Episode 144: Keep Soil Depletion From Affecting the Quality of Your Food with Gregg Forster

Introduction

Hey everyone, welcome back. Today I have a guest named Greg Forster. He’s from Wisconsin Mineral Solutions and he’s here to talk to us about how to get nutrient-dense foods through our soils.
So welcome Greg. Thank you, I’m really glad to be here. So do you want to tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your business, what you do? Sure, well I have a Bachelor of Science degree in physics which originally I was putting to use in the world of software engineering.
That sounds boring. Sometimes it was, sometimes not. I did that for about 20 years and through downsizing and things like that, that all of a sudden wasn’t a career path for me and I did end up using that a little bit in the world of indoor air quality for a while too.
But eventually that got focused on what’s going on in the soil and how to produce healthier food based on healthier soil. So about just over 14 years ago I formed the company called Wisconsin Mineral Solutions and we have a goal of helping people to better understand the soil and to understand not only how it works but more importantly for most of us what the implications of healthy soil is and how healthy soil can lead to healthier crops and healthier crops are eaten either by people or animals and so we can have healthier livestock, healthier meat, healthier eggs and ultimately healthier people. And I do think that you really have to be in a pretty good state of health to make good wise decisions and when people are sick it affects so many parts of our being that life can become pretty difficult even in relationships and things like that when we’re not getting the right kind of nutrients into our bodies.
So that’s one thing that’s really important for me is not just, I don’t just care about the soil, I care about human beings and how we can have a much more robust life when we kind of pay attention to the foundation of things.

Rethinking What “Sick” Means

I really love how you put that because I think there’s been a whole new thought process over the last few years of what sick is. You know I think at one point it was just you know like you have a disease or you don’t have a disease versus now so many people are seeing that we can just kind of be sick overall through our gut health and our nutrient densities and how that affects our brain and all of that.
And so I think you know even as somebody who I mean I’ve been a producer my whole life, yeah I always thought about you know if my soil isn’t healthy then my plants don’t grow. You know that if my soil isn’t healthy I don’t grow plants to feed my cows. But I don’t know that I ever really like to put that connection together if the quality of your soil is going to affect the quality of what you’re eating.
Right, right.

Why Our Soils Are Depleted

So what do you see as a reason why we have such depleted soil? I mean I mean I think there’s some of the real obvious ones but I’d like to kind of discuss that especially on some of the smaller scales.
Right, right.
Because I think a lot of times we think if we’re growing our own food we must be doing a really good job or at least a better job than. I still think it’s probably a better job.
Yeah unless we’re copying their big eggs practices and using some of the same tools that they are.
And sometimes that’s just the norm; it’s where people look for answers. And that’s all the information that’s out there.
Yeah fortunately more and more good information is available but you do have to look hard for it.
And if you’re attending different conferences like maybe the Acres USA conference or what used to be called the Moses conference, Marble Seed and other events like that where people are sharing some of that information. Then yeah you can make some great decisions but you do have to have knowledge at some level to be able to make wise decisions like that.
I definitely agree.

Practices That Damage Soil (Tilling, Working Wet Ground)

