Grass Roots of Healthy Hay - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Defining Fertility

“It is in these fundamental body-building, life-propagating aspects of making proteins in the vegetation that the soil elements of fertility take over control.”                                                        

                                                                        -Dr. William A. Albrecht, Ph.D

 

To become fully nutritious food for livestock, grass requires some 20 or so inorganic  elements in balanced ratios.  Grass, being a powerhouse of protein production, requires ALL these essential elements to compound nutrients for its own growth and reproduction.  Any missing element, major or minor, will be the limiting factor in providing complete nutrition for the grazing animal, as well as for the plant’s own health.  The list of minerals seems to vary with the source of the information, but for the most part they are as follows:

 

 

Major Elements

• Nitrogen (N)
• Phosphorus (P)
• Potassium (K)
• Calcium (Ca)
• Magnesium (Mg)
• Sulphur (S)

Minor Elements

• Iron (Fe)
• Boron (B)
• Copper (Cu)
• Manganese (Mn)
• Zinc (Zn)
• Molybdenum (Mo)
• Chlorine (Cl)

In addition, other non-mineral elements are Carbon (C), Hydrogen (H) and Oxygen (O)

 

For animal health, we can add to the list of soil-derived nutritional elements:

• Sodium (Na)
• Iodine (I)
• Cobalt (Co)
• Selenium (Se)

Grass produces sugars and starches, literally, from air, water and sunshine, through the process of photosynthesis.  These the grass uses for its own energy and growth.

Photosynthesis is defined as “the production of organic substances, chiefly sugars, from carbon dioxide and water occurring in green plant cells supplied with enough light to allow chlorophyll to aid in the transformation of the radiant energy (from the sun) into a chemical form.”

So basically, sugars and starches are above-ground stuff.  What about all the other stuff?  The proteins?  The vitamins?  The enzymes?  The antioxidants?  That’s all below ground stuff.  Without all the essential soil minerals, the nutrition factory in the grass doesn’t produce much more than sugar.

Grass plants require the inorganic elements of the soil to build those life-sustaining nutrients.  That is why it is so important that our animals get as many of their dietary minerals from the plants they eat instead of from a mineral box.  Dr. Albrecht put it this way:

Plants make carbohydrates from air and water by means of chlorophyll, itself an enzyme composed of organic and inorganic materials, with an atom of magnesium (from the soil!) at its heart. The plant uses some of the carbs to build roots, stems and leaves.  Roots bring up nutrients from the soil. Leaves capture solar energy for photosynthesis.  Some carbohydrates (sugars) are starter compounds for conversion into proteins.  Another part of the carbohydrate supply is used as energy to bring that conversion about.

This conversion is called biosynthesis.  Biosynthesis is defined as The formation of chemical compounds by the cells of living organisms. The plant requires all the inorganic elements of the soil, to biosynthesize the products of four above-ground nutrients (carbs), into all the essential nutrition required by our animals.

In this way, the presence or absence of all the soil minerals governs the health of our animals.

But many of these nutrients do not actually contain minerals!  That is because the grass uses the minerals as catalysts in the biosynthesis of nutrients.

A catalyst in nature is a substance which can cause or accelerate a chemical reaction without being altered itself in the process.  Thus, few of the minerals that catalyze the biosynthesis of an amino acid or vitamin will actually be present in that nutrient.  Exceptions include magnesium, which is found in every molecule of protein, and sulphur, which is contained in sulphur-bearing amino acids such as methionine.

As catalysts, minerals assist in the construction, or biosynthesis of complex nutrients within the grass plants, then go on to perform other functions within the plant, without being changed themselves.  Therefore, whenever an animal eats a blade of grass, it not only ingests the necessary mineral, but also additional phyto (plant) nutrients that the minerals helped create. The animal cannot use the minerals to create these nutrients for itself.  They MUST come from plants. This is why mineral supplementation will never be a match for mineral-rich forage.

