For twenty-five years, the world's harvests have stopped keeping pace. Farming works harder than ever to grow food that costs more and carries less. The clue may be in the water beneath it.
Outstanding insight Pierre. No surprise there. I am looking forward to the testing that must be done. I'm hoping you're able to connect with Secretary Kennedy with this critical piece of information. He will be able to do the necessary investigatory research and then, time willing, make the recommendations for the intervention. Is there enough of your precious minerals to support and nourish the fields around America and the world?
Although the decline of crop production is alarming (the graph 'Global Annual Yield Trends'), the graph with the wheat yield may be 'saturation', meaning, one cannot indefinitely increase the yield. It has to cause saturation at some point.
Years ago, I read about concerns that our soil is getting depleted from needed minerals, since the only thing we put back is nitrogen. Our food becomes 'empty' of essential minerals. Then pesticides may kill soil bacteria that used to liberate needed minerals to become bioavailable for the plants.
And the fascinating findings in the Amazon, where the soil had been cultivated by the indigenous people a thousand years ago and root systems of plants were still going down 3 feet deep. Here more research is needed to understand how we can replicate that.
Regarding plants, everything evolves around the root system. As with the biome in our guts, the plants need a healthy biological environment in the soil, including needed minerals.
So, a combination of volcanic ash or grounded rock and beneficial soil bacteria should reconstitute the soil environment that the root system of plants need.
Merci, très bon article. Améliorer l'eau est un excellente idée, mais il serait dommage par contre d'alimenter un système de culture basé sur la destruction du vivant, comme le modèle actuel de la culture intensive.
too bad you need to use AI to write and can't write it by yourself, or hire someone who can write.
the irony is that just what you complain about in terms of degrading our water is just what AI is doing to literature. It's grating to read; it's like the nitrogen fertilizer and glyphosate on the mind.
I spent many months writing umpteenth revisions and restructurings of this chapter/post with AI as a much-needed editor. Whether you liked it or not, as someone who has written many hundreds of posts without AI, I can assure you this was way better than it would have been unaided. To each his own, but I won't argue that we are all over-relying on AI, some more than others
Alongside what you say, regards hydrating plants only, not regards mineral composition, increased atmospheric carbon apparently means that plants need less water.
Dr. Kory, interesting article. There is so much to discuss when it comes to the "Industrial
Agriculture" cartel! My favorite farmer/philosopher, Wendell Berry, who recently died at the age of 94, wrote prolifically on the demise of the small farm and the devastating effects of the massive monocultures that industrial agriculture has perpetrated not only on our environment, but also on our nutritional well-being as well.
On another note, I recently purchased a bottle of Aurmina from you and am amazed at how many
nasty, yellowish strands of sediment are pulled out of a half-gallon glass bottle of tap water! And I live in a small town in the South Central Ozarks that is known for its cleaner-than-usual municipal water! I am currently using coffee filters to strain the particulates from the treated water, but I have a gravity-fed filtration system on order to further the purification process.
I also ordered a bottle of Primora and plan to run some experiments on seedling growth with and without a Primora application. I'll keep you posted. Thanks for all you do and are doing!
The least we could do is get rid of Fluoride from the public water supply. That would be a safe first step we could implement tomorrow.
When my daughters husband relocated in the US from Great Britain it took him months to acclimate to US foods which have far more toxins than those found in his home country. Us Perennial Hippies, like myself (b. 1954) have long understood that ultimately everything is connected. So when you try to "improve" the food supply you need to understand everything about the ecosystem in which food production exists; plant metabolism, the role of microbes, the effect of glyphosate which chelates minerals making them unavailable to the plants, the mineral depletion of the soil.
Now I do occasionally enjoy watching Pornhub videos. And one thing I have noticed is the Russian and European female pornstars seem to be significantly thinner than their American counterparts. I suspect this has do do with the fact that Europe does not allow half the crap we put in our foods in the United States. Or I suppose it could be they can't afford to eat that much. I don't think that is the problem however. If you look at young people from 1972 -- when I graduated from High School -- you will also notice that American youth were significantly thinner then than now. As the saying goes 'you are what you eat.' Back then there was no GMO farming or use of glyphosate which only began in the early 1990's. So whether the globalists are doing this on purpose is up for debate. What is clear is over the last 50 years we are slowly killing ourselves much like the Romans who began using lead in their aquaducts and wine containers. Microplastics, increasing EMF exposure, Glyphosate, endocrine disruptors are all having a negative effect on our metabolism and our health. And sadly RFK's MAHA has fallen short of doing anything about it.