So what are some of the practices that maybe kind of the small scale farmer or a new farmer might be doing that would be depleting the soils?
Well I have a rototiller and I use it but I’m kind of ashamed of that.
I use mine too.
And every time that we work the soil aggressively it is damaging to microbial activity.
And we need to have soil that is like aggregates and chunks basically so that there’s lots of air space in there for the microbes to function. And generally in the top six inches of the soil that’s mostly aerobic bacteria and other organisms that need oxygen to live. When you start going deeper than that it starts to shift into anaerobic types of life.
And so if we are plowing or rototilling or something too deep we’re bringing up those anaerobic organisms and sticking them up where there’s just plenty of oxygen and we’re putting all of the aerobic bacteria shoving it down deeper where there isn’t enough air and they don’t survive very well. So there is value in working the soil. I know that.
But I think sometimes we get over aggressive and maybe go too deep. And there are plenty of people that will argue on both sides of the fence about till, no till, things like that. But in my mind I think it’s a healthy thing to work that soil up periodically and get some more oxygen down into the soil to move things around a little bit.
But one of the errors we can make is mixing up the higher level soil with the lower level soil and making it so the microbes don’t function very well because of what we mechanically did to the soil. So that’s one factor.
I think another thing is in the spring it’s really hard not to go out and get going in your garden as soon as you possibly can.
And sometimes in the spring it’s too wet to get out there. And if you go out into your garden with a tractor or you know if you have a bigger homestead or a farm and you’re out there with heavier equipment and it’s too wet you can cause yourself problems for like two or three years after that. Just because you squished everything down you got a whole bunch of air squeezed out of the soil structure and you’ve damaged the microbes.
So working the soil when it’s too wet that’s another major mistake that I think a lot of homesteaders can make.
It’s hard to not like to get excited but luckily I live in North Idaho where they make the choice for me. I haven’t even walked out to my garden yet this year. I could probably have some like greens growing out there and stuff right now but I was like you know let’s say I’m helping the pollinators by not touching it this year.

Weed Pressure and What It Tells You

So for the main reason that we till like our homestead and we have like a small garden with raised beds and then we have a larger garden that I plant some of my you know squashes that spread out and also our orchard like surrounds it and stuff. That one’s probably about a quarter acre large so I mean it’s pretty decently sized. The reason we till that one the most is because the weeds are so bad here.
Like I mean we actually went out to one of our flower beds in early spring. We were trying a little test out there and my son pulled anything that was already coming up and then we put down pre-emergent and we now have seven foot tall weeds. We did a wonderful job and so with the gardens I mean there’s no way we could get out there and actually start gardening without ripping that up because that weed bed is so dense. Whether we hand weeded or mowed even if we mowed I mean we would have this mat so deep that I would barely even be able to grow or to dig a little hole to plant something.
And I know you talked a little bit about some different weed control tips that I mean we’ve used a ton but and we try to keep it as chemical free as possible. I don’t put any chemicals in my garden but I will sometimes use them along the road where like the cows can’t get to it and stuff.
Right here’s a book you’re probably going to see but it’s Weeds Control Without Poisons by Charles Walters and I really like that book.
It looks at why those weeds are there, what they’re doing to the soil and a lot of times when we have excessive weed problems. I mean you’re always going to have weeds that are blowing in and maybe rhizomes coming in the side of your garden and all of that. So weeds are always going to be there but when it’s actually a problem and you’re going oh those weeds again and you’re spending too much time weeding it’s usually because the soil is not balanced right. And there are some weeds that well actually most weeds really like a tight compact soil and sometimes depending on the weed just adding calcium can make a big difference in loosening up that soil so that it can harbor more aerobic bacteria it has more air space and the root systems of those weeds really don’t like that environment and they just kind of go away or at least they back way off.
And sometimes if you drive by a field that has just tons of Canadian thistle in it that is almost always a case of not enough calcium in the soil and if they were just to start adding calcium at the appropriate rates those thistle problems would just go away instead of being a nightmare.
That would be the dream.
Yeah so that’s one reason one of the reasons why.
I’m currently being overtaken by catnip.
Oh okay.
Yeah.
I’m not sure exactly what drives that but that’s something we could definitely look into.
It’s sticky and it smells.
Yeah yeah soil testing for me is pretty foundational.
Okay.
In understanding what we should be doing with our soil it can help like I said with the weed issues and it helps a lot with the soil structure.

