Living Soils, Fungal Composting and Health: Short or Full Version
Living Soils, Fungal Composting and Health: Short or Full Version
Living Soils, Fungal Composting and Health: Short or Full Version
Colin Austin 1 Feb 2016 Creative commons this document may be reproduced but the source should be
acknowledged. Information may be used for private use but commercial use requires a license.
I have written this document in two parts. The long version analyses how our health is being
compromised by the food industry and my plans to establish a community project so people
can balance their diet with fresh home grown fruit and vegetables.
If, as I hope, you may be interested sharing your expertise by participating in this community
project you really need to read the long version and understand my ideas on how the project
is organised.
If all you want it to learn a bit more about my fungal composting system then all you need to
do is email me at [email protected] and I will send you the documentation as it is
prepared. This is totally free but there are some conditions to protect the integrity of the
system (as explained in the long version).
The information is supplied on the basis that it is for your private non-commercial use only
and the information will be treated as confidential e.g. not shared or publicised. However I
encourage you to suggest to your friends and contacts that that they contact me so their
name is on the mailing list. This way they will receive the latest and most accurate
information on the system and will avoid the problem that happened with Wicking Beds
where false information became widely spread.
Short version
The food we eat has a dramatic effect on our health. In the modern food system mega
corporations heavily promote highly processed food full of sugars, fats and salt yet low in
essential vitamins and minerals. This is a serious issue leading to the worlds greatest
health crisis resulting from the metabolic crisis, overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes
and cancer etc.
The mega food corporations have large funds and excessive political influence so we cannot
expect Governments to reverse this in the short term.
However Wicking Beds allow virtually anyone to balance their diet with fresh and nutritious
home grown fruit and vegetables. Community action is proposed to where experienced
growers can spread the word and provide support and training for people who have little
experience in growing their own food.
1
Living soil with the essential minerals and nutrients is needed to realise the health benefits, a
component of the proposed community action is to grow the soil based on a system
developed form studying the process of natural soil formation from volcanic lava.
Full version
Preface
The aim is to create community action to grow living soil so we can all enjoy the health
benefits of good food.
I want you to read this stuff - its about protecting you, your family and friends health by
balancing your diet with the right food. When you read this I hope to be enjoying a glass of
wine to celebrate by 76 birthday, at my age there is not much I can do as an isolated
individual - particularly against the might of the processed food industry but I hope to
convince enough people to start a social movement for healthier food.
To make it a bit more interesting I am going to tell it as a story with some pretty unsavoury
characters but hope you can hang in to get the key points.
When my kids were young I used to climb into bed and tell them a story. It pretty difficult to
think of a new story every night so they helped me by giving me a list of things they wanted
in their stories - bad witches, little kids, exploding mushrooms (which with hind sight seems
highly appropriate).
Did you know that mushroom actually explode? They wait for the right
conditions then fire of little missiles containing spores - thats why we get
the fairy rings. But look at how much greener the grass is inside the ring
- that because the fungi are so efficient at extracting nutrients which they
pass onto the grass.
I am sorry this story will be a bit light on bad witches with pointy hats riding on broom sticks,
but I hope the con men in bespoke suits driving Lamborghinis make an acceptable
alternative.
When I was a kid the oldies would yarn away saying things werent as good as in the olden
days.
But there are some very big BUTS particularly about food which I get particularly steamed up
about
2
Lets start by going to wildest Africa
In 1978 Melbourne suffered massive dust storms losing billions of tonnes
of prime top soil. I decided to set up a research project to find a way of
generating top soil - this taught me a lot about soil and water.
(I once bought a book just called Chocolate for $1 from a jumble sale -
amazing read if you can find a copy - kids are used as slave labour to grow the beans but
cannot afford a chocky bar for themselves).
Xiulans diabetes
Then my wife - Xiulan - was diagnosed with diabetes. She was a respected surgeon - a
gynaecologist. She has delivered many thousands of babies amongst other operations for
both male and females. She once offered me the chop on the kitchen table - I am not sure
whether she was cross with me or just joking - but I declined.
But it did set me wondering - how could a healthy Chinese lady - who
had eaten Chinese food all her life without any health problems - come to
Australia and develop diabetes so quickly.
So with the help of my good friend Mr. Google I started to study diet,
health and diabetes. At first I thought this would be simple - just study
the research and select the right food - but it was far from simple with so many contrary
opinions even among the genuinely qualified experts. But search hard enough and long
enough and a clear consensus emerges - the diet must be balanced with enough fresh fruit
and vegetables with the essential minerals, fibre and nutrients.
