Corporations/Universities/Lies

[RanchoDeluxe]

So as a good ole fashioned cannabis smoker from America I'd like to think that I question everything. I've been reading alot of University studies lately, because I was under the impression this is where the most reliable information on horitculture could be found. After taking some classes from my county extension office via an accredited State University that is well known for it's agricultural program I'm starting to wonder if this is really the best place to gather information.

In this class, the instructor made statements like: "compost tea has yet to be proven effective" and "most organic farms will eventually have to use chemical pesticides on at least part of their operation to take care of certain problems that may arise..." I started to wonder why someone with an education level much greater than mine would be spewing such non-sense.

Well, this is America, if something stinks...just follow the money. I've heard on the news about large corporations funding our University system. Specifically, corporations in the petro/chemical/ag business. Seems like a sad state of affairs, I was hoping that taking this class would lead me to enrolling in the horticulture program. Having second and third thoughts about this. Curious as to what you guys think about this. Are their universities that aren't on 'company' time?
Where can we find reliable non-biased info? Rodale Institute seems like a good one.
Tell us what ya think.

 

[Seandawg]

Personally I believe that all universities are businesses, why else would they have commercials (advertisement), or make you pay tuition. iTunes U has loads of college level courses in any and every course you could think of oh yeah and it's free. Khan academy could cover just about everything else, also free.

Your college degree just says to me, "I've paid my dues" literally!

 

[OrganicOzarks]

Most educated people are uneducated. What I mean is they were taught to only see things one way.

Formal education is very good at this. I feel it is a form of brain washing.

I would never suggest to any of my kids to go to College unless they want a PHD in something that pays extremely high. If not don't bother, and read on the interwebs instead.

 

[Muleskinner]

compost tea IS unproven! It hasn't done jack shit over regular organic soil in my testing. Look like the latest MJ-gardening gimmick to be foisted on us by the indoor gardending "industry".

Totally disagree with the guy about chemical pesticides though, there are more organic solutions and predatory insects than ever before. Nowadays every problem has an organic solution.

When I went to college - engineering school - it was known that most of the professors were basically avoiding the real world and the pressures it brings. We were forced to study 10-20 year old technology from these guys because that the last time they worked for a modern, competitive business. And a lot of them had worked for the government, not business, and their skills were even more obsolete.

I encourage everyone I know to do their own experiments, keep records of everything you add or use and what works. I don't care about conventional wisdom, only what works for my situation.

 

[ziggestardust]

Most educated people are uneducated. What I mean is they were taught to only see things one way.

Formal education is very good at this. I feel it is a form of brain washing.

I would never suggest to any of my kids to go to College unless they want a PHD in something that pays extremely high. If not don't bother, and read on the interwebs instead.

I sincerely hope that you mean horticulture/farming specifically as I would feel very offended otherwise. You can't learn physics/math/solid mechanics/fluid dynamics etc. on a university level without proper education or an extremely high IQ. Also, there is nowhere to be biased in sciences based purely on math and proven models. Except for some very fringe sciences.

Anyway, you might want to see if they have downloadable material from previous courses that you can look at or have mailed to you.

 

[MIway]

Most educated people are uneducated. What I mean is they were taught to only see things one way.

Formal education is very good at this. I feel it is a form of brain washing.

I would never suggest to any of my kids to go to College unless they want a PHD in something that pays extremely high. If not don't bother, and read on the interwebs instead.

Unless one gets a degree in philosphy, its all a trade school... Doctors, lawyers, biz exec, research, etc, etc, etc.

The more specialized one becomes, the more ignorant they are to everything else in life... Straight from a professional phd.

 

[al-k-mist]

In reality, there is this shit called integrated pest management
i live in the willamette valley, tho i cant spell it. the mecca of organic nuts.
some farms say they use certain chem pesticides if all else fails, and not on the food crops, and its not lingering, blah blah blah
not all, just a few. but they can still get some organic labels
we are trying to get 'oregon tilth certified organic' for our farm, and will NEVER use anything that we know to be non-organic, or "organic" labeled that is false

some of the fish hydrolysate, or fish emulsions...something can be certified organic, but with >2% of Phosphoric acid. WHAT THE FUCK?
My bro laughed at the desire for certification, as much as we are anti-corporate..its feeding into their shit, as wll.
omri listed stuff is not certified, theyre just some cats who made a list on a website, and would list someones stuff if its not really organic, i hear...and if they pay the bribe

sorry to derail your thread, bro. Just ranting, its like theyve turned 'organic' into a catch phrase attatched to big bucks, ie whole foods and thier mislabeled misleading lies, etcetera

Local organic is where its at!