Mineral Balance, the “Mineral Wheel,” and Plant Health

So like going back to a more heavier clay-like soil that thistle and other weeds like that really like to grow.
If you do add calcium because it’s low then what happens is the like soil platelets start to open up and they call it flocculating the soil and as it opens like that you are able to get more of the oxygen in like I was mentioning and but as you continue to add more calcium the platelets are going to get higher and higher and eventually they have a hard time staying up and they can collapse back on top of themselves and then if you used calcium to open up the soil before how are you going to do that now? You’ve got too much calcium and usually in my experience it’s a lot harder to deal with an excess of a mineral than it is with a deficiency. So we don’t want to just add add add add because it’s a great thing because too much of a good thing is usually a pretty bad thing.
And also have you seen the mineral wheel they call it? It’s a circle that has all of the well not all but a lot of the elements listed around the perimeter of the circle and then there’s a line that goes from each mineral to all of the different other minerals that are, I guess you could say engaged in their activity.
There are dependencies there and some of them have like 12 or so different lines coming off of them and so any one mineral isn’t going to do a very good job in the plant or in the soil by itself. It has to have the right balance.
The mineral wheel you said?
Yeah.
I don’t know what I’ve ever seen called the mineral wheel.
If you do just a search on the internet for the mineral wheel you’ll probably find a bunch of pictures of it. But one of the things there is like if you want that flocculating soil to stay open like that one of the things that really helps is to have the right level of sulfur.
And so you’ve got sulfur or calcium that’s opening it up and sulfur that holds it in place. A little more complicated than that but if either one of those are not there you can have troubles.
And I also really like there are so many great analogies that people have come up with to help explain how the different minerals work inside plants and one I like is calcium is the truck that carries all the minerals up into the plant.
But the wheels on the truck is boron and so you can have this great level of calcium and all these other minerals available to be brought up into the plant but if you don’t have boron at the adequate levels you’re trying to drive this truck that doesn’t have wheels or has broken wheels and it just doesn’t function like you would expect it to. So you can see things that look like let’s say a calcium deficiency in a plant. You might have blossom end rot on your tomatoes or your peppers and usually people say oh you need more calcium. Well maybe you do but you could do a tissue test to find out if it’s actually a calcium problem or maybe you just don’t have enough boron.
And so the calcium’s there at the good level but it doesn’t have the supporting boron that it needs to do its job.
So I know I’m kind of like with my physics degree. I maybe kind of geek out a little bit on how it all works but a simple test.
I was actually sitting here like fully engaged and going. I wonder if anyone else thinks like it gets excited like I am right now.
Well to me it’s very exciting and it’s really satisfying when someone contacts me and says that they’re having some kind of problem in their greenhouse or wherever it is and we do a test and then it comes back and we’re like oh well no wonder and all you have to do is make these few changes and you’re going to see things turn around. So for a homesteader that’s awesome because you know we’re producing a lot of our own food but if you’re a commercial grower a lot of my customers are produce growers and they depend on that for their livelihood.
Yeah.
If they have something go through their greenhouse and they lose a thousand plants or four thousand plants they’re in trouble but they don’t have to be.
Yeah that’s I mean that’s something I just hadn’t really thought of it like that so and yeah I was kind of joking before the we started recording that soil science was never my forte even though I’ve taken several soil science classes I passed them I mean like I got my degree but it was just something that like it never quite like clicked for me the same way some other things did and so I always which for most people makes them avoid it but for me whenever somebody has something exciting you know something that can bring it like full circle for me I get really excited. I’m also the one who took organic chemistry after I graduated from college because I didn’t like the grade I had in it in college so you know.
That’s awesome.
It was another one that really really didn’t click for me and it was because in at the university I’m taking it with you know 200 nursing students and I was an ag major and so after college I took it again at a community college with a bunch more nursing majors but there was only 12 of us in the class and I was able to like really ask the questions and find out what I needed to do to understand the course. At the time I’d planned on going to a master’s program and I needed biochem to do that and so I was like I cannot even begin to take biochem until I understand this class.