What is disturbing to me is how we have an elite of Transhumanists, Eugenicists, Globalists that have expressed the need to vastly reduce human population on Earth. Perhaps that is why "they" destroyed the Georgia Guidestones which explicitly stated that very goal. And predictably Trumps lack of empathy to the affordability crisis has caused the greatest political upset in the last 50 years. So now we have elected majorities of Democrats and DSA members that unknowingly are embracing the larger globalist agenda. I had to mention this given yesterdays midterm election result. I have repeated this many times: the greatest shortcoming of humanity has always been to underestimate the evil of our rulers. Here's the last essay I wrote prior to yesterdays midterms:
=====
“If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” John Lennon
“If you go carrying pictures of El-Sayed it’s just a matter of time before all us Non-Muslims are dead.” Bruce Cain
I don’t have time for a long essay today. But after Stevens announcement today I laughed so hard that it brought tears to my eyes. Haven’t laughed that hard in years. Yep, hopefully this is the end of El-Sayed’s political career. He is an arrogant Muslim extremist punk who thought he could fool the people of Michigan with his use of Taqiyya: an Islamic term for strategic lying and deception. Right now he must feel like someone stole all his Halloween candy.
Islamist Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed and the Metastasizing Red-Green Alliance
If you live in Michigan vote Rogers to stop the Islamification of America
At any rate I asked Google AI the following question:
how glyphosate and genetically modified plants have reduced the nutritional value of food over the decades
And here is the very predictable answer.
=====
Over the past 60 to 70 years, the nutrient density of fruits, vegetables, and grains has declined by roughly 25% to 50% across major minerals and vitamins (such as calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, and vitamin C). While this drop is driven by multiple agricultural shifts, genetically modified (GMO) crops and the heavy use of the herbicide glyphosate play specific roles in this process.
How Glyphosate Impacts Nutrient Density
• Chelation (Mineral Binding): Glyphosate acts as a chelating agent, meaning it binds tightly to essential soil minerals like iron, manganese, copper, and zinc. By locking onto these minerals in the soil, it makes them less available for plant roots to absorb, lowering the final mineral content of the crop.
• Soil Microbial Disruption: Healthy plants depend on a symbiotic network of soil fungi (mycorrhizal fungi) and bacteria to break down and deliver nutrients. Glyphosate can harm or alter these beneficial soil microorganisms, reducing the biological activity needed to feed the plant.
• Pre-Harvest Desiccation: Glyphosate is frequently sprayed on non-GMO and GMO cereal and grain crops just before harvest to dry them out quickly (desiccation). This practice leaves higher chemical residues on the harvested food.
How Genetically Modified (GMO) Plants Fit In
• The "Dilution Effect" (Yield vs. Nutrition): Most commercial GMO crops (like Roundup Ready corn and soybeans) were not engineered to have higher nutritional value. Instead, they were engineered for herbicide tolerance or insect resistance to maximize physical weight, size, and growth speed. When a plant is bred or modified to grow bigger and faster, it spreads the same or a limited amount of soil nutrients across a much larger volume of plant tissue, diluting the concentration of vitamins and minerals per calorie.
• Shifting the Crop Landscape: The widespread adoption of herbicide-tolerant GMOs caused a massive exponential surge in the overall volume of glyphosate applied to agricultural fields.
• Lack of Nutritional Upside: While genetic engineering can theoretically be used for biofortification (such as Golden Rice for Vitamin A), the vast majority of GMO crops in the commercial supply chain focus on commodity traits rather than boosting human micronutrients.
Other Contributing Factors
The decline in food nutrition is not due to glyphosate and GMOs alone. Researchers point to several combined pressures over the last several decades:
• Soil Degradation: Intensive monoculture farming and loss of organic matter strip the soil faster than natural or synthetic inputs can replenish it.
• Elevated Carbon Dioxide (eCO₂): Rising atmospheric eCO₂ acts like an aerial fertilizer that forces plants to pack on more carbohydrates (like glucose and lignin) faster than they can draw minerals and protein from the ground, further diluting nutrient density.
Google AI [how glyphosate and genetically modified plants have reduced the nutritional value of food over the decades]
So glad to hear this, I swear I feel like I may be losing my audience going into agricuture and water... I will say that I worked on this essay/post/chapter for a long long time, has had many iterations over many months...
