Last night Standard Process put on a dinner at True Food Kitchen in Old Town Pasadena. It is an organic restaurant and I recommend it having now eaten there. The speaker was Christine who has managed the Standard Process farms for the past 30 years. Before that she worked for Novartis, a Swiss drug company. So she knows both sides of the health spectrum. She also owns an organic farm with her husband. She has a college degree in Agronomy which means she knows how to farm effectively. About 25 health care professionals attended the dinner.
The 4th generation son of the family, now in his 20s, was also there. He told us about some of the different organic seeds and that different versions of the same species have different nutritional values. New products or old products with better more nutritious profiles will be coming out in the products. Standard Process tests these different seeds in an experimental farm in Idaho as well as on their main farm in the Palmyra area of south central Wisconsin. Of course, organic farms do not get subsidies like the chemical based farms.
Before World War II essentially all farms were organic but the chemical fertilizers came out and have spread since the war. Conditions such as diabetes and autism have gone through the roof as time has progressed since this war. In 1996 a study was done at Rutgers University that compared several vegetables both the organic version and the commercial version. Several minerals were tested and each was far less in the commercial brand compared with the organic. For example, organic lettuce had 49.3 parts of magnesium compared to 13.1 parts magnesium in the commercial. Tomatoes had 1,938 parts iron in the organic to 1 part in the commercial. Only one half of one percent of farms in the USA are organic, with 20% of the organic farms in California. That is one bright spot for California. Probably more vegetables you would see on your table are organic than that one half percent as almost all the wheat, soy and corn are inorganic.
Growing organic takes substantially more work than the commercial way. A cover crop has to be grown to increase the nitrogen in the soil, for example. Minerals in crushed rock are spread on the ground to resupply certain minerals. Every several years what is grown has to be changed to a different crop. Interestingly bugs that feed on crops are very specific in what they will eat. When you rotate a crop there is no food for the bugs on that acreage. Composting is practiced which returns organic material to the soil. Despite decades of using the land it is more fertile today than decades ago. We hear people say they are very happy with the Standard Process supplements. This will give you a little insight as to why.
Sincerely,
Dr. Mike Spearman
