Ideas have consequences, and words have meaning. So if we want to talk about subjects of science, we need to start with our thoughts and the words we use.

For soils people, dirt is inert. We all played in the mud or dirt as kids, didn’t we? Mud puddles could be turned into clay structures and mud balls thrown at combatants. We had great fun—to the consternation of the mothers who saw the dirt all over bodies, clothes, hands and feet.

Dirt is what’s left after the life is gone out of soil. Nutrients are depleted. And if nutrients aren’t there, they also won’t be in the food grown from it. Oh, there will be leaves from what are today called pioneer weeds. They will be the pioneer plants whose roots will go deep. They will find some calcium that had leached downward to lower levels. Maybe potassium too. Over a vast amount of time, by growing and rotting and other plants’ appearing from seeds, they would finally restore the soil.

By farming depleted soil, a farmer might blame himself for poor crops or call it bad luck, or a season of bad weather, or often just blame it on bad seed. But what makes a living soil and how do we take poor land—dirt—and renew it where the life was gone and hopes and dreams with it?

We have a good guide to that in the southwest Missouri, where Eugene Marcel Poirot (1899–1988) and Dr. William A. Albrecht (1888–1974), chairman of the Department of Soils at the University of Missouri, got together and demonstrated it. It’s recorded in Poirot’s book Our Margin of Life, published by ACRES U.S.A. in 1945. That book should be reprinted someday, so farmers not just in Missouri but everywhere else can take heart and realize the great genius of these two men.

Albrecht stands yet unrecognized except by a few as the Father of Soil Fertility Analysis. That’s a tragedy for the state and the nation. He stands with Dmitri Mendeleev (1804–1907), the Russian chemist who believed in a natural order to the world and had a scientific mind larger than all but a few. He put together the Table of Elements. It should be on the wall of every beginning class in science—where the history of science should also be taught. Without that history, we simply are pinball thinkers with thoughts bouncing from one thought to another. When he produced the first Table of Elements, Mendeleev left eight positions open because he calculated that by atomic mass and molar structure there would have to be additional elements in those locations. Since then, they have been found, and his genius has been confirmed.

In his own field of soils, Dr. William A. Albrecht was an equal genius. He discovered the Cation Exchange Capacity equation and followed it where his ideas led. Now that work stands solidly confirmed, along with the elements of Mendeleev, so that we can measure the fertility of a soil and develop it to grow nutrient dense foods that would produce health in the soil, plants, animals, and human lives to the benefit of the world’s population. And it can be done, has been done, and is being done, without using any toxins.

Just imagine what spreading that practice worldwide could do toward building a world community to replace the strife and wars we have seen throughout history and that continue to this day. These were men of vision and the consequences of their visions meet at the junction of soil fertility.

Dr. Albrecht shared his ideas freely. He freely published his work for all to see and use to further the ideas of healthy soils contributing to optimum crops coming from fertile lands. He responded to every request to speak to farm groups, future farmers, ladies’ farm and homemaker groups, magazines, and newspapers. He presented his ideas to Congress in testimony. He produced a black-and-white video, a rare film of a presentation to a small group in the 1950s setting that looks like my grandmother’s house with its furnishings—the gas stove with oven above on the right and burners on the left. With that picture in mind, I can taste her chicken and noodle Sunday suppers that I don’t seem able to duplicate. That film was titled The Other Side of the Fence. It showed cattle reaching over the fence to get nutrients that were absent in their own pastures. It also showed that cattle knew what they wanted, and Dr. Albrecht later proved that by putting boxes out for certain nutrients and letting the cattle decide what they needed. Like Poirot’s book, the film is available from ACRES U.S.A.

Thousands flocked on “Farm Days” to see Poirot’s results in southwest Missouri, from which, in 1910, Missouri shipped 10% of the world’s corn supply. So much for global planning needed for food supply to the world! Missouri had access by rail and the Mighty Mississippi to the markets of the world way back then, as it does now.

Hard work and a sound understanding of God’s gift of soil and how to sustain and renew it—those are the legacies of men like Eugene Poirot and William Albrecht. We need people like them today, just as much as the world needed them in the past!

Featured Photo by meriç tuna on Unsplash.