animal activity that makes nitrogen available as freshly digested amino acids.
From protozoa upward, intelligence is linked with smelling, travelling, tasting and digesting the most appealing bits.
In the process unused amino acids are released along with whatever breakdown products of protein chemistry are excreted.
In order to really understand what engages nitrogen we need to understand sensation and desire.
Though they tend to be neglected, taste and smell are fundamental in the evolution of consciousness, which depends on nitrogen quality.
This shows up in such things as the fact that to get nitrogen right it helps to use such savoury inputs as seaweeds and sea minerals.
Some misconceptions
It is not inspiring that scientists of the past century thought of nitrogen fixation as something legumes did, ignoring the fact that legumes were merely hosts for nitrogen fixing microbes.
Strangely, no one seemed to ask why legumes made such beloved hosts. This ignored the fact that legumes draw oxygen into the soil making calcium and other minerals available for nitrogen fixation.
Because they release
four
to
six times as much calcium to the soil biology as is used by their microbial symbiotes to fix nitrogen, legumes give a wonderful boost to nitrogen fixation with whatever crop follows.
Agricultural scientists tended to assume the amount of nitrogen fixed could be measured by assaying a legume’s nodules - if no nodulation occurred no nitrogen was fixed.
Since grasses did not nodulate, grass was treated as though no nitrogen fixation occurred.
However, via root exudation, grasses supplied far more biological carbon to the soil foodweb, and nitrogen fixation required abundant energy.
‘. . . the basis of growing good food is soil fertility, and fertility is not a substance, , it
is a process . . .’
By 1975 soil microbiologists working outside of agriculture had catalogued upwards of 1,000 different microbes that free fix nitrogen in the soil given available calcium and enough energy, and most have nothing to do with nodulation.
Realistically, agricultural schools and researchers were captive to the false doctrine that artificial nitrogen was the energy efficient way to feed the world.
Funded by industry, they taught the form of the nitrogen made no difference, and chemical nitrogen was just as good as biological nitrogen.
It went ignored that nitrogen fertilisers amounted to the waste of nitrogen fixing microbes, and flooding the soil with them poisoned natural fixation. The fact that grasses were a key energy source for the soil foodweb was avoided.
The understanding that many grasses host nitrogen fixing microbes as endophytes living within their leaves and stems was not even on the horizon in agriculture.
This was science at its worst, wearing blinders in the service of industries that supplied artificial nitrogen for virtually every agricultural application as if it was cheap, efficient and wise.
This sold an enormous amount of nitrogen fertilisers, but it also illustrates the dangers of disguising selfinterest as science.
Growing food that provides for raising consciousness requires learning nature’s delicate mechanisms for giving crops the natural nitrogen needed to make things tasty.
This is a challenge, and learning by doing is a practical way to get started.
While alternatives to such soil destructive methods as clean cultivation, mono-cropping, herbicides, pesticides and fungicides are being experimented with, the basis of growing good food is soil fertility, and fertility is not a substance, it is a process.
Recipes for restoring it would be most helpful.
Making vermiwash and
vermicompost
Also known as earthworm leachate, homemade vermiwash is valuable as a food source for microbes that activate soil biology and nutrient reserves.
• Collect old bathtubs or similar tanks. Caulk screens in the drains and plumb on an overhang over a low wall or at a slight slant on blocks so buckets will fit beneath the drains.
• Fill with a balanced mix of manures, green/soft and shredded brown/tough materials including 10 per cent clay-loam soil, rock powders and grit. Earthworms have gizzards instead of teeth and they need grit to grind their food.
• Use materials from one’s own property or locality to help nature work in a cohesive, intelligent way in regard to the nitrogen in the environment. Home gardeners may shred their leaves and garden wastes along with lawn clippings and kitchen scraps, judiciously seasoning the mix with clay, rock powders, bone meal, ashes, kelp and sea minerals.
• Use local weeds to meet specific needs for minerals such as sulphur, zinc, phosphorous, copper, etcetera.
• For microbes that make your soil thrive, use your soil.
• To emphasize available nutrients use more manure and less clay or rock powder. This favours bacteria, protozoa and the small, red earthworms found in manure piles, making the vermiwash rich in small molecule compounds
• To emphasize insoluble but gradually available nutrients use more woody/siliceous material such as shredded bark for a humus rich actinomycete/mycorrhizal leachate. Also increase the proportion of clay, rock phosphate and siliceous rock powders such as crushed basalt or granite.
