Scavenging
We need to understand the central importance of scavenging. We need to understand what it tells us and what it accomplishes. Scavenging is the recycling end of health.
Two tiny examples or metaphors to guide us. Surgeons use maggots to clean infected wounds. The maggots perfectly consume infected tissue and stop right there. And plagues of locusts that, in our imagination, consume everything in their path actually consume the plants in one field down to the roots and leave the next field untouched.
Brix
I have acquired kit for measuring Brix in plants. Brix is an old notion that was invented to measure directly the health of a plant. It uses sap from a plant and measures the amount of sugar in the sap to tell us about how well the plant is photosynthesising. Photosynthesising is what a plant does: if it does it well the plant can be seen to be healthy; if it photosynthesises poorly we know the plant is sick.
This is not a minor issue. Glyphosate for instance reduces the ability of plants to photosynthesise, thus contributing to global warming as they process less carbon dioxide. Glyphosate in the US is even in rain water.
On the first time round this loop, we note that insects, fungi, nematodes etc., the pests that growers are concerned about, do not attack healthy plants. An attack on plants correlates exactly with the health, or lack of it, in the plants. And we can measure the Brix level of plants and predict accurately which plants are vulnerable and which are not, even when there is no visible sign of poor plant health.
It is a bit drastic to know after the locusts have eaten every last stalk that your crop was not healthy, but that is precisely the case. We need to note that poor health in crops is the rule rather than the exception, so that locusts eating everything in their path can indeed be the case.
My particular interest in Brix is not (Welsh) locusts but soil. A plant can only be healthy in healthy soil, and healthy plants indicate that the soil is indeed healthy. This is going to be the focus of our argument here: we cannot get to a healthy plant via fertilisers and fungicides and pesticides: that route simply does not, and indeed cannot, work.
Of course this loop closes, and the fertilisers and pesticides can be seen to damage the soil in ways that makes future plant health even more difficult.
Ecosystems again
The soil is a fantastically complex ecosystem. There is a vast diversity of microbes and more complex creatures that all interact to maintain the soil environment. The soil’s structure, even to the naked eye, is entirely the product of microbes and their activity, interacting with the roots of plants. A healthy soil has a flourishing diversity of microbes and without that diversity it cannot support healthy plants.
People trained in agriculture and horticulture mostly regard the soil as a chemical process. Certain elements and compounds are seen in chemical analysis to be necessary for plant growth. There has been an extrapolation from this finding to supply any missing chemicals as fertilisers. Visibly sick plants can indeed be rescued by this approach, but it is the equivalent of force feeding the plants and cannot lead to a stable health of plant and soil. A Brix measurement will tell you.
It is really difficult from the chemical viewpoint to see where the problem lies, but there is a world of difference between saying that a chemical is missing from the soil and saying that the microbes that should be supplying it are not working properly. Just because we don’t understand all the roles that microbes play is no reason not to feed them and let them do their job: quite the opposite.
The role of scavengers
What on earth can be positive about losing your crop to aphids, as I did the first season in my polytunnel? What is the infestation, the attack, telling us? This is not random bad luck; it is a predictable destruction of sick plants. The destruction of the plants is indeed scavenging and will feed the microbes that will repair the soil!
The plants feed the soil by releasing into the soil by various mechanisms sugar from their photosynthesising. The soil and its microbes will in return bring minerals and water to the plants. The scavenging mechanisms are there to short-circuit this mechanism to bring the soil back to health more quickly. The plants that are working poorly are cannibalised. Note that if you are growing a monoculture then scavenging is likely to be all-or-nothing.
I learnt in reading up about research in this field that I can kick-start the microbial life of the soil simply by supplying sugar! Feeding the microbes in the soil is a much better route to plant health than trying to feed the plants directly. Who would have thought that?
What scavengers do is get the things that are needed to the right place in the wider system. Dung beetles bury dung, changing it from a problem for grass at the surface to a brilliant resource of much-needed nutrients below the surface. Notice that human systems typically do the opposite, removing things that would otherwise be resources to places where they are a toxic problem.
The read-across
Animals and human animals are not plants. And the things that attack plants are not the same as the things that attack animals and humans. But there is much in common too. A virus is a virus in both domains and it does virus things for virus reasons.
We have to wonder what the analogue is of only sick plants being attacked by various things that can be thought of as scavengers. We are happy to describe carnivores picking off the weaker members of their prey species. We know absolutely that various indicators of poor health, obesity being the most popular, are predictors of illness or various sorts.