Brilliant! Thank you so much for publishing it and I too was caught by this article in a particular way and with a particular hope and effort on my part to start somewhere, in this case a large property we recently bought which will be for both the elderly and intellectually disabled, but which is on 50 acres and where we intend to grow food.
Thanks again for the inspiration! (and precious little excuse for my elaborately run-on sentence :-)
Well, so much for upcoming studies. Now that dems flipped the senate, mandates are back, Bobby/MAHA will be reversed any way possible, vaccines will be pushed and made mandatory, Big Harma worshipped and all other voices shunned. In other words, Make America Dysfunctional Again.
I DID buy a whole house filter a few years ago. Two years ago I added a reverse osmosis for drinking and cooking water. Our city (Calgary) decided to add fluoride to the water and I did not want fluoride in my bones. I did believe though that the water from tbe r'/o system is stripped of minerals we need. So I bought AURMINA. I tested the drops in both regular tap water and r/o water for 3 days. There was sediment in the regular tap water even with our whole house filter. No sediment in the r/'o water. I add the drops for the minerals. I hope I am on the right track.
you are on the right track... except you are missing the major minerals that water is built on, e.g. calcium and magnesium (Aurmina provides only tiny amounts of those). But we are working on a way to build back RO water with calcium and magnesium to pair with Aurmina - stay tuned.
It depends on the chemical composition of the calcium and magnesium. Eating chalk, for instance, would not improve calcium uptake or it might even become a burden to the body. Those minerals have to be in a bioavailable form. I only supplement magnesium, which supposedly balances the calcium uptake in our body. I think it will be easier and more cost effective to just supplement magnesium, for example in the form of magnesium glycinate.
Dave, agreed. As an avid outdoorsman and gardener, I have watched the skies over the past twenty years or so, and the persistent contrails that have marred our once-azure skies are undeniable. I have also observed a marked decline and death of numerous varieties of trees
that have grown along the creek bed in my backyard for decades.
Outstanding insight Pierre. No surprise there. I am looking forward to the testing that must be done. I'm hoping you're able to connect with Secretary Kennedy with this critical piece of information. He will be able to do the necessary investigatory research and then, time willing, make the recommendations for the intervention. Is there enough of your precious minerals to support and nourish the fields around America and the world?
Although the decline of crop production is alarming (the graph 'Global Annual Yield Trends'), the graph with the wheat yield may be 'saturation', meaning, one cannot indefinitely increase the yield. It has to cause saturation at some point.
Years ago, I read about concerns that our soil is getting depleted from needed minerals, since the only thing we put back is nitrogen. Our food becomes 'empty' of essential minerals. Then pesticides may kill soil bacteria that used to liberate needed minerals to become bioavailable for the plants.
And the fascinating findings in the Amazon, where the soil had been cultivated by the indigenous people a thousand years ago and root systems of plants were still going down 3 feet deep. Here more research is needed to understand how we can replicate that.
Regarding plants, everything evolves around the root system. As with the biome in our guts, the plants need a healthy biological environment in the soil, including needed minerals.
So, a combination of volcanic ash or grounded rock and beneficial soil bacteria should reconstitute the soil environment that the root system of plants need.
Merci, très bon article. Améliorer l'eau est un excellente idée, mais il serait dommage par contre d'alimenter un système de culture basé sur la destruction du vivant, comme le modèle actuel de la culture intensive.
too bad you need to use AI to write and can't write it by yourself, or hire someone who can write.
the irony is that just what you complain about in terms of degrading our water is just what AI is doing to literature. It's grating to read; it's like the nitrogen fertilizer and glyphosate on the mind.
I spent many months writing umpteenth revisions and restructurings of this chapter/post with AI as a much-needed editor. Whether you liked it or not, as someone who has written many hundreds of posts without AI, I can assure you this was way better than it would have been unaided. To each his own, but I won't argue that we are all over-relying on AI, some more than others
Alongside what you say, regards hydrating plants only, not regards mineral composition, increased atmospheric carbon apparently means that plants need less water.
Dr. Kory, interesting article. There is so much to discuss when it comes to the "Industrial
Agriculture" cartel! My favorite farmer/philosopher, Wendell Berry, who recently died at the age of 94, wrote prolifically on the demise of the small farm and the devastating effects of the massive monocultures that industrial agriculture has perpetrated not only on our environment, but also on our nutritional well-being as well.
