21st Century
Field Broadcasting
"We must be the change we wish to see." Mohandas K. Gandhi
By Hugh Lovel
For me farming started when my work in psychology faced a wall. Despite powerful biofeedback techniques, I and my colleagues were dispensing emotional Band-Aids and crutches. People, locked into limiting behavioral patterns from their first moments of life, missed developing their potentials. There wasn't much help for that. To some extent they could be liberated from knee-jerk behavior, but by the time they got help their opportunities had mostly passed them by.
My dilemma was if parenting, particularly mothering, didn't improve how would people grow into their potential from birth? Even more basically, nutrition-particularly that in the womb-needed to improve tremendously. Food of the quality I envisioned hardly existed, so I took up farming.
Background
At one time I was a cook in Montreal, one of two great restaurant cities in North America, the other being New Orleans near where I grew up. We used fresh fruits and vegetables, literally by the ton. And I knew from my chemistry courses that we have two of the best methods of chemical analysis ever developed that we carry around with us at all times-taste and smell.
Food of true high quality occasionally surfaced in our restaurant, and it was unmistakable. Not only were the smells and flavors from heaven, but it imparted a special zing to the blood and bounce to the bones. I imagined that was what pregnant mothers should eat if there was truly any hope for humanity to lift itself out of dull, helpless, automatic behavior. What could be more fundamental to raising children free of the invalidations and suppressions of their forebears than good food?
I don't mean to ignore emotional environment. Nurture in general, both physical and spiritual is required. But it seemed to me food came first.
In the beginning I knew little about farming. Most of what I thought I knew was wrong. My formal education was in business, sociology, biology, chemistry, physics and psychology. My parents grew up on farms that I had never seen. Once, in college, I opened an agricultural chemistry book and read its introduction-about how the soil held the plant up while the nutrients were applied as fertilizers. Given the complexity of living organisms I knew this couldn't be good agriculture. Maybe it was how things were done, but I knew there had to be more to it.
Most of the fertilizers my feed and seed dealers sold were made of ammonium nitrate, phosphoric acid and potassium chloride. Anhydrous ammonia wasn't available though urea could be found. Georgia law required a minimum of 15% soluble nutrients before a product could be sold as fertilizer, even though such high salt levels surely harmed plant chemistry and soil microbiology.
It occurred to me that in thousands of years of agriculture it was only after chemical fertilizers came into vogue that pesticides came into use. I knew that China, with a fifth of the world population but more like a tenth of its agricultural resources, in 1976 was feeding itself with little of this agricultural chemistry. So I had to wonder if there wasn't an intimate connection between soluble fertilizers and pesticides.
Nowhere To Turn
On my first visit to the Georgia Mountain Experiment Station south of Blairsville in 1976 I told the scientists I wanted to grow food of the highest quality. Of course, I wasn't going to use poisons. Moreover, I'd majored in biochemistry and knew the chemistry of living organisms was extremely subtle, sensitive and complex. Using more than small amounts of soluble salts would slam plant chemistry against the wall. Since one couldn't grow quality food that way, what did I need to do?
We were sitting in folding chairs, three career scientists facing me with nothing between us, friendly as it gets. I was the beginner asking for help, and they were doing their best to give it. When I explained why commercial fertilizers were no use to me they looked at each other and the one in the middle said, "We'd like to help you, Mr. Lovel, but we don't know what to tell you."
It began to dawn on me I was on my own. These fellows were nice guys, helpful as could be. But they hadn't been paid to find out what I needed to know. Looking back, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Government seems to do more good by accident than it does on purpose.
Regardless one of them took me on a tour of the experiment station, giving me good advice on making hay, varieties adapted to the locality and much that truly was helpful. In conversation I told him, "You know, I don't want my nutrients to be soluble. They'll wash away. I want my nutrients to be insoluble but available." I thought that was a no-brainer.
Why did Georgia law require a minimum of 15% soluble nutrients before a product could be labeled fertilizer? My Webster's said a fertilizer was "a substance used to make the soil more fertile." Soluble salt nutrients, especially chlorides and nitrates, damaged soil biology, ultimately reducing fertility. The law didn't make sense, but then I came from a state where the legislature once tried to round off pi to 3.
I knew from chemistry and microbiology that if living organisms held the nutrients they would be pretty much insoluble. Yet, given the dynamic interplay between the thousands of microscopic soil species they would also be available. With potassium muriate 40% was chlorine. That much chlorine surely killed soil microbes. And nitrogen salts would inhibit, if not kill, nitrogen fixing azotobacters which are among the leading indicators of good soil. Phosphoric acid, while not so caustic, would bond with calcium, iron, etc. almost on contact with the soil. Of course, it wouldn't wander off into the water table. But why not put it on as powdered phosphate rock to begin with? Or maybe solubilize it with ammonia and just not use so much.