 

[VortexPower420]

I have found the same thing and waste little time on university studies unless they were done by Albrecth.


I find Acres and their book publishing company to be the truest and most sound sources of information. They have done a great job of collecting and making public lost works by great minds.

Of coruse you have the soil and health online library, if not look for Russian studies. The USSR escaped much of the chemical fertilizer craze.

On the online library is Soil Microorganisms and Higher Plants written by Krasil'nikov, N.A. a monster reference on how to grow plants properly using our favorite methods.

Also in the back of acres mag there are meeting and event around eco ag with great course taught by the greats.

I highly recommend attending the Acres conference they have every year, I have not yet been able to but have seen the speakers else were and they are all amazing.

Some greats are Hugh Lovel, Arden Anderson, Neil Kinsey, Steve Solomon, Michael Astera, John Kempf, Dan Kittredge Jeff Lowenfelds and many others

There are also the past greats (which have been dicussed before) Carey Reams, William Albretch, Rudolf Stiener,Bruce Tanio Charles Walters, Fletcher Sims Dr Dan Skow and Phil Callighan

This is where I have gained my base knowledge of all things biological. Amongst those names are countless years of understanding the finer aspects of soil, plants and life.

Funny Story about "Institutes of education"..
2 Years ago I attended the Northeast Organic Farming Association summer conference at the University of Amherst MA. There were a couple of great classes of soil biology and soil testing taught by some of the people mentioned above. I guess there was the head of the UMASS soil testing dept in those classes. I guess he didn't like what he heard about trace minerals and how UMASS testing sucks because they do not give trace mineral recommendations and everyone should use a more prominent testing service like logan labs.
Later in the year they wanted to have a advanced soil class with John Kemp and Dan Kitterage, but Umass said they could not have it there because of what was said in those classes and what will be taught is not proven and beyond the scope of the Umass soil Dept.

Hows that for education...Big money always wins with mainstream education.

Hope this helps some one all of these have helped me greatly

Timbuktu

 

[CT Guy]

compost tea IS unproven! It hasn't done jack shit over regular organic soil in my testing. Look like the latest MJ-gardening gimmick to be foisted on us by the indoor gardending "industry".

Totally disagree with the guy about chemical pesticides though, there are more organic solutions and predatory insects than ever before. Nowadays every problem has an organic solution.

When I went to college - engineering school - it was known that most of the professors were basically avoiding the real world and the pressures it brings. We were forced to study 10-20 year old technology from these guys because that the last time they worked for a modern, competitive business. And a lot of them had worked for the government, not business, and their skills were even more obsolete.

I encourage everyone I know to do their own experiments, keep records of everything you add or use and what works. I don't care about conventional wisdom, only what works for my situation.

Just because you didn't get results doesn't mean the technology of aerated compost teas is "unproven." There are many real world farmers, horticulturists, cannabis growers, and backyard gardeners that use it on a regular basis due to the noticeable BENEFITS that they experience.

If you do your research, you'll see that ACT didn't come from the MJ or indoor gardening industry, but rather from organic agriculture. There are a few university studies now showing the benefits of ACT relating to plant health and plant growth, and some on disease suppression.

Granted, there are some companies that are exploiting it (Vermicrop would by my example in the MJ industry), but the same thing happens with seaweed, humic acid, molasses, etc... Maybe people just need to be more intelligent consumers?

Please don't make blanket statements about something that you're not informed on, as other people read this forum and may think you know what you're talking about...

 

[Durdy]

Mulesinker - Can you describe how your making your teas? What are your inputs? How long do you brew it for?

Also after taking some horticultural classes at a local community college I find the course information to be incredibly basic. The majority of the things covered are subjects we discuss here on a regular basis.

I really feel one could learn more with some good books, an internet connection, and a small plot of dirt to grow some plants.

The teacher is the same for all the classes and is a pretty cool guy. He's very open to receiving new information and will add information sent to him into the lectures if he likes it.

I talk to many friends about my negative feelings towards institutionalized schooling, and the vibe I get from most of them is that if it weren't for the structure school gives they wouldn't take the initiative to learn anything on their own.

