Rock Dust : All Hail !

TWO articles on Rock Dust as a fertilizer. First one in green, second in a brown. Want some science to back this up ? Here is an article and study.

Rock dust grows extra-big vegetables (and might save us from global warming)

By Paul Kelbie

Spring 2005

For years scientists have been warning of an apocalyptic future facing the world. With the prospect of an earth made infertile from over-production and mass reliance on chemicals, coupled with an atmosphere polluted by greenhouse gases there seems little to celebrate. But belief is growing that an answer to some of the earth's problems are not only at hand, but under our feet.

Specialists have just met in Perth to discuss the secrets of rock dust, a quarrying by-product that is at the heart of government-sponsored scientific trials and which, it is claimed, could revitalise barren soil and reverse climate change.

The recognition of the healing powers of rock dust comes after a 20-year campaign by two former school teachers, Cameron and Moira Thomson. They have been battling to prove that rock dust can replace the minerals that have been lost to the earth over the past 10,000 years and, as a result, rejuvenate the land and halt climate change.

To prove their point, the couple have converted six acres of open, infertile land in the Grampian foothills near Pitlochry into a modern Eden. Using little more than rock dust mixed with compost, they have created rich, deep soils capable of producing cabbages the size of footballs, onions bigger than coconuts and gooseberries as big as plums.

"This is a simple answer which doesn't involve drastic life changes by anyone," Ms Thomson said. "People don't have to stop driving cars to do this, just spread some rock dust on their gardens. We could cover the earth with rock dust and start to absorb carbon in a more natural fashion which, along with reducing emissions and using a combination of other initiatives, will have a better and faster response."

Before the Thomsons began their "good life" experiment, erosion and leaching
were so severe in the glen where they set up home that nothing had been grown there for almost 50 years. The basis of their theory is simple. By spreading a thin layer of the dust over the land, they are able to mimic the earth's glacial cycles which naturally fertilise the land.

Since the last ice age three million years ago, the earth has gone through 25 similar glaciations, each lasting about 90,000 years. "We are 10,000 years into an interglacial - a hiatus between ice ages - meaning modern soils are relatively barren and artificial fertilisers are needed," Mr Thomson said.

"By spreading the dust we are doing in minutes what the earth takes thousands of years to do - putting essential minerals in the rocks back into the earth.

"Over the years the couple, who established the Sustainable Ecological Earth Regeneration (Seer) Centre charitable trust in 1997 to test their ideas, have slowly convinced others of their theory. They recently won a grant of almost £100,000 from the Scottish Executive to conduct Britain's first official rock dust trials.

The couple claim the technique may also play a significant role in the fight against climate change as calcium and magnesium in the dust converts carbon in the air into carbonates. Such is the interest in the theory that NASA in the US is examining it in preparation for growing plants on other planets.

The couple say that the rock dust means that crops don't need water to produce harvests of magnificent vegetables. "It would be perfect for Third World countries that are usually unable to grow crops because the land is so dry," Ms Thomson said. "This could hold the solution for them."

"There is no doubt that, when rock dust is mixed with compost, it has a dramatic effect on crop yields," said Alistair Lamont, president of the Chartered Institution of Waste Management, who is impressed by the Seer experiment. "Future waste strategy is going to rely heavily on the diversion of biodegradable municipal waste from landfill, and one of the treatments involved is composting so we need to find a home for that compost.

"Agricultural land is something we need to work on and the benefits of rock dust in combination with compost can be seen at the Seer Centre at harvest time. We need to get farming to take on board the value of remineralisation and re-fertilisation.

Mr Lamont added that evidence showed that, since 1940, the mineral contentof vegetables had fallen dramatically in this country. "We might be encouraged to eat a lot of vegetables but many don't contain the quantities of minerals that we need," he said.
###

Dust to Dust
From Faultline Magazine

by Ron Sullivan

Some years ago, someone gave me a videotape called Stopping the Coming Ice Age, companion to the book The End: The Imminent Ice Age And How We Can Stop It, by the late Larry Ephron. My first thought was that I’d stumbled onto a horticultural cargo cult.

The originally rational premise of the video was that atmospheric pollution and the greenhouse effect would soon result, not in global warming, but in an Ice Age. More and more fresh water deposited in the Arctic and Antarctic by an increasing number of storms would cover North America and Eurasia with glaciers. This would cool the climates of the world’s major grain-producing areas enough to render them useless. Mass starvation, war over scarce resources, etc. etc., would follow. The root cause of all this was held to be the loss of forests worldwide; as they shrink and wither, their carbon-dioxide consumption and storage capacities go with them.