On the other hand, sulfate fertilizers would stimulate soil biology, so small amounts of potassium and ammonium sulfate wouldn't be such bad ways to apply these inputs. Pity they weren't available in my area. Still, the most important missing ingredients for my soils were calcium and magnesium. Lime, gypsum and epsom salts weren't considered fertilizers, Webster's notwithstanding.
Off On The Wrong Foot
What could I do? I wanted robust soil biology, though I really didn't know much about how to get it. For years I believed I couldn't go wrong applying all kinds of organic materials in abundance. To me this meant truckload after truckload of old sawdust, sawmill bark, manure, composts, lime, colloidal phosphate, wood ash, local granite quarry dusts. I was in a hurry, and I thought organic matter was organic matter. It never occurred to me that such massive applications of waste would not make haste. Since I didn't know what balanced, healthy conditions were I didn't notice when I created unhealthy and imbalanced ones.
On the other hand, I maintained a lively interest in subtle energy-quantum mechanics, fluid dynamics, chaos theory, fractals, holographics and projective geometry. Having a background in biofeedback I was particularly interested in the physics and chemistry of thought. So I found biodynamic agriculture attractive, with its allusions to spiritual science. I'd sort of always believed in such a thing. No matter that Biodynamics had a true believer flavor with its worship of Rudolf Steiner. I found I could tolerate it-unlike most cults. Clearly Steiner was a genius far ahead of his time, and his work was good science even if the uninformed treated it as mysticism.
What About the Atmosphere?
With its equal emphasis on both soil and atmosphere biodynamics stood apart from all other schools of agriculture. It's funny. Everyone seems so fixed on building soil when plants do the greater part of their growing in the atmosphere. Usually when I point this out people say, "Sure. But what can you do about the atmosphere? Forget it!"
However, biodynamic agriculture has methods of imparting dynamic patterns to the atmosphere. These generate living, breathing organization that can be very helpful. If, for instance, there was no cloud formation, no organization of moisture in the atmosphere, we wouldn't have life as we know it. Biodynamic remedies help give rise to clouds and rain. These remedies are simple, homeopathic patterns that improve the organization of the atmosphere. We should look at what patterns of activity occur in the atmosphere. The soil provides moisture and nutrients. But in the atmosphere photosynthesis, blossoming, fruiting and ripening take place. These are atmospheric patterns.
Steiner saw that the digestive, nutritive patterns of the soil revolve around lime; whereas the patterns of the atmosphere revolve around silica. His basic remedy for the atmosphere was finely ground quartz crystal, buried in a cow horn over the summer. This could be applied at the rate of a gram per acre stirred for an hour in water and misted into the leafy, fruiting region above the soil in the early morning. It provides excellent patterning for the atmosphere.
When you think about it silica forms the finest particles in the atmosphere. But it would be dangerous to pump tons of micronized silica into the atmosphere. However, spraying a mist patterned with horn quartz has a remarkable organizational effect.
Organization is, after all, the basis of life-order, organ, organic, organize, organism. Silica, in its pure form as quartz crystal, is a superb vehicle for patterns. Once I began to understand patterning I could see Steiner's remedies were pure genius. Steiner was working with organizational patterning, as does homeopathy. There were silica patterns in the atmosphere and lime patterns in the soil. In between there was the up and down travel of plant sap between soil and fruit. These were the patterns of clay. The oxides of aluminum bound to silica-clay-was the bridge between the two extremes.
Getting It Right
Even as I continued massive hauling, huge compost piles and the like I kept finding that using the Steiner pattern remedies to organize the environment was the most effective thing I did. A pattern remedy that really woke me up was horn clay. Horn clay stimulated plants to feed their sap to the soil as well as improving nutrient uptake. Steiner hadn't fully worked out the details of horn clay before his death. When Greg Willis introduced me to this "missing" Steiner remedy was when I really saw the drawbacks of using large quantities of compost. Before working with horn clay I had no idea there were any drawbacks to generous use of compost. It took more than twenty years to dawn on me that a little well-made compost with high populations of azotobacters and other beneficials was far more important for the nitrogen fixing capacity it gave the soil than for the actual nitrogen contained.
In the first place, in good soils there are bacteria that free fix nitrogen as long as they get enough sugars. In the second, when conditions permit, plants feed sap to the soil as complex, sugary root exudates. Then robust fixing occurs and nitrogen levels within a fraction of an inch of feeder roots can easily be several times higher than the surrounding soil.