Grand Theft Mineral – How Soils Become Depleted

When you buy hay from someone else’s farm, or sell hay or meat or milk off your farm, you must realize that you are responsible for a kind of theft.  Every blade of grass in that hay, every pound of that meat or milk contains a little of the soil fertility – the minerals – that originated in the farmer’s field.  If you buy hay for your animals from another farm, you have relocated, or more correctly “translocated” the calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, and all the other minerals contained within that hay, to your manure pile.  If you spread that manure on your own field, you have “stolen” fertility from someone else’s field.  If you pay to have the manure hauled away, those minerals are lost forever at the bottom of a landfill.  If you pile the manure up on a distant part of the farm, those minerals are weathering away or accumulating in the soil, perhaps leaching into the groundwater under the pile in toxic amounts.

An “average” grass hay contains about 5% of its dry matter in the form of inorganic minerals that the living grass extracted from the farmer’s soil. That means that for every 20 pounds of hay your animals eats, approximately one pound of it is inorganic  minerals!

To visualize this, go to your fireplace or barbecue and scoop out a pound of the gray, powdery ash.  Do not include the charcoal.  If you have your hay analyzed, the sample you sent to the lab may have been burned to ash just like the fireplace ash,  and evaluated for the inorganic minerals that the hay carried with it from the farmer’s field.

That doesn’t sound like a very smart way to evaluate the actual nutritional value of the hay does it?  It gets worse. As we go through the chapters, we’ll explore ways of linking some of those mineral numbers on a hay analysis to give us a better understanding of the true quality of the hay.

Let’s get back to our illustration of soil mineral “theft”.  If you feed 20 pounds of dry hay to your horse every day, 365 days per year, and 5% of that hay is inorganic minerals, the horse is ingesting 365 pounds per year of inorganic elements from the farmer’s field! If your horse lives 25 years on the same amount of hay every day, that one horse has mined 9125 pounds of nutritional inorganic  minerals – ash - from the farmer’s field. That’s four and one half tons!

If the farmer’s acre of hay ground contains 2,000,000 pounds of topsoil, and the hay fed to the above horse was all produced on that one acre, the uptake and subsequent translocation of nutritional inorganic minerals would be about 0.5% of the minerals by weight of the topsoil on that one acre, by that one horse over its lifetime. Erosion, rain and irrigation take a little more.

Let’s pencil it out further. If that acre of ground is used to feed one horse at a time over a period of 100 years (that might very well be only FOUR horses), the loss of minerals from that acre becomes unimaginable. By the end of 100 years of such treatment, feed-quality grass would not grow because it has been starved out.  All that remains are weeds and brush.

Soil depletion, then, is the continuous extraction of soil minerals from uptake by crops, and translocation away from where the crops were grown. Depletion is also caused by the forces of rain, wind and irrigation.

If we are losing calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium and choride, sulphur, and trace elements via these mechanisms, doesn’t it make sense to put them back?  How else are we to produce nutritious grass for our animals?

Indirect Mineral Deficiencies

Ironically, the opposite of mineral depletion can occur on mismanaged soils which receive excessive quantities of manure or chemical fertilizers. If you have 20 horses on a ten acre farm, and all their hay is purchased from some other farm, and  all the manure is spread on the same field, year after year, huge quantities of some minerals, notably potassium, will build up to toxic levels.  (“Toxic” in this context, means excessive levels which may produce symptoms of disease in the grazing animal.) As we will see, this overabundance of some minerals will cause the unavailability of others, which results in an entirely different kind of “depletion.”  The result is the same, deficient grass, which makes deficient hay, which gives animals nutritional deficiency diseases. 

 

Disease as a Symptom of Nutritional Deficiency

Diseases  frequently have no specifically identifiable agent, such as a virus or bacterium. These diseases take many forms.  We call them grass tetany, milk fever and equine metabolic syndrome to name a few, but the more we know about soil minerals the more these diseases begin to look suspiciously like nutritional deficiency.