It is also true that we cannot medicate ourselves to health. Drugs and supplements do not lead to thriving. We cannot feed and tend the human being directly to deliver health, despite the immense attraction of this route to a certain sort of person. We can, however, say unequivocally that eating food that comes from a thriving soil ecosystem usually results in healthy people.
We are troubled by a virus, Covid, that attacks people who are metabolically unhealthy. I would go out on the limb and say that the prevalence of people with poor metabolic health has allowed the virus to become a pandemic and to mutate repeatedly. We have provided a substrate for the virus to flourish. It is because we do not understand about scavenging in the wider system that we are blind to what we are doing, and blind to the limitations of our responses that are so gutless in their effectiveness. We are not yet removing the fuel from the fire.
Back to Brix
In some areas like hill farms in Wales, Brix value are poor, sometimes very poor. I understand the highest Brix values are from soils the buffaloes roamed in the mid-West. That doesn’t take us very far beyond saying that some soils are poor and some are damaged, indeed some are ruined.
The fence line between a crop in East Africa that the locusts ate and one that they didn’t indicates that this is a management problem. I have seen similar dramatic fence lines between areas too arid for much in the way of plants life and areas that are relatively lush, again just down to management, mostly of animals and grazing. The answer to my Welsh soil problem lies in the management of grazing: I just don’t know how to do it yet!
I am retired. There is a point of view that says I should have my feet up. The Brix levels of the grass in the pasture here says that the health of me and my family lies in how I move the sheep and goats and what I need to pay attention to in doing so. I choose to care for the (poor, hill) soil but I know that human health rests directly on it and one will improve with the other. It is as accurate to say that the grass is managing me as the other way round. Moving electric fences every three days on steep ground is labour intensive.
I hadn’t heard of Brix. Farmers don’t know about the critical biodiversity of soil. Government policies and projects aren’t targeted on anything fundamental and are hobbled by needing “scale”. I spoke to a local farmer the other day trying to do something closely related to my project here and it is hard to get the nature of the challenge into focus.
Scavenging and healthcare
The surgeon’s maggots are very much the exception. Healthcare is very largely about resisting and reversing scavenging activity. This is a moral and ethical minefield: we cannot abandon people to be scavenged, although that is what triage decisions are about. We try desperately hard to counter the effects of poor metabolic health. Metabolic health is about whether we can process the food we provide for our bodies, that we eat. From this perspective what we do is weird: we spend thousands of pounds on drugs to counter what a few pounds spent on good food would sort out.
Have a think about ecosystems and how they deal with problems that threaten them. What can possibly happen other than a scavenging of the sick part of the system to feed the healthy parts? The feeling that you get when you realise we are desperately propping up something that can only collapse. The feeling that the propping up can only make the inevitable collapse worse. Our public health fails twice over. Firstly by giving advice that makes people sick and prey to medicine. Secondly by doubling down on medical solutions when they are making things worse.
The Covid pandemic reveals the faultlines in our population health. It shows clearly that a majority of the population are on a trajectory that makes their health unsustainable. We could see this anyway but we had grown accustomed to it, to people getting more and more obese, to steady growth in people suffering long term conditions, to the quality of life declining. The virus merely makes this acute. Reform or be scavenged, unacceptable thought that point of view is.
Brix does not suffer from ethical ambivalence. Plants can be clearly seen to be healthy and healthy plants absolutely do not get scavenged. The human equivalent is probably the signs of metabolic syndrome, or indeed simply glucose levels in the blood as revealed by a CGM, continuous glucose monitor. If your blood glucose is too high over time you will get ill from one or more of a number of long term conditions. In addition you may be scavenged by something more acute.
And the glucose and associated hormone response, insulin, are actually the agents of the damage caused to your organs, unlike cholesterol which is merely a marker, and a very misleading one at that. Reducing cholesterol may damage your health whereas reducing blood glucose is always a win.
Welsh Brix
All of which is well and good, but if the Brix values of my plants are low, what can I do? As far as I can tell 90% of advice about plants is based in a model that will not improve Brix values and will give me more difficult problems in the medium term. The Welsh hills are, to put it kindly, strongly seasonal. Nothing much grows for six months of the year. Arranging that important parts of soil, plant and animal biodiversity are fed and sustained is a hard problem.
I do know that if I make progress then it is fundamental progress, not papering over the cracks. If I make fundamental progress my own health will track it, it cannot be otherwise. In the end this is a “who am I?” problem not hard science problem. A cholesterol mirage might be fatal.