Horn clay also stimulates the mycorhyzal relationship between plants and symbiotic fungi on their feeder roots that maximizes plant nutrient uptake. For roughly a hundred years it was believed that plants could only absorb nitrogen in crude form as ammonium, urea and nitrate. Truly, when a plant takes in water these salts are so readily absorbed they may block the uptake of more complex nitrogen compounds. But plants exude complex sugars and amino acids into the soil, so as long as conditions permit they can also take these up. By feeding carbon compounds-mostly sugars-to the soil's teeming microecology, plants ensure their nutrient uptake will be as near to the needs of their protoplasm as possible.
The trouble with putting on lots of compost is it's everywhere, whether plants have any roots there yet or not. Its nitrogen compounds tend to oxidize into nitrates. If these aren't tied up by living organisms they contaminate the water table. Plants absorbing nitrates develop bitter flavors, as is common in spinach, collards, mustard greens, etc. Even compost-fed organic vegetables may contain levels of nitrates that affect flavor and nutritional quality. This was particularly true of turnips when I clean cultivated them, so I learned to plant turnips in with winter rye cover crops on beds with grassy paths in between. Then the vegetation sucked up any nitrates and kept the soil food web healthy. Even then too much compost was a no-no.
Nitrate uptake makes plants salty and watery. They have to convert this crude nitrogen into amino acids before they can use it. Their cells, bloated with water and salt, are susceptible to diseases. Moreover, their chemistry is shifted to short chain amino acids which insects require. In general, flavor and nutrition suffer, and such crops fall short of their genetic potential.
I found that by applying Steiner's basic patterns of horn quartz, horn humus and horn clay, photosynthesis was more organized, the soil food web was more robust and the ebb and flow of sap in the plant was improved. Crops approached their genetic potential. And, interestingly, obtaining abundant high quality was cheaper and easier than relying on salt fertilizers--to say nothing of compost. Quality, and lots of it! To think, less really was more. This was a method that needed to spread.
Field Broadcasting
It has always been obvious to me that stirring each remedy for an hour before spraying was too much for farmers with sixteen hour days. The full sequence takes a minimum of two days back-to-back, and if one's acreage is large it could take weeks. With at least two extra hours both morning and evening it just wasn't going to get done. And when it wasn't clear how the remedies worked-or even if they worked-where was the incentive?
Galen Hieronymus, who lived about 65 miles from me in Lakemont, Georgia invented a method of inducing patterns into the soil. He called this a Cosmic Pipe, and called the mode of energy eloptic energy. I must have more patience than most people with obscure terminology.
I could see Galen's invention used the pattern energy of Steiner's remedies, and could induce patterns over large acreages. No stirring, no spraying, no heavy tractors in wet weather belching diesel fumes with nozzles clogging up. To make a long story short, I trialed Hieronymus' pipe for 10 years.
Galen's design just worked on the soil. This threw everything seriously out of balance. The downward patterns built up so strongly that magnesium, potash, boron, copper and zinc flushed into the water table along with the nitrates and chlorides. Digestive patterns climbed up into the atmosphere. My tomato crop rotted before it ripened for six straight years, a week earlier each year. Peppers kept getting leggier and fruit set declined. At the worst point ripening was delayed by six weeks. My wheat, barley and corn had huge fungal problems. Eventually I realized I had to make a two-way broadcaster.
After all, the patterns in the atmosphere were just as important as those in the soil. Gosh, it took a long time for that to sink in.
Sharing Discovery
In the long term field broadcasting will revolutionize agriculture. Gradually fertilization will decline, particularly the use of nitrogen fertilizers. Moreover we can broadcast patterns that turn off specific weed and insect pests like a switch. Thus field broadcasting will eventually mean the end of toxic agriculture. It's safety, simplicity and low cost, will mean anyone successfully using it will refuse to go back to the dangerous, arduous and expensive practices of the past. Industries will change and investors will rearrange their portfolios. A few less-than-nimble CEOs may lose their jobs.
As with many discoveries and inventions, if this were patented certain industries would try to sit on it. Who knows what they would do to suppress it? Life is fragile and my life expectancy won't increase by keeping what I know secret. I don't want to be indispensable to this technology. Thus I've made public everything I can.
I produce reliable, well-constructed field broadcasters that can cover up to 2,000 acres, and I am one of several who will install for a reasonable price. I wholesale to anyone who can do the reagent work and installation.