• A wooden cover will attract life force and shed rain.
• Water with a couple litres of water every other day.
• Finished material, including earthworms, can be used for things like potting plants or kicking off new tanks.
• Ideally biodynamic soil activator should be included. (See www.biodynamic.net.au)
Fulvic and humic acids
Fulvic and humic are names based on molecular size that are used to categorize complex organic acids.
Usually these are formed when organic materials like cellulose are broken down into simple sugars and built back up again by microbial activity.
These terms are also applied to extracts made from organic deposits such as peat, leonardite or soft brown coal.
Fulvic acids are relatively small carbon molecule complexes that bacteria can absorb along with related amino acids and chelated minerals.
Their larger humic cousins are higher molecular weight compounds sity while making plants tastier.
Taste, smell and related digestive/ nutritive processes play a central role in engaging nitrogen.
This recipe ensures strong cell walls and transport vessels making plants immune to diseases and insects, and - lest we forget - it improves photosynthesis which translates into flavour.
Taste is the key indicator of the nitrogen cycle’s complexity and wholesomeness, which means the more you that complex with clay and are only accessible to soil fungi.
Symbiotic mycorrhizae and actinomycetes store their surplus amino acids and minerals in such stable, high molecular weight carbon compounds because they aren’t available to most bacteria.
These humic stores do not reveal their contents on soluble soil tests, and this is nature’s wisdom at work.
Most growers are taught that nutrients must be soluble, but nature knows better.
These microbes are storing future food supplies as insoluble but available nutrients like bees store honey in the hive. Ideally nutrients should be insoluble but available - otherwise they tend to get lost with the result that biological nitrogen fixation is impaired.
Potassium silicate watering
solution
The most common deficiency seen in both agriculture and human nutrition is silicon.
Its deficiency makes crops vulnerable to weeds, diseases and pests and this silicon deficiency often results from soil mismanagement, particularly artificial nitrogen fertilisation.
That makes potassium silicate watering solution nearly universal in importance.
It makes plants efficient and resilient, ensuring strong cell walls, transport vessels and connective tissues.
It also makes photosynthesis more efficient, assuring protoplasmic den- use this formula on your crops and recycle their residues as compost or vermiwash the better you can taste how you engage nitrogen.
Used with vermiwash, potassium silicate can be a mainstay in most fertility programs whether for home gardens, market gardens, orchards, vineyards, flowers or herb production.
It would even make lawns more resilient to weather, insects and diseases while making them smell cleaner and have more shine.
A recipe
• Burn a large quantity of high silica plant matter and collect the ash. Any silica rich plant material will do. Rice hulls (not bran) are excellent and even bamboo ash works. Mill ash from burning sugar cane bagasse is available at some sugar mills at industrial prices and is rich in both potassium and silicon. If silica rich ash is hard to obtain it may help to include half a kilo or so of diatomaceous earth.
• In a 20 litre pot, simmer 2.2 kg of high silica ash with half a cup of solubor or boric acid in 15 litres of water while stirring for 30 minutes. Measure boron with care as too much can burn seedlings and young plants.
• Carefully cool, strain and filter the solution [caustic].
• While still warm, add a tablespoon of biodynamic horn clay and stir homoeopathically for 20 minutes.
• When cool, combine with vermiwash at a rate of one cup potassium silicate per quart vermiwash. Dilute this concentrate at least half and half with water (more is better) and apply to the garden, orchard soil as needed.
• This formula can be overdone, so limit applications of combined solution to once every two weeks, or at most once a week with most garden vegetables.
• Residual ash should be recycled via compost/vermiwash production, incorporated into solid fertilisers such as humified compost or scattered on grain, pasture or hay land.
or vineyard
Application
Generally Potassium Silicate Watering Solution (with added boron) should be watered in.
If using foliars, keep in mind that boron must get to the roots and be taken up into the transport system to produce sap pressure.
Boron has long been poorly understood while silicon has mostly been ignored despite it being the basis of nutrient transport.
Use boron along with potassium silicate and vermiwash as a mainstay in almost any fertility program.
Keep in mind these ingredients are all naturally occurring except solubor or boric acid, which are permissible in organic certification programs where boron deficiency is documented.