Some nutritional deficiency symptoms so closely mimic a disease with a causative agent such as parasites, that an attending vet may entirely reject the possibility of a deficiency and insist on treating the symptoms with more drugs even in the absence of the identifiable agent. This has been our personal experience.  A copper deficiency mimicked parasitism in our sheep, with scouring diarrhea and wasting. Because the vets are only concerned with copper toxicity in sheep, they prescribed as much as five times the label recommendations of wormer for the sheep, despite the fact that there were no parasite eggs present in the fecals.  The notion of copper deficiency was scorned outright, and disbelief remained even after the sheep recovered when their feed was supplemented with copper. 

How to Grow Nutritionally Deficient Hay

Because so much of agriculture is based on yield instead of quality, we continue to crop depleted land with the addition of fertilizers which feed plants directly.  The dead soil is then simply an anchor for plant roots, and soluble fertilizers are supplied directly to plant roots in irrigation water.  The resulting crop may be a very good approximation of hay, heavy in biomass, poor in nutritional complexity.  Crops  grown for heavy yield on such soils, whether grass or grain, are known for their high carbohydrate, low protein nutritional content. Hay grown this way will contain plenty of non-protein nitrogen which is reported on an analysis as Crude Protein.  Health problems cannot be far behind when animals are forced to eat this kind of hay.

Forcing Change

Independent thinking and research by the observant farmer on his own behalf are discouraged these days. If his conclusions are not the result of a double-blind study, then they are irrelevant. We have handed over our responsibilities and decision making to the so-called “experts.”  This has something to do with the considerable difficulty we find ourselves in at present.

The livestock owner who is battling various degenerative diseases such as equine metabolic syndrome and arthritis needs to understand why grass, the natural food of grazing animals, can cause degenerative disease, even though they may not be presently engaged in growing their own hay.  This includes the sugary, starchy hay that is causing the epidemic of insulin resistance and Metabolic Syndrome in horses. It includes grass tetany and milk fever in ruminants, and even arthritis and inexplicable broken bones and parasite infestations. It may begin to turn our thinking away from the catch-all blame on “bad genetics” to redefine the role of nutrition in disease prevention in general. It always pays to know the enemy.   Perhaps the book needs to be passed along to the person who grows your hay.  Even some farmers view their soil as merely an anchor for plant roots, and that producing large quantities of pretty green hay is their only goal.  If that hay makes our animals sick, that’s our problem. Farmers get paid for tonnage, not nutritional quality.

Everybody who eats food ought to be aware that veggies and fruits also need to “eat” and that the starvation diet offered up by yield-based agriculture promotes the same kinds of degenerative diseases for humans that are attacking our livestock.  After reading this book, you might want to consider growing a garden on the same principles that grow nutritionally dense forage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summary

•            Forage plants require a balance of soil minerals in order to produce complete nutrition for grazing animals

•            Plants first photosynthesize sugars and starches from air, sunshine and water for their own growth and energy requirements.

•            Plants then biosynthesize the “starter compounds of sugars and starches into amino acids, enzymes, vitamins, antioxidants, etc.

•            Plants require  approximately 18 soil minerals to catalyze this biosynthesis.

•            Minerals are not usually present in the “phyto (plant) nutrients” that they help catalyze into existence.

•            Any missing soil mineral, including trace minerals, will be the limiting factor in producing complete animal nutrition.

•            Some soil mineral deficiencies can be caused by excesses of other minerals.

•            Diseases without a causative agent may actually be nutritional deficiencies.

•            “Biological” approaches to fertility are based on balanced levels of soil minerals which promote soil microbial health.  “Nutrition” takes precedence over “yield.”

•            Every agricultural product sold off the farm that produced it “translocates” soil fertility away from the farm.

•            “Soil depletion” is the continuous extraction of soil minerals by crops, nature and irrigation.  In order to produce nutrient dense feeds and foods, these minerals must be replaced in a program of balanced soil “remineralization.”

•            All fruits and vegetables for human consumption require the same type of balanced soil fertility as forages to produce nutrient dense food for human consumption.