Also, farmers can make their own. Some have lathes to wrap coils and are as handy as I am with a soldering pencil and sheet metal tools. Anyone can go for it. I want to set up a couple businesses making and installing field broadcasters and earn a modest income. I think I do a good job, and will make some money. But some folks will want to make their own. That suits me fine.
It is clear to me that without good nourishment people don't manifest their spiritual impulses well. If I could get quality food on track I would go back into psychology and see what can be done to improve emotional environments during pregnancy and childhood. This is where I got off into farming. It's a goal I haven't lost sight of.
Reagents
I believe the real frontier in field broadcasting is reagent work. This is my colleague, Lorraine Cahill's specialty. I often think of a call she got. The guy said, "I built one of your Cosmic Pipes, and I put Black Flag in it. Do you think that'll take care of my insects?"
This guy had ideas anyway, but Black Flag is poison. It would surely "take care" of his insects, his earthworms, his dog and cat, goats and cows, wife and kids, the whole ten yards. This is something you do not want to do.
It's a bit disappointing more folks aren't interested in unsurpassed quality. But most are selling their corn, wheat, soybeans, etc. without any premium for quality. Their biggest problem is weeds. These reduce yields and elevators dock farmers for weed seeds. Herbicides are expensive as well as dangerous. Often the weeds keep coming back. What about eliminating weeds?
Rudolf Steiner pointed out it takes both moisture and warmth for any plant to grow. The Moon patterns govern moisture, while Saturn patterns govern warmth. The specific pattern of any weed is strongest in its reproductive parts, usually its seeds. The seed has the DNA pattern for that specific plant and no other.
I can drive off all the moisture from a handfull of seeds by heating them in a cast iron skillet on the stove. The charcoal left behind contains the carbon framework for that weed, severed from moisture. Broadcasting this pattern interferes with the weed's uptake of moisture without adversely affecting other things.
Current State Of The Art
I started off with a tough weed, Johnson grass. Since the Moon channels all patterns related to moisture, I dowsed for the Moon constellation it received its pattern energy from. This was Gemini. So on a Gemini Moon I charcoaled my Johnson grass seed, cooking it until a small amount of the charcoal turned to ash, ensuring all the moisture was driven off. The end result looked like pepper. I ground this up with my mortar and pestle, and by serial dilution and succussion of one part in ten, I took it to a homeopathic potency of 8x. Then with my Hieronymus analyzer, a radionic instrument, I copied the pattern of this 8x Johnson grass Pepper onto a vial of sugar tablets. My colleague, Lorraine, said, "Here, let me test that on my Determination Board."
Her Determination Board has a 360 degree wheel. She places the sample on the board and pendulum dowses to see how many degrees around the wheel the pendulum swings. 360 degrees is basic balance, though sometimes a sample will dowse two or more times around. I watched, and the Johnson grass reagent only went 70 degrees. "Oh!" I exclaimed.
Right then it hit me what I had was a reagent that simply killed Johnson grass. But Johnson grass serves some function, and nature abhors a vacuum. I wasn't doing nature a favor by simply eliminating Johnson grass.
I sat down and wrote out the following intent: "If it be Thy will, let the powers of nature converge to sever the connection between Johnson grass and the Moon's forces of moisture wherever this reagent is used, and to replace its function with the best means available for now and in the future for as long as is appropriate. Amen."
I didn't need to know what the best means available would be, but it struck me there were means and there were better means and so forth. I had one of MaZebah Taahn's SawTees, a ceramic pattern energy bead with an enormous array of patterns on it. I put all three, the 8x pepper, the SawTee and the written intent in the well of my Hieronymus analyzer and made a new reagent.
This time when Lorraine put it on her Determination Board it went 360 degrees. Thus at the end of August 2001 we sent the reagent to Arkansas to be tested. It did not completely wipe Johnson grass out in the next two months as I originally hoped, but we believe the Johnson grass was reduced nonetheless. Johnson grass has a lot of stored vigor.
Steiner suggested that with some weeds this procedure could take as long as four years. Considering how much moisture healthy prickly pear stores it's one that might take the full four years. But I wouldn't expect any new prickly pears to grow during that time.
Presently we are collecting weed seed specimens from all quarters. Send us your favorites, but please send us seeds--not leaves, stems, brush or trash. We've seen some pretty rough samples so far. Do you have a weed you would like to eliminate? Contact us.
Hugh Lovel and Lorraine Cahill
Union Agricultural Institute
8475 Dockery Road
Blairsville, Georgia 30512
706 745 6056
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.unionag.org
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Construction Plans
The basic idea of field broadcasting is to induce patterns into the medium. This design (see drawing) has a copper plate on the top roughly nine and a half feet in the air and another on the bottom two feet underground. There is enough difference in potential from top to bottom that a slight current flow occurs. This is sufficient to create an induction effect.
