Guess What's Missing From Your Food (and Thus from You)?

Ocean Grown is a Florida company that harvests ocean water far off the eastern coast of Florida and concentrates it for dilution (1:100) as a soil amendment and plant/grass/tree fertilizer. I visited their offices in Naples several years ago when they first began work and almost joined up I was so excited about what they were doing. I've been using Ocean Grown Solution to water my wheatgrass and garden ever since.

Why ocean water? Because it contains the perfect balance of the 90+ chemical elements found in nature, all of which should (in a perfect world) appear in the earth's crust (soil) and in the foods grown in that soil. (Different plants need and select different minerals from the soil.) Dr. Maynard Murray, the "father" of the ocean-water-as-nutrient idea, in his book Sea Energy Agriculture, described plants and their fruit as nothing more than conduits for getting minerals out of the soil into the human body (which gives new insight to Genesis 1:19: "for dust you are and to dust you will return").

The demineralization of the earth's soil, through wind and water erosion, poor agriculture practices, and failure to replenish, has led to nutrient-poor foods which has contributed to the lack of vitality and health in those who feed upon them. This is one of the main reasons to eat organically-grown foods as opposed to conventionally-grown—organic farmers (generally) make an effort to add back to the soil more than they take from it through composting, deep-root cover cropping (some grasses and legumes can send roots as deep as 20 feet below the surface, bringing fresh supplies of minerals to a plant's foliage which is then plowed back into the top few inches of the soil ready to be taken up new crops), remineralization, and proper tillage.

In one of their recent magazine ads, Ocean Grown produced the following color-coded periodic table of the elements, the headline stating that earth's soil used to contain every chemical element in this chart (except the two yellow ones). They then ask, "See the BLACK ones? Those are the ones listed on your fertilizer bag."

Everyone who has fertilized their yard or garden is familiar with the three numbers on the bag of fertilizer, e.g., 10-10-10. Those are the three chemicals represent by the black boxes on the chart: nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P), and potassium (K). A nineteenth-century German scientist, Justus von Liebig, the "father of modern fertilizer," set in motion the discoveries that led to the realization that plants could grow with adequate N, P, and K alone—especially N. But what about the other 87 elements? Plants will grow without all the elements they ideally need, but not robustly. And neither will humans and other animals who feed on mineral-deficient plants. (Obviously, all soil contains some minerals. The point is that most/all soils today are unbalanced and deficient in mineral content.)

This post isn't an advertisement for Ocean Grown. But the three black boxes in the periodic table from their ad point out the deficiency of most modern fertilizers that are lacking the majority of chemical elements that are needed for healthy soil, healthy plants, and health beings. Fortunately, companies like Ocean Grown (and now others) are providing remineralizing products via ocean water, and other companies have been providing remineralizing amendments (trace minerals harvested from dried sea beds) for gardeners and farmers to add back to their soil (products like Azomite, Planters II trace minerals, and others). The more complete the mineral balance in our soil the more resources our bodies have to work with in maintaining health via the foods grown in those soils.