Nutrient-dense food is key for optimal health, and for this you need healthy soil. More specifically, without the proper minerals in the soil, the plants cannot reach their genetic potential. Dr. August Dunning is chief science officer a company that specializes in mineral products for hydroponics and home gardens.

He’s also associated with one of the premiere technical universities in the world, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and has developed some truly groundbreaking ionic mineral products, extracted from ocean water, for use in sustainable agriculture.

“I started working with the platinum-group elements (PGEs) at Caltech. I found some really interesting characteristics in ionic form of the elements, and found that that’s the only form of element that works in plants, because plants can only pass ions and small molecules through the pumps in the cell surfaces,” he says.

Many experts now warn that nearly all commercial agricultural topsoil around the world will be lost in the next 60 years if practices don’t change. This makes soil regeneration a vitally important issue.

Why Are Soil Minerals so Important?

In the soil, minerals provide an essential ingredient for most enzyme systems to function properly. Without the appropriate minerals an otherwise perfectly produced enzyme will not work and provide nutrients to the plant, or protect it from pests.

This is one of the reasons that Roundup (glyphosate) works. It binds up important minerals like zinc, manganese, and many others making them unavailable to the plant.

Soil can also be viewed as an interface between biology and geology. Minerals have electronic valence potentials that attract, mediate, and moderate enzymes to be used in other processes. Without minerals, metabolic enzymatic processes cannot occur.

This is why when minerals are added back to the soil you will frequently see massive increases in plant growth. On the other side of the coin, decreases in yield and poor plant growth are associated with modern agricultural techniques that strip too many minerals from the soil.

For ground cover, mulch of wood chips or other biomass can be used for smaller areas. In commercial settings, a cocktail cover crop is an important strategy that will help promote remineralization of the soil by increasing soil microbes that will extract the minerals from the soil.

Nitrogen-fixing crops, such as alfalfa and other grasses, actually have specific bacteria growing on their roots that can grind up rock, thereby producing minerals that support the biome and the soil subsurface to correctly decompose.

“‘There’s always a balance in what’s going on in the soil. There’s this huge amount of bacterial diversity and an enormous amount of enzymatic production,’ Dr. Dunning says.

‘If you have good bacteria, they’re going to have great enzymes, which can help incorporate these minerals and the nutrients in the plants.

What you’re trying to do with these cover crops is two things: to control moisture loss, because when you just have bare fields, it dries up and your soil blows away.

But if you do multiple types and different types of crops, you can have this huge plethora of biological diversity. That allows all sorts of things to develop in that soil or the plants in the soil while you’re not cropping more food.’”

Cocktail cover cropping with dozens of different species is different from crop rotation, where you would typically grow a crop for three years, and then for a year you allow the field to go fallow and just plant weeds.

The key for healthy soil that cocktail cover crops provide is diversity. Growing a wide variety of flowering plants that flower at different times also provides plenty of food for plant pollinators.

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