The broadcast induction coils are two feet long and are lathe-wrapped on 2-inch Sch 40 PVC cores with 20 gauge wire at approximately a quarter inch between turns. The one in the top broadcasts into the atmosphere while the one in the base does the soil. We should broadcast only the patterns appropriate for each domain, soil patterns to soil, air patterns to air. So each broadcast coil has its own reagent well (pronounced re-agent).
This well has a coil around it to pick up the patterns of the reagents inside. The wire then leads to a quartz crystal, also wrapped with a coil, which functions as a resonator. The top broadcast coil, well coil and resonator coil are all wrapped counter-clockwise for the northern hemisphere. The base broadcast coil and other coils are wrapped clockwise. For the southern hemisphere this is reversed because of the Coriolis effect. The minimum number of turns for any coil is seven going on eight in order to satisfy the "octave rule." The broadcast coils top and bottom have more than 84 turns.
Incoming flow has to first cross the germanium diode, a one-way conductor, in front of the well and resonator in the circuit. Just beyond the well junction is a 100k resistor. This acts as an anchor for the well patterns. As current takes the path of least resistance, resistors fight power, but they stabilize information. We can think of the complex fractal patterns we broadcast as information. 100k resistance is ample to steady the patterns so they resonate right on top of themselves. This eliminates drift and creates a field which can cover a wide radius.
When flow enters the circuit in the opposite direction it encounters the resistor, then the well and resonator, then the diode. But it can't go across the diode since this only conducts in one direction, so it takes the alternate path of no resistance through the 12 �h choke coil. The choke coil eliminates radio antenna effects.
I cover the windings of all coils with masking tape, and silicone caulk each broadcast coil inside a three inch schedule 40 tube of the same length so they are sealed and securely suspended. At the ends I use three inch PVC dome caps fitted with the top and bottom copper end plates, which are connected into the circuits.
I found diodes sometimes fail so I double these, wired in parallel. Before and after the diodes I install binding post terminals so that each circuit's components can be tested during assembly and at any time afterward. I find it is important that the wells be securely caulked so no moisture condenses inside the tower. Otherwise it fills up with water and, among other things, may act as a lightning rod.
I've deliberately kept my design as simple as possible though several further elaborations could be made. -Hugh Lovel
Editor's Note: Hugh Lovel is a scientist, farmer and author of A Biodynamic Farm. As an innovator in the field of quantum agriculture he has furthered T. Galen Hieronymus' agricultural subtle energy work. He studied business, sociology, biology, chemistry and physics at Southeastern Louisiana University and currently market gardens on 16 acres near Blairsville, Georgia. Lorraine Cahill, who specializes in reagent making and farm energy analysis, works with dowsing, Malcolm Rae instruments and other modalities. She has long been a student of health, nutrition, subtle energies and radionics. She works with Hugh Lovel at Union Agricultural Institute near Blairsville.
Cutlines for Pictures:
A.
>From upper left clockwise: 1. Hollis Rosson pulverizes and sifts quartz crystal by pounding it inside a 2" heavy steel pipe w/sealed end with a longer 1 1/2" steel pipe with solid end. 2. Hollis grinds the sifted quartz sand between two sheets of plate glass to achieve talcum-like fineness. 3. A mature female bovine horn is filled with moist quartz powder and sealed at the end with a plug of calcium bentonite clay. 4. The horns pack with quartz powder are buried from spring equinox through fall equinox so the material is resonantly charged with the summer's photosynthetic, blossoming, fruiting and ripening energy patterns.
B.
Field Broadcaster set up at Fragrant Farms, a cut flower and vinyard operation in New Harmony, Indiana. The owner wrote to us and sent us samples of his peonies, which he said had never bloomed so profusely. Later he also sent us a complementary bottle of wine, which we have not sampled yet.
C.
Machine wrapping of broadcast coils on a lathe. A strip of double sided carpet tape is run from end to end and the coil is wrapped with approximately 1/4" between turns yielding more than 84 turns in a two foot coil. Wire is covered with masking tape for stability.
D.
August cutting samples of a four year old stand of alfalfa divided into test and control plots. Left is control with a relative feed value (RFV) of 220 and right is test with a RFV of 209.
In this farmer's words, "Short alfalfa normally always tests better than tall alfalfa, so if I can grow alfalfa twice as tall and maintain the same high level of quality I'm happy."