 

[RanchoDeluxe]

The info I received in my class was very basic, but I knew it would be that way going into it. It was supposed to be non-biased on the organic/chem topic. I found the organic info to be misleading at best. Then I started to wonder WHY?
Is it really just all the cash these Universities are receiving from the petro/chem/ag biz??
I don't want this to be a debate on whether or not you should go to college.
I want to know if you believe/experienced misinformation at an institutional level.
Just Curious.

 

[Durdy]

Got it Rancho

The information in my classes is good, they give a good perspective on both organics and chemical farming / horticulture / permaculture.

 

[Weird]

Postwar Fertilizer Explodes


During the 1940s, fertilizer exploded in more ways than one. During the war, nitrogen was one of the prime components of TNT and other high explosives, and the U.S. government built 10 new plants to supply nitrogen for bombs. After the war, those plants produced ammonia for fertilizer. Fertilizer use exploded, in part because the supply was there and in part because farmers and scientists understood how important nutrients were to crops.

Modern science tells us that growing plants need at least 16 nutrients to be healthy.

•Primary nutrients are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, known by the chemical symbols of N, P and K.
•Secondary nutrients are calcium, magnesium and sulfur.
•Micronutrients include boron, chlorine, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum and zinc.
•Other nutrients that are easily available in the environment include carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. These last three do not need to be supplied by fertilizers.

Farmers have known for centuries that soil doesn't necessarily contain all of the nutrients that plants need. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew that manure spread on fields helped crop production immensely. Arab civilizations collected the written knowledge about farming. Somewhere along the line, farmers realized that ground up bones provided nutrients. By 1815, England was importing so many bones for bone meal that people on the Continent starting complaining:

"England is robbing all other countries of their fertility. Already in her eagerness for bones, she has turned up the battlefields of Leipsic, and Waterloo, and of Crimea; already from the catacombs of Sicily she has carried away skeletons of many successive generations. Annually she removes from the shores of other countries to her own the manorial equivalent of three million and a half of men... Like a vampire she hangs from the neck of Europe."

Bird droppings, known by the Spanish name guano, became popular fertilizers in the U.S. in the 1800s. The effectiveness of all of these early fertilizers was tested by trial and error experiments by farmers and later scientists.

It was not until the last two centuries that chemists began to understand which specific chemical elements were supplied by materials like guano and bone meal. By the 1940s, plant scientists at land grant colleges and research facilities at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) had the list of 16 essential ingredients for plant growth. The only problem was figuring out how to produce enough nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. The three primary nutrients were needed in quantities approaching the millions of tons by 1940.






In the early part of the 20th Century, potassium was mined from potash deposits, and the largest were in Germany. As World War I approached, U.S. officials began the systematic "Great Potash Search of 1910-1914." For a time, the brine encrusted lakes in the Nebraska Sand Hills became a major source of potash for America. That industry collapsed after the war when Germany started exporting again. By 1940, new sources had been discovered in Canada, and there were chemical processes coming on line to supply potassium.

By 1940, phosphorus was also being produced by chemical processes and by mining phosphate rock. In the 1940s, the use of "normal superphosphate" fertilizers peaked. In later decades, it was replaced by triple superphosphate and ammonium phosphates.

Nitrogen production got the biggest boost from World War II developments. Nitrogen is, of course, one of the main ingredients in explosives. During the 1930s, the U.S. government spent millions of dollars researching how to produce nitrogen from the air we breathe. That process requires a lot of electricity, so some of the first plants were built near hydroelectric dams in the TVA. The nitrogen produced took the chemical form of ammonia.





When World War II started, the government constructed 10 new plants to produce ammonia for munitions. All were located in the interior of the country. Several of the plants were built alongside natural gas pipelines so they could use the gas as raw material for their production. By the end of the war, these new plants and the old ones were producing 730,000 tons of ammonia each year, and had the capacity of producing 1.6 million tons.

When the nitrogen was no longer needed for bombs, what were they going to do with all this capacity? The answer was, use the nitrogen-rich ammonia for fertilizing the nation's crops.

Stan Jensen says nitrogen fertilizer production "really took off" after the war. "Nitrogen fertilizer was a huge factor in the yield increases that began [then]."

As more and more farmers were planting most of their farms in one or two major cash crops, fewer and fewer were rotating their crops. They had to artificially build back the nitrogen that corn, wheat, soybeans or cotton pulled out. The source was there, but there was some work still to do on how to apply ammonia to the fields.