On another note, I recently purchased a bottle of Aurmina from you and am amazed at how many
nasty, yellowish strands of sediment are pulled out of a half-gallon glass bottle of tap water! And I live in a small town in the South Central Ozarks that is known for its cleaner-than-usual municipal water! I am currently using coffee filters to strain the particulates from the treated water, but I have a gravity-fed filtration system on order to further the purification process.
I also ordered a bottle of Primora and plan to run some experiments on seedling growth with and without a Primora application. I'll keep you posted. Thanks for all you do and are doing!
Keep me posted! with pictures (that is if you do a control plant or two!)
The least we could do is get rid of Fluoride from the public water supply. That would be a safe first step we could implement tomorrow.
When my daughters husband relocated in the US from Great Britain it took him months to acclimate to US foods which have far more toxins than those found in his home country. Us Perennial Hippies, like myself (b. 1954) have long understood that ultimately everything is connected. So when you try to "improve" the food supply you need to understand everything about the ecosystem in which food production exists; plant metabolism, the role of microbes, the effect of glyphosate which chelates minerals making them unavailable to the plants, the mineral depletion of the soil.
Now I do occasionally enjoy watching Pornhub videos. And one thing I have noticed is the Russian and European female pornstars seem to be significantly thinner than their American counterparts. I suspect this has do do with the fact that Europe does not allow half the crap we put in our foods in the United States. Or I suppose it could be they can't afford to eat that much. I don't think that is the problem however. If you look at young people from 1972 -- when I graduated from High School -- you will also notice that American youth were significantly thinner then than now. As the saying goes 'you are what you eat.' Back then there was no GMO farming or use of glyphosate which only began in the early 1990's. So whether the globalists are doing this on purpose is up for debate. What is clear is over the last 50 years we are slowly killing ourselves much like the Romans who began using lead in their aquaducts and wine containers. Microplastics, increasing EMF exposure, Glyphosate, endocrine disruptors are all having a negative effect on our metabolism and our health. And sadly RFK's MAHA has fallen short of doing anything about it.
What is disturbing to me is how we have an elite of Transhumanists, Eugenicists, Globalists that have expressed the need to vastly reduce human population on Earth. Perhaps that is why "they" destroyed the Georgia Guidestones which explicitly stated that very goal. And predictably Trumps lack of empathy to the affordability crisis has caused the greatest political upset in the last 50 years. So now we have elected majorities of Democrats and DSA members that unknowingly are embracing the larger globalist agenda. I had to mention this given yesterdays midterm election result. I have repeated this many times: the greatest shortcoming of humanity has always been to underestimate the evil of our rulers. Here's the last essay I wrote prior to yesterdays midterms:
=====
“If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” John Lennon
“If you go carrying pictures of El-Sayed it’s just a matter of time before all us Non-Muslims are dead.” Bruce Cain
I don’t have time for a long essay today. But after Stevens announcement today I laughed so hard that it brought tears to my eyes. Haven’t laughed that hard in years. Yep, hopefully this is the end of El-Sayed’s political career. He is an arrogant Muslim extremist punk who thought he could fool the people of Michigan with his use of Taqiyya: an Islamic term for strategic lying and deception. Right now he must feel like someone stole all his Halloween candy.
Islamist Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed and the Metastasizing Red-Green Alliance
If you live in Michigan vote Rogers to stop the Islamification of America
https://brucecain.substack.com/p/islamist-senate-candidate-abdul-el
=====
At any rate I asked Google AI the following question:
how glyphosate and genetically modified plants have reduced the nutritional value of food over the decades
And here is the very predictable answer.
=====
Over the past 60 to 70 years, the nutrient density of fruits, vegetables, and grains has declined by roughly 25% to 50% across major minerals and vitamins (such as calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, and vitamin C). While this drop is driven by multiple agricultural shifts, genetically modified (GMO) crops and the heavy use of the herbicide glyphosate play specific roles in this process.
How Glyphosate Impacts Nutrient Density
• Chelation (Mineral Binding): Glyphosate acts as a chelating agent, meaning it binds tightly to essential soil minerals like iron, manganese, copper, and zinc. By locking onto these minerals in the soil, it makes them less available for plant roots to absorb, lowering the final mineral content of the crop.