Soil → Plants → Animals → People

So you know we talked a little bit about the weeds with it and commercial growers but you mentioned like you know what’s going into our soils going into the plants which is going to the animals. I’d really like to talk about that one for a little bit and how those interact with each other and like what kind of meat quality you’re getting from that because I think that could even well go ahead yeah.
Right, well I know that there have been some studies in the UK that have looked at the nutrient value of meat over the last like 50 years or so and some of the levels of nutrients in them are shockingly low.
I know iron for example is one that is just way lower in today’s meat than 50 years ago and certainly there are you know breeding programs and things like that that are changing a bit how animals live how they function well there’s the environment too but the genetics can have a big factor in how they’re pulling up nutrients out of their or pulling nutrients out of their food just like when they change the way plants grow they change the ability of them to bring nutrients up from the ground.
Just a little side note on that seedless grapes people tend to like seedless grapes. I like them better but why are they seedless? They’re seedless because there’s definitely a design flaw there yeah there is a design flaw in my opinion but in order for grapes to form seeds they need enough manganese and manganese is an important fertility related mineral it’s important for fertility in humans and in animals and in plants and it helps form the seed in the grape and so if you can do something to make it so that plants grape plants cannot bring up enough manganese then they just won’t be able to form a seed and there is you know a seed in them if you you know bite in or come on open but it’s kind of a wimpy little not really formed usually soft yeah it’s no no good and so I’m thinking wow do I want to be eating grapes that are from a plant that doesn’t know how to bring manganese up very well into itself like God designed them to have seeds yeah and the seeds are actually very good for you, what else is it doing to that plant if it yeah I’ve never thought yeah having dug into that very deeply so I don’t know how different a seedless grape is from a regular grape as far as nutrients are concerned but it concerns me a little bit well like you said they were designed a certain way which then for us to eat them we were designed a certain way and we need the nutrients from the things that were designed for us to eat right and if they are altered too much they’re no longer doing their job right possibly being a negative effect right right I can definitely agree with you on that I mean I know in college at one point we did a we went really deep into studying what the omega fatty acids in like grass-fed versus mm-hmm uh grain-fed cattle and you know even to this day like you know when we did the study it was a very small margin so you know the argument was it really doesn’t matter that much but to this day I look at it and we’re getting ready to butcher a steer that has only ever eaten grass grown on our property and I’m not fertilizing my soil or anything like that they’re we’re just on good grass they get a little bit of hay from the neighbors but they’re it’s grown right here too and I know exactly what it is and I know exactly what’s going on it good batter and different I don’t know if I’m buying grain at a commercial from a commercial feed store I don’t know what’s in that grain right and it could be some of these things that you’re talking about where there could be those deficiencies and even the grain I buy from my local grain mill they’re buying there’s where where are the producers that are literally in the field you know in the valley below me getting their seed and you know so on and so forth so it’s like there’s that if I when there’s literally nothing going into the grass that like my cows are eating and I’m also not taking anything from it it’s like a more pure form of it so I mean that’s my thoughts at least
yeah there’s a lot of truth in that and when you look at different hay tests when people are selling hay you know some people are very willing to have their hay tested before they sell it to you others aren’t so interested in doing that but when you do look at different forage samples they actually can range a lot in the quality and the nutrients that are going to be available to an animal and so you can get away with feeding lower quality hay but then you usually have to supplement with minerals and you know other for fortifying agents to make it work and I run dairy cows with my beef cows so there’s always minerals out but yeah right so the same thing we have forest deer all the time here that we’re rotating through pairs and all they get is what’s out there in the field and they’re awesome they do really well they’re never yeah I mean we haven’t seen any problems and with what we’re eating and one thing that I do really see like you’re talking about the genetics of animals is you know we have we raise old line pigs too and what I really love to see is what our meat looks like compared to the meat you buy at the store and on and off a lot of times I’m feeding even not even at the store because we’ve raised you know like yorkshires and stuff that my kids bought for show projects or something like that and I’m literally feeding them the same feed from the same feed mill and the commercially bred ones versus our old lines have their meats a different color it’s a different consistency it’s a different flavor completely on the exact same feed right so even what those animals are doing with it you know when we talk about what minerals are going into the plants but even the and the changes with the plants like the magnet magnet I can’t I can never say that one in the grapes if you’re changing the way your animals produce you’re going to end up with a different product completely as well so I mean and maybe they’re not producing the same nutrients as they would have from the animals that like the old line ones from before the 50s and things like that so I only say the 50s because that’s when they started changing the pork genetics

