Healthy Soils, Healthy People; The Legacy of William Albrecht [View all]

[JohnyCanuck]

Text of 2011 Albrecht Lecture

Healthy Soils, Healthy People; The Legacy of William Albrecht

John Ikerd

William Albrecht was still Chairman of the Soils Department and a familiar name in the College of Agriculture when I first arrived on the MU campus in the fall of 1957. I recall a friend who was a bit offended because Albrecht seemed to be questioning the intelligence of people, like him, who been raised on food from the “worn out” soils of South Georgia. We students weren’t aware of the larger controversy surrounding Albrecht’s work linking the health of soils to the health of people. While President of the Soil Science Society in 1938, he had written in the Yearbook of Agriculture ”A declining soil fertility, due to a lack of organic material, major elements, and trace minerals, is responsible for poor crops and in turn for pathological conditions in animals fed deficient foods from such soils, and mankind is no exception."[1] My soils instructor, Prof. E. R. Graham, stuck pretty close to the physics, chemistry, and biology of soils. I don’t recall him ever mentioning Albrecht’s work linking soil health and human health. Perhaps he didn’t want to endure the professional criticism Albrecht received for venturing beyond the narrow bounds of his disciple. The University of Missouri had plant and animal scientists to worry about the health of plants and animals and an entire medical school to deal with the health of people. Professor Albrecht was admonished to restrict his observations to the health of soils.

Perhaps his most controversial, most important, study was a review of World War II era dental records of 70,000 U.S. sailors. He linked the health of sailors’ teeth to the health of soils in their native regions of the U.S. In those days, people mostly ate foods grown on local farms or at least grown in their respective regions of the country. He concluded, “If all other body irregularities as well as those of the teeth were so viewed, it is highly probable that many of our diseases would be interpreted as degenerative troubles originating in nutritional deficiencies going back to insufficient fertility of the soil.”[2] With the end of World War II, Albrecht called for a major national initiative to restore the health and fertility of America’s “worn out” soils.

Instead, the nation’s agricultural priorities shifted to producing more and cheaper food. Albrecht anticipated that reliance on commercial fertilizers to increase production would degrade both soil health and human health. He was particularly concerned with an overemphasis on nitrogen, prosperous, and potash (N, P, & K), would lead to depletion of trace minerals, such as manganese, copper, boron, zinc, iodine, and chlorine, and degrade basic soil health. He wrote "N P K formulas, as legislated and enforced by State Departments of Agriculture mean malnutrition, attack by insects, bacteria and fungi, weed takeover, crop loss in dry weather, and general loss of mental acuity in the population, leading to degenerative metabolic disease and early death."[3]

SNIP

I identify with William Albrecht, both personally and professionally. I had to break free of the narrow bounds of agricultural economics when I began to explore the larger and more important questions of agricultural sustainability. I was a respected agricultural economist at the time: Head of the Department of Extension Agricultural Economics and President of the Southern Agricultural Economics Association. I felt the sting of academic rejection and marginalization whenever I raised questions related to crop science, animal science, soils science, ecology, sociology, or philosophy. I never claimed to be an expert in any academic area other than my own. Like Albrecht, however, I knew I needed to understand enough about rest of agriculture, society, and humanity to understand how and why a dysfunctional agricultural economy was degrading the sustainability of agriculture and threatening the future of humanity. My work in sustainable agriculture led me to the work of William Albrecht.

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