• Soil Microbial Disruption: Healthy plants depend on a symbiotic network of soil fungi (mycorrhizal fungi) and bacteria to break down and deliver nutrients. Glyphosate can harm or alter these beneficial soil microorganisms, reducing the biological activity needed to feed the plant.
• Pre-Harvest Desiccation: Glyphosate is frequently sprayed on non-GMO and GMO cereal and grain crops just before harvest to dry them out quickly (desiccation). This practice leaves higher chemical residues on the harvested food.
How Genetically Modified (GMO) Plants Fit In
• The "Dilution Effect" (Yield vs. Nutrition): Most commercial GMO crops (like Roundup Ready corn and soybeans) were not engineered to have higher nutritional value. Instead, they were engineered for herbicide tolerance or insect resistance to maximize physical weight, size, and growth speed. When a plant is bred or modified to grow bigger and faster, it spreads the same or a limited amount of soil nutrients across a much larger volume of plant tissue, diluting the concentration of vitamins and minerals per calorie.
• Shifting the Crop Landscape: The widespread adoption of herbicide-tolerant GMOs caused a massive exponential surge in the overall volume of glyphosate applied to agricultural fields.
• Lack of Nutritional Upside: While genetic engineering can theoretically be used for biofortification (such as Golden Rice for Vitamin A), the vast majority of GMO crops in the commercial supply chain focus on commodity traits rather than boosting human micronutrients.
Other Contributing Factors
The decline in food nutrition is not due to glyphosate and GMOs alone. Researchers point to several combined pressures over the last several decades:
• Soil Degradation: Intensive monoculture farming and loss of organic matter strip the soil faster than natural or synthetic inputs can replenish it.
• Elevated Carbon Dioxide (eCO₂): Rising atmospheric eCO₂ acts like an aerial fertilizer that forces plants to pack on more carbohydrates (like glucose and lignin) faster than they can draw minerals and protein from the ground, further diluting nutrient density.
Google AI [how glyphosate and genetically modified plants have reduced the nutritional value of food over the decades]
I love all of your articles. This one is by far my favorite. God bless you and your family and thank you for your outstanding work.
So glad to hear this, I swear I feel like I may be losing my audience going into agricuture and water... I will say that I worked on this essay/post/chapter for a long long time, has had many iterations over many months...
Brilliant! Thank you so much for publishing it and I too was caught by this article in a particular way and with a particular hope and effort on my part to start somewhere, in this case a large property we recently bought which will be for both the elderly and intellectually disabled, but which is on 50 acres and where we intend to grow food.
Thanks again for the inspiration! (and precious little excuse for my elaborately run-on sentence :-)
Well, so much for upcoming studies. Now that dems flipped the senate, mandates are back, Bobby/MAHA will be reversed any way possible, vaccines will be pushed and made mandatory, Big Harma worshipped and all other voices shunned. In other words, Make America Dysfunctional Again.
That's my conclusion, too. And Bobby didn't have much success, too many politicians from both sides are fed by Big Pharma, I believe...
Was the war with Iran really necessary? I think the resulting increase in prices alone may explain the election outcome.
I DID buy a whole house filter a few years ago. Two years ago I added a reverse osmosis for drinking and cooking water. Our city (Calgary) decided to add fluoride to the water and I did not want fluoride in my bones. I did believe though that the water from tbe r'/o system is stripped of minerals we need. So I bought AURMINA. I tested the drops in both regular tap water and r/o water for 3 days. There was sediment in the regular tap water even with our whole house filter. No sediment in the r/'o water. I add the drops for the minerals. I hope I am on the right track.
you are on the right track... except you are missing the major minerals that water is built on, e.g. calcium and magnesium (Aurmina provides only tiny amounts of those). But we are working on a way to build back RO water with calcium and magnesium to pair with Aurmina - stay tuned.
It depends on the chemical composition of the calcium and magnesium. Eating chalk, for instance, would not improve calcium uptake or it might even become a burden to the body. Those minerals have to be in a bioavailable form. I only supplement magnesium, which supposedly balances the calcium uptake in our body. I think it will be easier and more cost effective to just supplement magnesium, for example in the form of magnesium glycinate.
AND the water above - geoengineering the sky ("chemtrails" are real).
Dave, agreed. As an avid outdoorsman and gardener, I have watched the skies over the past twenty years or so, and the persistent contrails that have marred our once-azure skies are undeniable. I have also observed a marked decline and death of numerous varieties of trees
that have grown along the creek bed in my backyard for decades.