The video made a pretty good case for this part of the thesis. I myself was not convinced of every detail — phytoplankton are thought to play as much role in global climate as do forests, for example — but it wasn't insulting, nor was its tone more alarming than the news it conveyed. If its plea were to save the forests as they are, I’d endorse it heartily.

However. Here’s the horticultural part, and the scary part too. The video endorsed the wholesale use of rock dust as a fertilizer, in the wildlands as well as in the garden, and the speedy mass planting of "fast-growing trees" to replace the emaciated forests.

The rock dust (also called "gravel dust") was to be ground to powder and pumped out of trucks, airplanes, and other such Great Big Vehicles, over forests worldwide. Such dumping and pumping were shown in action on the tape. I had a sympathetic asthma attack just watching them.

Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees! A lot of what makes up a forest has lungs, folks; and some other inhabitants, notably amphibians, just absorb oxygen directly through their damp skins. Lock yourself in a room with a running fan and a few cans of talcum powder, combine the two, and meditate on the result.

Also scary was the exhortation about fast-growing trees. This is a certified crisis, after all, and steps must be taken quickly or we’ll all starve to death, die in resource wars, etc. etc. Great. There aren’t enough species being swamped and crowded out of existence by weedy alien competitors; we have to get a move on and plant fast-growing things. What grows fast? Acacias and tamarisks and such, plants that are already weedy pests all over the world, partly because they grow so fast.

The reasoning behind the rock dust fetish was this: supposedly, one big cause of the forests’ decline is that "the minerals have leached out of the soil." The glaciers of the Ice Age grind the surfaces of the rocks they pass over into dust; the dust is distributed around the world by wind and water, and in a homeostatic system all this renews the "demineralized" soil and makes it fertile enough to support vigorous plant life again. The newly revived tropical forests can again turn enough carbon dioxide into oxygen to alleviate the greenhouse effect, and the planet warms up again, and the glaciers recede.

I’m not a soil scientist, but I have a few lay questions: for example, if the minerals have leached out of the soil, what’s left? Soil consists of minerals and organic matter. I see no evidence that the world’s soils’ proportion of humus is increasing. That clay in your garden is rock dust. If the video's author's meant trace elements, it would make more sense to add compost or manures, as these would contain the same elements that went into the organism they came from: this stuff doesn’t get destroyed, or transmuted by metabolism into Something Else. Molybdenum in, molybdenum out.

Of course, it wouldn’t work well as a Grand Plan to dump planeloads of manure into all the world’s forests. I don’t want to think about what that sort of weather would do to a pleasant camping holiday. Partly cloudy with scattered … never mind.

If minerals are getting leached out of soil, where are they going? Into the sea, and desalting seawater would be a more reasonable way to recover them. Sorting the sodium chloride from everything else would be interesting, as would deciding which other minerals would be useful, and which harmful, and in what proportions. Of course, the wholesale dumping of dust wouldn't allow that distinction either.

A bigger question was the environmental impact of the proposed remineralization. Without a few more of the glaciers we were supposed to be forestalling, how was this rock to be rendered into dust, and where would it come from? Granite was the recommended rock; it would have to be quarried. Where? In some renditions of the argument, the stuff was called "gravel dust." Quarrying gravel is notoriously destructive to riparian lands, which are already endangered along with their citizens. The mining and grinding would certainly not be done by hand, and the fossil fuels used — I’ve never heard of a solar-powered power shovel — would of course contribute further to the greenhouse-gas problem, among others.

The question of whether we can or should stave off a new Ice Age by scattering rock dust is one thing. I haven’t heard much of the mass-dumping proposal lately, perhaps because its proponents voiced their sense of urgency by predicting worldwide starvation by 1995 and they’re too embarrassed to talk about it with their mouths full. There’s starvation aplenty, but also plenty of evidence that the problem is more maldistribution than global scarcity.

Craig Dremann of the Redwood City Seed Company tested some popular soil additives, analyzed their content, and reported the results in his 1988 booklet Organic Fertilizers: the Truth and the B.S. He said of granite dust (aka "glacier minerals"): "…vastly over-rated as a fertilizer or soil amendment. Useless as a fertilizer and extremely damaging [because of mining, processing, and transport impacts] to the environment."

He pointed out that at the recommended concentrations for saving the world - one pound per square foot, twenty tons per acre - just treating California would require two billion tons, two billion cubic yards. (Picture a granite cube three quarters of a mile on each side. Picture Half Dome sitting next to the cube, looking dwarfed.) Dremann suggested dryly that "a wiser plan might be to more efficiently recycle the nutrients we already flush down the toilet."

Well, yes, but isn’t it always harder to rally an excited new crusade around an old idea like housekeeping? And of course that has to be done steadily every day, and not with helicopters.
###