Nutrient Decline, Albrecht, and Regenerative Balance

so so you had mentioned a little bit about what the nutrients in food is today versus what was it like 50 years ago yeah about 50 to 80 years ago yeah so what what are we seeing there
well that I’ve seen some studies done where they compare do you know who Dr. William Albrecht is
no
I believe he was the soil department head at the University of Missouri quite some years ago and he’s since passed away but he did a lot of research on soil health and human health and some of the relationships between that and livestock health he’s he’s got I don’t think he wrote any books but he had lots of notes that Charles Walters pulled together if I understand right into different volumes and I have one actually right here on my desk it’s called soil fertility and animal health the Albrecht papers volume two and there are so many interesting things that he studied and one of the things that he did is he sent students around the world collecting uh samples of soil and so sometimes it was coming from like very arid land sometimes it’s coming from a rainforest farmland in towns anywhere and they would spin out the humus from that and most of us are trying to build the organic matter in our soil because when we do the crops seem to do so much better well he actually like extracted that the humus which is fully broken down organic matter and tested it to see what the mineral makeup of that was and it was almost exactly the same no matter where it came from in the world and and it’s also very close to the mineral makeup of a human body would be and and so there are some tests done where they grow things the way that Dr. Albrecht recommends where you’re really focused on the soil health at mineral balance and the biological activity in the soil and so growing it that way and then growing it not to slam universities but at the time you know the university’s best recommendation for how to grow great tomatoes great cabbage great lettuce great green peppers and then they did I mean a side note on that I think that there’s a little bit of a disconnect coming up with the universities versus what is happening like in this like a more small-scale farming and it’s coming apart and people are trying to try to want to pull that back together so
right right
yeah and so they they tested the the outcome of those those test plots and tried to find out how how different were they going to be and they were hugely different and I’m kind of glancing over at a chart here actually it’s kind of sideways but yeah I do put this on YouTube so if you have something to show
yeah
well I don’t know if I can like you know really be able to see my chart too well
okay
well yeah I mean we can see what it’s
but snap beans grown the Albrecht method had 40.5 units of calcium grown the university’s way the conventional way was 15. So if I’m going from 15 you can get it you could be better off by having 40 units of calcium in there and the magnesium in those same beans went from 14 up to 60 and from potassium went from 29 to 99 I mean that’s crazy and some of the bigger differences I’ve noticed are in some of the things like B vitamins and I kind of get hung up on this one myself because I think of all of the depression and emotional distress that seems to be so common everywhere we look today and a lot of times people do a lot better if they can just increase their B vitamin intake
well I kind of just as soon as you started saying that I said like nobody has their happy vitamins
right well we used to get our happy vitamins from our food we didn’t have to go take vitamins in pill form and people didn’t but what if you were going to get 10 20 50 maybe even more times certain minerals certain vitamins just by how you decided to grow your food
yeah
so that’s huge
what is the ALREC method
well synopsis of it you can’t I don’t think you could say like here’s the method
right
that’s like a synopsis of it
yeah but it but it is kind of regenerative agriculture in in its core essence and it’s looking at how to protect the soil how to make sure that the soil has vibrant life in it and that it’s got soil structure that supports biology and that the minerals are balanced right and so he looked at the the cations like calcium and magnesium and potassium and hydrogen and he looked at what the balance was and all that humus and he said well what if we just try to balance regular soil the top six inches of soil like it’s humus and so he said we should have it depends a little bit on the soil but generally about 68 percent of the base saturation should be calcium and 12 percent should be magnesium and you might be looking at about six percent five to six percent for potassium and just trying to get those things in balance made a huge difference in what was actually coming off of those fields
and also this is another little thing that I found interesting over time is if a crop is healthy pests we talked about weeds but pests don’t seem to like healthy crops and a lot of times it’s that the sugar levels are too high in them and the sweetness is too good and so the pests don’t want it and I’ve seen three rows of potatoes that were heavily mulched three rows of potatoes next to it that had no mulch on it and the mulch was actually horse manure and it was fairly fresh so there was a lot of nitrogen going down into the ground there and the potatoes that were nitrogen rich were covered with potato beetles and the ones right next to it like right next to it had pretty close to zero any bugs that landed there and chewed just went right over to the ones that were over nitrogen too much nitrogen makes plants weak and anything that you do that makes the plant weak makes them more attractive to the pests and it’s almost like the pests are the cleanup crew that’s designed to go get rid of garbage that we probably shouldn’t be eating anyway and if we can increase the the health of the plants the bugs just don’t have a whole lot of interest in it if there’s nothing else to eat they may you know stay around but generally they’ll look for better hunting I guess better grounds they’re suitable to them
that’s interesting I I’m not like sitting here thinking because we only have one pest problem and it’s some little bugs that really love my lettuces and it just makes me wonder like because all my other plants do really well on that pest on the pest front like I wonder what we could possibly change I am rotating beds this year so maybe I’ll see some differences

