The previous few pages have cleared up at least one point. It is impossible to take calcium and sequester it under a subject head without reference to the other volumes of the Albrecht message.
Proper calcium levels help plants form better root systems for the root-bed, stems and leaves for efficient use of sunlight energy, water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and mineral nutrients. They reduce the toxicity of several soil constituents and combinations.
A comment for this section has been promised for enlargement of the subject, and perhaps a demurrer for our times.
In “Understand the Calcium Process in American Agriculture,” published in Biodynamics Quarterly, Spring 1991, Walter Goldstein wondered in print silence whether the cation balances told the whole story, certainly Carey A. Reams would have entertained such a question, and Rudolf Steiner circulated his insight even while Albrecht was conducting scientific tests. Steiner was a clairvoyant, and yet he advised his followers to “experiment, experiment.” The biodynamic system that emerged from his insight has been ratified by followers who have added paragraphs and chapters to the calcium connection. The literature is massive.
Whatever, any analysis has to start with analysis, seedbed and root-bed preparation, seed selection, and then it has to move into tillage, crop maintenance, foliar support nutrition, harvesting and storage. All seem to depend on the calcium connection. When the foundation of this sequence is short-circuited, rescue chemistry hopes to pull the farmer’s chestnuts out of the fire. All this fails largely because the calcium connection hasn’t been made in the first place. It is no accident that weed crops and subsoils connect. Weeds that best proliferate under anaerobic conditions—foxtail, tall panicum—arrive when there is a calcium disconnect. Yet calcium levels without the tolerance levels Albrecht prescribed improve soil texture, phosphorus and micronutrient availability, thus improve the environment for microorganism and aid the growth of both symbiotic and non-symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria.
Calcium thus remains a backbone consideration in any volume of The Albrecht Papers. It was therefore the goal of this volume to help farmers fine-tune their thinking on the subject before moving on.
The ideas proposed here are further enlarged in The Pfeiffer Papers, in The Enlivened Rock Powders (by Harvey Lisle) and in A Biodynamic Farm (by Hugh Lovel). Albrecht followed the work of Pfeiffer, a student of Steiner, with keen interest, much as he followed Biological Transmutations (by Louis Kervran), until nature closed down that interest with his death in 1974.
Absorb the rest of these papers and learn for yourself.
—Charles Walters, Editor