During the 1940s, most of the ammonia was applied as solid ammonium nitrate pellets. But this form is highly explosive. In fact, ammonium nitrate mixed with fuel oil is a common explosive still used in mines. There were several disasters where the material exploded in ships or other transports.

By the mid 40s, researchers were exploring ways to apply anhydrous ammonia directly into the soil. It won't explode, but it has to be kept under pressure and usually refrigerated. It can "burn" skin by drying it severely, and it can crowd out oxygen in a closed area and even cause death by asphyxiation. But, anhydrous ammonia has the highest nutrient content of any fertilizer. It's 82.5 percent nitrogen.

So, in 1943, researchers at the Mississippi Agricultural Experiment Station came up with a way of injecting anhydrous into the soil. They used a knife-like applicator with an iron pipe welded on the back of it to inject the material five or six inches below the soil. Then adisc hiller followed immediately behind to cover the channel and trap the anhydrous in the soil. This method of ammonia application overtook the pellets by 1960 and still predominates in the Great Plains today.



John Steingard (left) says that some farmers used too much fertilizer when anhydrous ammonia first came out. "We just put on a lot of it because the more we put on the better the crop, it seemed like. Now, its more controlled."

Holly Miller (right) saw the explosion of fertilizer use first hand. After the war, Holly opened a seed business in York, and he believed in educating farmers about the new technologies. "I had meetings all the time, every year," he says. "Of course, education is excellent. My theory of education is no better than the application of it."

By 1950, the annual capacity for ammonia production had shot up from 1.6 million tons in 1946 to 2.6 million tons. Artificial fertilizers combined with new hybrid crops, new pesticides and developments in irrigation to produce an explosion in crop yields and production.

 

[Weird]

big chem companies like dow own the market and dont want their income streams disturbed and they have the power to infleunce many institutions

 

[amannamedtruth]

Hear Krishnamurti

I am going to ask you something. Why are you being educated? Do you understand my question? Your parents send you to school. You attend classes, you learn mathematics, you learn geography, you learn history. Why? Have you ever asked why you want to be educated, what is the point of being educated? What is the point of your passing examinations and getting degrees? Is it to get married, get a job and settle down in life as millions and millions of people do? Is that what you are going to do, is that the meaning of education? Do you understand what I am talking about?

This is really a very serious question. The whole world is questioning the basis of education. We see what education has been used for. Human beings throughout the world - whether in Russia or in China or in America or in Europe or in this country - are being educated to conform, to fit into society and into their culture, to fit into the stream of social and economic activity, to be sucked into that vast stream that has been flowing for thousands of years. Is that education, or is education something entirely different?

Can education see to it that the human mind is not drawn into that vast stream and so destroyed; see that the mind is never sucked into that stream; so that, with such a mind, you can be an entirely different human being with a different quality to life? Are you going to be educated that way? Or are you going to allow your parents, society, to dictate to you so that you become pad of the stream of society?

Real education means that a human mind, your mind, not only is capable of being excellent in mathematics, geography and history, but also can never, under any circumstances, be drawn into the stream of society. Because that stream which we call living, is very corrupt, is immoral, is violent, is greedy. That stream is our culture. So, the question is how to bring about the right kind of education so that the mind can withstand all temptations, all influences, the bestiality of this civilization and this culture. We have come to a point in history where we have to create a new culture, a totally different kind of existence, not based on consumerism and industrialization, but a culture based upon a real quality of religion.

Now how does one bring about, through education, a mind that is entirely different, a mind that is not greedy, not envious? How does one create a mind that is not ambitious, that is extraordinarily active, efficient; that has a real perception of what is true in daily life which is after all religion.

-J. Krishnamurti

 

[amannamedtruth]

On a sidenote, its been shown that compost tea is a great plant stimulant when watered, and surely foliar fed, but the active microbes in the tea are hardly effective at preventing pathogen and pests, they simply nourish a plant to health levels well enough to resist them.

 

[CT Guy]

On a sidenote, its been shown that compost tea is a great plant stimulant when watered, and surely foliar fed, but the active microbes in the tea are hardly effective at preventing pathogen and pests, they simply nourish a plant to health levels well enough to resist them.

Did you read the study I posted? Personally I may not tout the disease suppressive ness of ACT but there are favorable studies that support this.

And yes Rancho the issue is money. Monsanto and big chem companies fund much of the university studies. The costs of the studies can be very high and most organic companies can't afford the research on that level.