Then there was an armada of quacks offering quick fixes - very clever promotion with an
abundance of smart young people pretending to be doctors in white jackets with
stethoscopes hanging around their necks - a sure sign of a quack - so easy to avoid.
3
Suits in Lamborghinis
This story is a bit short on evil witches on broom sticks - instead we have to make do with
Suits in Lamborghinis.
We may know of an old auntie who smoked until she died at the age of
93 but there is really no issue that smoking is bad for health. The tactics
used by the tobacco industry are now very well known, attacking
genuine researchers, paying for opposing research, arguing the case for
not proven just to delay and confuse the process. It worked delaying
effective action for years.
The same tactics worked for the anti climate change brigade and is now
endemic in the food industry. In fact the tobacco industry - realising that the tobacco industry
is inevitably in decline - has invested heavily in the food processing industry and is using the
same tactics of confusion and delay.
We actually need some sugar for our energy - our bodies sense the low sugar level and
inject hormones into our blood stream so we feel hungry and crave more sweet sugary food
(or carbohydrates which are just as bad). Our hormones have evolved to protect us from
starvation so we are soon tucking away into more sugar laced food and the cycle is
repeated.
The more sugar we eat the more we want to eat yet more sugar, this is
addiction - it may not sound as bad as tobacco but its actually worse - it
affects far more people (anyone who eats processed food) and can end
up with having your limbs chopped off with diabetes, dying from a heart
attack or being paralysed with a stroke.
You may find it hard to believe that the executives managing these giant food companies
would be so heartless to be killing or maiming the population just for the sake of profits.
Surely they would have a bit of humanity inside there flash suits.
4
But life is never simple so we have to go on to the next part of the story and work out how it
is that these well paid executive should be so uncaring about their customers.
Supersizing
This bit of the story is really fascinating and I will illustrate by telling the story of supersizing.
I am not on the payroll of McDonalds (in fact no one pays me anything for my food battle) but
I actually feel a bit sorry for Maccers over supersizing.
I am not defending them or their likes and there is no doubt that they and
their cohorts are inflicting chronic damage to our food system.
Supersizing was an invention of one smart arsed accountant who saw that the actual cost of
the food in a fast food restaurant was only a small proportion of the total costs so they could
double the portion size but only charge 50% more and make tons of money as everyone
loves a bargain.
This idea caught on with the other fast fooders but to their credit McDonald resisted on the
basis that there job was to supply low cost food to the less affluent. Bravo for Maccers.
But they were caught out by the dead cat or silo effect - the curse of our modern complex
society.
The financial institutions hold trillions of dollars from pension funds etc. which provide the
capital for these mega corporations. They see their job as making as much money as
possible for their investors - sounds reasonable - at least in principle. So they put the
squeeze on Maccers basically telling them to get into supersizing and make as much money
as possible so.
Economists dont seem to like my dead cat term so they now call this the silo effect.
5
This system failure is a far too common feature of our complex modern society.
Large companies tend not to be innovative, it is much cheaper to go and buy out a small
company that is innovative and so they keep on getting bigger. If this helps them establish a
pseudo monopoly so much the better.
The food industry is the worlds largest industry with just a handful of
companies (forget all l those different packets in the supermarket - thats
what the smart guys call branding where one company packages almost
identical product in different boxes to maximise sales).
This may give us cheap food but the health effects on modern societies is scary - obesity,
diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, cancer are all aggravated by this bad diet.
Let me tell you how - this is the really important bit of the story.
Tribes would not only look after their own kids but also kids from other
tribes - kids and child bearing women became valuable prizes in fights
with other tribe.
For the best part of a million years being part of a tribe was the only way to survive and
breed. No wonder it is such an ingrained instinct in us. (I expect any day an announcement
that they have found a bit of the brain that controls the tribal instinct.)
6
Birth of nations
But they dont call us homo sapience for nothing. We worked out that a system with tribes
fighting and killing the men and capturing women and kids was not all that smart. We
needed a better way and developed the concept of nations which largely stopped inter-tribal
fighting (but led to conflict between nations).
But the idea of nations only goes back a few thousand years - nothing in comparison with
our lives as tribal creature. Being a tribal creature is built into our genes.
Try and understand the horrors of the 7 oclock news - it is largely explained by tribal conflict.
One of the horrors of this modern tribal warfare is refugees - parents who know they are
doomed - death if they stay - nearly as bad if they try to escape - but instinct tells them that if
they let their kids go that some friendly tribe will care for them. Such is the power of the
tribal instinct.