How to Test and Amend Soil

but so like right now what should people do like how do we get our soil tested and then how do we amend because I think that that’s a big I mean do you just go dump it on and walk away like you know I’m playing a little dumb but yeah
well I do think yeah I do think soil testing is like the foundational step and uh for people that are that have a large farm and have a lot of acres there are ways to do it cost effectively where they don’t have to test everything every year and they can kind of have a rotational plan on how they manage their soil differently than you would if you had a homestead and on a homestead your your family’s food’s coming off of that ground and so I would want to be doing the best job I could with my own soil and
well and I mean alternatively like I sell to local people who are expecting that if they’re buying it from my farm it’s a higher quality product than what they’re getting from the grocery store
right right and when you care about those people personally they’re you know in your community you want them to be healthy and you want what you give them to be of not just better quality than what they can can get in the store but of a level of quality that really is going to contribute to their health and so yeah testing that ground and looking at what the balances are there makes a huge huge lot of sense to me and you can get soil tests anywhere from like 12 dollars to 180 dollars and the 12 dollar ones don’t really give you enough information to make good decisions the hundred and plus dollar ones to me don’t seem like they’re they don’t give you the extra value that you know that some people think that they do and that’s just my opinion
but if you were me would you go down to the garden store and grab one or would you like send it off to your like land grant college
I would do neither
okay
I would send them to uh Brookside labs in Ohio
okay
there are some other good labs too that’s the one that that I use and on my website I have a free downloadable guide it’s called something like why and how to test your soil
okay
it gets at some of the reasons why you would want to do it some of the reasons we’ve been talking about here and then also shows you exactly what you do to collect the soil and how you can send it off to any lab and if people wanted to do that with us they could get worksheets from us to send straight to the lab but the when the test results come back they come with recommendations for how much of the different amendments you should put on and you know like like I said earlier sometimes people find a good thing and maybe they add a bunch of calcium one year and they notice some real improvements and so they just think they should do that every year and it probably is a good idea for a couple years if it made a big difference the first year it probably will for a few years but at some point if you just keep doing that same thing without checking what the balance looks like you’re gonna shoot yourself in the foot and end up really sorry that you did that so on a garden and homestead I would say test every year and they cost about 30 30 to 35 dollars to get a test done and it just gives you so much insight in what you should be doing
what about like my pastures so should I be testing those too
I would do a pasture probably every three years
okay
mm-hmm
yep
all right because we yeah we do our rotational pastures and there’s one that just gets destroyed every year because it’s the one closest to the barns that’s where they live in the winter time
uh yeah
yeah and I’m like I’ve got to figure out how to like get some health back on that because we always run out of hay before that pasture starts growing
oh yeah
I’m like we’ve got to get I’ve got to get that pasture a little healthier because all the others are just beautiful and that one is sad
right
yeah yeah there are a lot of things you can do I mean there’s some really good for natural fertilizers that aren’t that expensive and if people do have pest problems that seem like they’re always an issue if you if you try to correct that by fixing the soil that’s the right approach but it can take a while and so sometimes you have to use band-aids basically you know and so I like neem oil there are other oils that seem to be really helpful against pests there’s some cinnamon oil products out there I like those neem oil garlic oil is really good too
all right
and some of those products we have available there are other companies that have similar things too
I use the neem oil on my orchards and they seem to do pretty good
yeah I think it makes a big difference
yeah definitely a big difference from when we first moved on the property it hadn’t been farmed in several years and all my trees would get those they look like cobwebs but it’s a
uh tent worm
yes thank you
yeah
yeah sorry I’m apparently I’m tired today
so yeah we started using the neem oil on those I think in the spring my husband handles that one and so and I last year we were actually had good fruit and hardly any of the tent worms so we’re definitely seeing a difference from that