Combine potassium silicate with vermiwash at a rate of 250mls of potassium silicate per litre of vermiwash. Dilute this concentrate at least half and half with water (more dilute is better) and apply as needed.
Boron and silicon usually enter plants via actinomycetes and mycorrhizal fungi, which are delicate and easily damaged by the usual rates of salty NPK fertilisers.
Vermiwash and Potassium Silicate Watering Solution feed these microbial symbiotes, increasing their nutrient uptake, especially boron, silicon, calcium, amino acid nitrogen and zinc.
An Australian recipe uses the dried foliage of Australian She-oaks or bulloaks, while in North America and Europe horsetail is often preferred. In either case one burns a large quantity of high silica plant matter to ash and collects the ash.
The ash of any silica rich plant material will do, for example, rice hulls (not the bran) are brilliant and even bamboo ash will do. Mill ash from burning sugar cane bagasse is available at some sugar mills in vast bulk at industrial prices and is rich in both potassium and silica. An industrial version (not organically certified) made from high purity potassium silicate powder was researched by the USDA and found to be the most effective preventative for fungal problems in both wheat and tomatoes.
Caution
Like everything, this formula can be overdone, so it may be best to limit applications to a quart of dilute solution every two weeks per plant with pumpkins, squash, sweet corn, cucumbers, zucchini, capsicums, okra
‘Essentially biodynamic preparations are homeopathic remedies intended to strengthen both the soil’s mineral release, nitrogen fixation, digestion and nutrient uptake and the atmospheric photosynthesis, blossoming fruiting
and ripening,’ - Hugh Lovel.
or anything else with a tendency to get lush, weak, bug-bitten or diseased.
For tomatoes, if they are especially lush, the proportion of potassium silicate to vermiwash can be doubled.
If organic certification is a concern keep in mind that these ingredients are all natural materials except solubor or boric acid, which are permissible in most organic certification programs due to widespread boron deficiencies in most cultivated soils.
Remember, neither gardens nor farms should ever smell, much less taste, like heart attack alley in the garden shop. Growing food should be one of life’s most luxurious sensory experiences, brimming with aroma and flavour.
Biodynamic Soil Activator
Essentially biodynamic preparations are homeopathic remedies intended to strengthen both the soil’s mineral release, nitrogen fixation, digestion and nutrient uptake and the atmospheric photosynthesis, blossoming fruiting and ripening.
While each preparation is designed to improve one or more of the environmental processes essential to making agriculture thrive, the entire spectrum of process are all needed - nothing should be left out.
Biodynamic Soil Activator is a compound remedy that includes all the biodynamic preparations in one easy to use application. Contrary to older notions, the biodynamic preparations have been found to work quite well together.
To apply to one acre, draw 10 litres of warm water in a 20 litre bucket. If the water is chlorinated leave overnight or stir for thirty minutes to outgas the chlorine.
Water for stirring biodynamic preparations ideally should be warm, and may be warmed with sunlight, wood or gas heat. Electricity is not usually recommended, in which case the water might be better left cold.
Stirring
Add one quarter cup of Biodynamic Soil Activator to the ten litres of water. With arm or stirring stick, stir round and round to create a strong vortex.
The water becomes ordered or organised into laminate layers so that the cooler, denser water moves to the middle and sinks while the warmer layers seek the edges and rise. Remove arm or stick.
The appearance is one of a spinning funnel. Reverse the direction of stirring and the water will churn and froth in chaos until a new vortex is formed. Each time a new vortex is formed, reverse directions, again and again, back and forth, for twenty minutes. For every new vortex a new generation of order is created.
Order and organisation are the basis of life, as living organisms are selforganising. Creating generation after generation of order results in an evolution of order. This charges up the remedy with life force and imparts the intentions and vibrations of the stirrer to the water. Then what one thinks, one grows.
Spraying
The Biodynamic Soil Activator should soak into the soil, much as does the dew. Ideally it is sprinkled in the late afternoon in large droplets, though any time will do. Each drop radiates up to six feet, so there is no need for uniform coverage.
A pail and a wallpaper brush or whiskbroom is sufficient for applying this remedy for the digestive and nutritive activity of soil microbes as well as more complex participants such as ants and earthworms.
This boosts both the lime polarity where plants get their Ca, Mg, N, P and K and the silica polarity where photosynthesis, blossoming, fruiting and ripening occur.