Our nature is to do what is best for our local tribe in the short term - not consider the overall
effect on society as a whole.
Most people who work for large corporations are decent people - but it just takes one or two
evil heads of tribes within the corporation for the whole corporation to behave in an evil way.
Traditionally society have relied on their Governments to protect themselves from the evils
that arise from this myopic thinking but with the growth of the mega corporations this is
becoming ever more difficult - particularly as the multi nationals seem able to operate above
the law of individual countries .
Solving this myopia is one of the great challenges of our modern technology based society.
By time you have reached my age you will have learned an important lessons - do what you
can even if it not the total solution.
So I made up a mental list of what I can and cant do. Give up chocolate? Definitely NO!
Put that top of the list of cants. Start a social campaign against the food giants with lots of
7
street marches - put that in the list of cants - I am a bit of a hermit. The list of cants is filling
up - better start looking at the can dos.
Well as I often joke - I was born and Hitler declared war and tried to starve us into
submission so I have been involved with home grown food for a life time.
I have been researching how to regenerate soil for years and know how critical water is to
soil regeneration? In years gone by wasnt I a world expert in computational fluid flow with
my company earning hundreds of millions of dollars of export earning for Australia, didnt I
write up lots of software to predict how water moves through the soil - getting warmer? Didnt
I pioneer Wicking Beds and didnt they go feral on the internet? Getting real warm now!
How can community action fight the might of the mega corporations? We
cant, at least not directly, but we can still win by sneaking behind them
with smart community action.
OK I admit that this just happened - it was not some master plan of mine. People found
Wicking Beds useful and told their friends and it just went feral.
But Wicking Beds have not been an immediate success story - when I first started
developing Wicking Beds the expert gardeners told me they would never work because the
water would go stagnant and putrid. This did not put me off - my life has revolved around
technology and innovation - which in practise means a string of failures with the occasional
success.
I was lucky enough to spot that computers would revolutionise engineering design - and that
was in the days of punch cards.
That was one of my successes which gave me what every innovators dreams of - enough
money so I did not have to go round trying to convince myopic bureaucrats to finance my
experiments. If they failed (which they usually did) I could simply say it is my money and if I
want to waste it on my stupid ideas that is my business and no one elses.
8
So I never thought about protecting any intellectual property legally - I just wanted people to
share in the knowledge and eat better. I was very happy to see Wicking Beds going feral.
But I learned an important lesson about what happens if you just scattering ideas to the wind
and letting them spread of their own accord - and that is the degradation of ideas.
But the second part - providing nutrition - was missed when they went feral.
Farmers in poor countries simply cannot afford commercial fertilisers - and the chemical
fertilisers in common use can be decidedly destructive of the essential soil biology.
Most food plants are not very effective at extracting nutrients from the
soil. In the wild state they generally grow in companion with other more
aggressive plants. In any case nowadays most food plants have been
genetically selected to grow very fast in conjunction with fertilisers but
perform very badly without the addition of fertilisers. The green
revolution has been an absolute bonanza for the more affluent farmers but has been
devastating for the poor who cannot afford fertilisers.
By contrast plants we normally call weeds are extremely effective at extracting nutrient from
the soil - thats why they grow so fast and are such a pain. They may be indigestible to us
but soil biology can break them down to provide nutrients for our food plants.
This was my solution to providing nutrients in Africa for poor farmers. This appears to have
been totally missed in the feral promotion of Wicking Beds.
I would turn round and say this is typical dead cat or silo thinking - it may
be good for you but is it good overall. We are consuming mountains of
food - typically grown using chemical fertilisers. Already we are running
low in some chemicals like phosphorous. We need to act sustainably.
It requires some minerals from the soil - nitrate or ammonia, sulphate, phosphate, iron,
magnesium, and potassium are required in substantial amounts. Smaller amounts of such
elements as manganese, copper, and chlorine are also required.
Healthy plants can be grown if these minerals are readily available in the soil. However we
are animals - not plants - and we required larger amounts of some elements than plants do
9
and some elements which the plant has no need of at all. Fortunately the plant will absorb
these minerals if they are in solution in the soil.
There is a world of difference between plants that are healthy and plants that will make us
healthy.
In the world of the dead cat or silos - supermarkets need to display plants that look healthy
so we will buy them. There is no incentive for them to offer plants that will make us healthy.
Our bodies are not that dumb, in fact one of the most
interesting areas of research in diet and health is how our
hormones make us feel hungry or full. These hormones are
controlled by the type and quality of the food we eat. Sugars
and carbohydrates make us feel hungrier. The opposite
occurs with nutrient rich fruit and vegetables - they make us
feel full - so we stop eating.