About Wisconsin Mineral Solutions

all right so your mineral company tell us a little bit about it like you guys ship and small scale what do you guys
yeah we a lot of the products that we carry are either from New York or from the state of Mississippi and and mostly I consult with farms that are and homesteaders that are in Wisconsin and then just kind of leaking out into bordering states and we have helped people all across the country and we do can ship things out there wherever people are and sometimes we’ll just refer you to someone that’s got the same products that we have that just are closer depending on you know where a person is at
yeah like if I’m fertilizing my garden bed I could probably get it from you but if I need to fertilize 10,000 acres maybe like just find out who I should get them from
right and we can also you know uh set things up so that the manufacturer can ship things straight to
okay
and that’s usually pretty cost effective for larger acreages we have some farms that you know will buy a whole semi-load of fertilizer of one one kind the kind of our flagship flagship product if you want to call it that is a naturally mined clay that comes out of Mississippi and when you look at the uh terrain in that area you see kind of hills and stuff like that but there’s a fair amount of flat in between the hills and when they actually start digging down and exploring under the surface of the ground there they see that those hills actually continue going down and they’re actually a lot of deep deep valleys that are hundreds of feet deep they just happen to be filled in and when you look at what that material is and the consistency of it it looks like in my opinion it was all dead plant material and everything that was laid down during the time of Noah’s flood and then everything was rapidly buried there and there was a bit of an iron cap that kind of settled out on top that kept the pressure off of that plant material and animal material so that it didn’t decompose all the way down to let’s say a coal or maybe an oil it stayed at a pre-humate state so it’s a clay that just happens to be very very rich in trace minerals and also very rich in biology so when they open up the ground and the air comes down in there all that biology kind of reawakens and they take it out and age it and kind of like composting it and that biology just really starts churning and they age it anywhere from three to six or so months and then that’s an awesome fertilizer if they age it longer the biology ramps up high enough that if you actually eat it like if we feed it to livestock it stimulates their GI tract and gets all the microbes well balanced there so the same product just a little bit different aging makes a great fertilizer or a great livestock supplement so that’s one of the products that we recommend a lot and you can find more about that on our website if you’re interested.
Yeah so tell us what your website is. It’s wisconsinmineralsolutions.com. And you said that you have that free download on testing your soil and that type of stuff.
Right.
I’ll make sure I definitely link that because I’m going to go check that out myself.
Yeah there’s another free download there that people can get it’s called the five questions to ask for good food and so you know if if we have our own homesteads or even if we live in town and we have our own garden we can produce a lot of really good food for ourselves but we probably still have to get other food other places and for people that are in a city and really don’t have the possibility of growing maybe any of their own food I still want them to be able to find good food and so if they go to a farmer’s market you can get really good food at a farmer’s market or not so good food at a farmer’s market so I had a list of five questions I put together that they can ask someone else that’s growing their food for them or ask your own self if you’re growing your own food that can kind of lead you down the path of getting a high quality source of food for yourself and for your family
I love that that is such a great idea I cannot wait to go check these out because yeah even us who we grow 75 to 80 percent of our food I’m still buying my wheat from other people and I’ve being able to know that I’m getting the best quality so I really appreciate that

Closing – “Keep Growing”

one of my favorite questions to ask everybody at the end of our episodes is what does keep growing mean to you
keep growing yeah that’s a good question I like the the old adage that says when you’re done learning you’re done and I think to keep growing really means to continue to learn new things to be open to new ideas and and maybe grab old ideas that really worked well and somehow we threw them away over time and just being open to continuing to expand our capabilities and our knowledge and to do that you kind of have to have a certain level of humility that that is something that not enough people have
yeah well I really appreciate your time today and I don’t think you know how much I enjoyed this
so good I’m really glad everybody you know go check out what they have on their website it sounds like some really great information and remember what goes into your soil is what you’re consuming so thank you very much
that’s right thank you