The greatest health problem of our time is people stuffing themselves because they feel
hungry when they are actually full of sugars and carbohydrates.
But the overriding advantage is that they enable almost anyone, people
living in apartments with limited space or who have limited time or skills
to grow fruit and vegetables which will balance their diet and make them
healthy.
I would very much like to see this community revolution happen - but how? The answer in
principle is simple - by using the power of modern communication and letting the message
go feral.
10
When Wicking Beds first went feral there was no system of ensuring that
the message being sent out was in fact the correct message - in reality
there was a lot of misinformation - some people tried Wicking Beds and
they simply failed - for example by going putrid. More important others
had some success in growing plants but never benefited from the full
health benefits that come from having a soil with the minerals and nutrient readily available
to the plants and specifically tuned to the needs of Wicking Beds.
Patents and the law of Intellectual Property are geared to providing the owner with
essentially monopoly control over the technology. But they set up a monopoly and restrict
the use of that technology. Big companies love monopolies (or pseudo monopolies which
dodge the fair trading legislation).
This is exactly the opposite of what I want. I want people to use and benefit from this
technology - I see this as a communal project.
There are many cases where people want to participate in a communal project - but still
want their intellectual property right respected as the pioneer of their technology and if the
technology is commercialised expect to receive some rewards.
This is particularly true with Wicking Beds. I may have pioneered the concept of Wicking
Beds but many other people have cooperated in the refining the concept into a working
system.
I have talked about the dead cat or silo effect where people live and work
in their own specialist area without thinking about the system as a whole
(holistic thinking). Diet and health is an area riddled with dead cat or silo
thinking. There are many highly competent medical researchers and
practitioners studying the link between diet and health - some actually
talk about cooking and food preparation but there is hardly any
discussion on how the food is grown or the soil in which it is grown.
11
Yet there are other specialist who have an in depth knowledge of
gardening and soils while other specialise in other important areas such
as medicinal herbs.
There is yet one more issue - that stuff called money. I actually want
people to set up business to exploit the technology and am more than
happy if they make money from their businesses. To date I have spent a significant amount
of my money and time developing and promoting Wicking Beds and offering a free advisory
service with no financial reward.
I dont want to over dramatize the situation but people are suffering poor health or dying from
the profit above anything of the mega corporations who spend billions of dollars in false
advertising and public relations.
To counter there misinformation (euphemism for lying that snack bars are healthy when
stoked with fats and sugars) we need an effective community project - and even community
projects need some money to be effective.
There is yet one more issue - I am good at maths and statistics and can easily see that I will
soon be enjoying the same status as John Cleeses dead parrot. For this I have developed
what will be my very last innovation - the Wicking Coffin.
I would rather like to think that my work on soils, water, nutrients and Wicking Beds would
continue long after the decomposition of my body in my Wicking Coffin.
Incorporating a financial system into this community action will facilitate other people
continuing my work.
The first will give an overview of the system - this is pretty easy as it is
based on how nature creates soil - but speeded up a bit.
You can see this for yourself by looking at how a lava flow is converted to
some of the best soil. The only snag in following nature is you may have
to wait a while for a volcano to pop up in your back garden. You may
have to be awfully patient.
All I have done is taken this perfectly natural process and speeded it up a
bit (I say a bit - but really from 10,000 years to 1 year).
The overview will be in the public domain under the Creative Commons system. I will put it
on my web and under the Creative Commons system people can copy and use this
essentially as they wish for private use provided they quote the original source.
The second documentation will be an operating manual with adequate details so people can
effectively grow their own soil.
12
I want to make sure the detailed information is properly managed to avoid people with better
promotional but lower technical skills dont spread misleading information. Also I am just
one of many people working on soil and nutrients so there are lots of other good ideas
floating around which dont get promoted. By acting as a central source of information the
total technology can be co-ordinated and distributed.
I will not be putting up the full details on my web - instead I will email the manual to anyone
interested in using this technology but with certain conditions.
They can use this information to set up their own soil growing system for their own private
non-commercial use.
I am encouraging people to tell their friends about the system but rather then copy the
documentation or give people the specifics give them my email address and request a copy
directly.
I am hoping and expecting that many people will see ways of improving the system or can
provide extra knowledge. I hope that they can forward these ideas to me so I can improve
the system and share with other people. This sharing of information is one of the key
advantages of a communal project.
If you are happy with this system and would like to be on the mailing list for the technical
documents as I write them please contact me directly at [email protected]
13