I first encountered William A. Albrecht, Ph.D., on paper during my veterinary medicine days because of his connection with the discovery of aureomycin in the mid 1940s. Aureomycin literally leaped into the nation’s headlines as an antibiotic similar to penicillin.
It promised to defend against death dealing viruses and as an answer to gram-positive bacteria. Aureomycin was discovered on an eight acre plot known as Sanborn Field at the University of Missouri, now a national historical landmark over 100 years old.
These 39 research plots have given up more of nature’s secrets than any similarly sized piece of soil on planet Earth. At the time of Albrecht’s death on May 21, 1974, most of these plots had been operated under his tutelage.
It was here that Albrecht learned nature’s lessons and requirements. The papers presented in this volume reveal some parts of the record. They reveal some of the values and some of the fallacies and shortcomings of relations, the beneficial effects and some limitations of undigested farm manures, and the benefits and some misconceptions of legumes for soil improvement. The previous four volumes of Albrecht Papers have provided some of the bedrock rationale for limestone in crop production. The papers presented here merely enlarge the subject.
Through the years Sanborn Field told Albrecht more than a little about the acetic effect of some nitrogen fertilizers and the shortfalls after three quarters of a century of chemical fertilizers on soil properties and crop production. Albrecht asked nature about the possibilities of rejuvenating soil with non-legumes and plant nutrients, and nature gave her answers largely because Albrecht asked the right questions.
“If you really stop to think about it,” Albrecht told me during one of our Socrates sessions, “All I have done here is write down what we’ve learned through the years about how everything connects.” The prime connection was calcium.
The mere selection of Plot 23 for that famous aureomycin probe represented learned intuition. That plot had already accounted for face-reddening implications. Rotations under certain conditions were far from beneficial and even became outright harmful. Legumes could impoverish land as much as any non-nitrogen fixing crop. Fertilizer dealers found their premises demolished when they paused to listen to Albrecht.
Even this short inventory of information told the great professor that Plot 23 contained dynamite. That dynamite turned out to be Streptomyces aureofaciens, strain A377, the parent of all the aureomycins used in World War II.
Albrecht came to the University of Missouri as a microbiologist in 1916, having finished his graduate work at the University of Illinois. He was the seventh of eight children reared on a farm in Livingston County, Illinois.
Never satisfied with superficial answers to superficial questions, Albrecht pushed his way back to fundamentals.
In the early 1930s soil mining techniques had reached a climax point. The first government lime program surfaced under the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Possibly half the soils in the United States were helped by liming. “Lime and lime some more” became the catchphrase. “You can’t overdo it.”
As with most programs, this one was complied with political strategy, not science, and this caused Albrecht to come up fighting from his chair. There was more to reclaiming the soil than fighting acidity.
Albrecht had tapped foreign scholars. The classics—Russia’s Sergei Winogradsky and Holland’s M.W. Beijerinck—had proved that nitrogen fixation took place in the soil without any legumes whatsoever.
The essentials were found to be a balance of readily available nitrogen and the presence of carbohydrates, phosphates and calcium. Albrecht pondered the findings of Thomas Way of England. It was Way who in 1852 revealed that when soil absorbed ammonia, a corresponding amount of calcium was released into the drainage water. The exchange mechanism was seated in clay.
It was this point that Albrecht elected to explore. He knew that the exchange capacity of soil depended on both the colloidal clay and the organic matter.
“We took things one leg at a time,” Albrecht said, “and wrote down the results.” Often the findings went out as graduate student papers under the imprimatur of the Department, the student being the author, Albrecht the sponsor. Albrecht described his role as follows:
“I separated the finest part of the clay out of Putnam silt and loam soil by churning it in a centrifuge running at 32,000 RPM. After the clay had been suspended and settled for three weeks at the bottom, that clay finally plugged up the machinery. But we had thinner and smaller and smaller clay particles until about halfway up the centrifuge, there we had it clear as Vaseline. We took the upper half of the clay. We made pounds and pounds of it. We took it into an electrical field and made it acidic. We took off all the cations so it was acidic clay. That was how we studied plant nutrition. We titrated back different elements in different orders. We mixed them, balanced them.”
The papers presented in this book have to be absorbed with these few points in mind.
Albrecht was standing on the shoulders of giants. That’s how he knew he had to begin with calcium.
“The shoulders of giants” is no mere hyperbole. The effect of calcium hydroxide on nodulation was first observed by a scientist named Salfeld-Lingen in 1900. He secured nodulation of peas only when limestone became a soil treatment. Em. Marchal worked with water cultures. He found that the salts of calcium and magnesium also formed nodulation. And E. Laurent and A.V. Donnan came to observe that lime stimulates nodulation formation. Other workers noted the effect of calcium and magnesium under both alkaline and acid conditions. The focal point of much research at the beginning of the 20th century was nodulation, but the purview expanded itself soon enough.
The Albrecht bibliography is rife with papers that seemingly exhausted the subject. The answers sought by early Albrecht studies relied on asking the right questions.
1. What was the effect of standard soil amendments on the nodulation of soybeans grown on various treated plots of certain soil in Missouri and Illinois?
2. What was the effect on soybean inoculation of calcium, phosphorus and potassium treatments individually on the above soils?
3. What was the effect of calcium on the viability of Bacillus radicicola on the soybeans and on the nodulation of soybeans grown in solution?
4. What was the possibility of salt treatments of soybean seeds at the time of inoculation in order to increase nodulation?
Albrecht commented on these studies. “Professor Miller wanted me to put bacteria into the soil and I had to make the point that it took more than a fancy bull to produce a calf. The cow also had something to do with it.”
By the early 1930s, soil-mining techniques in the United States had reached a climax point. As far east as Missouri the dust bowl fogged the sky. The east exhibited faltering production in terms of protein. The limestone connection beckoned!
“Your acidic clay is one that doesn’t have the positive ions in it—hydrogen, calcium, potassium, magnesium, sodium and trace elements. I’ve got to have 65 percent of that clay’s capacity loaded with calcium and 15 percent with magnesium. I have to have four times more calcium than magnesium.
See why we ought to lime the soil? We ought to lime it to where it feeds the plant calcium, not to fight the acidity.”
The conventional ignorance concerning so-called sour soils almost goaded Albrecht into sermon-like activity. An explanation lies between the greens of the mustard family—kale, mustard greens, turnip tops and those of the goosefoot family (spinach, Swiss chard, beet greens and New Zealand spinach). The mustard group achieves nutritional superiority because of higher concentrations of calcium. Calcium papers reflect his wisdom. In Eco-Farm, An Acres U.S.A. Primer, I summarized and expanded the subject out of its airtight compartment. A general in-depth abstract concludes this foreword.
There are significant differences in vitamin C. Calcium is essential for body building and vitamin C is a protective food. Greens of the goosefoot family do not concentrate as much calcium as do the mustards. Moreover, calcium in the goosefoot family cannot be digestively utilized in the diet because of oxalic acid (oxalates). Oxalic acid combines with calcium to make nutrients in digestion. Indigestible oxalates are most pronounced when soils are neutral, when some soils have been corrected with calcium to a neutral point and not balanced as discussed by Albrecht.
Calcium has the leadership role among the nutrient ions that enter plant life. As protein concentrations rise, calcium concentrations also rise. With an increase in proteins, there is an increase in vitamins.
Soils limed to neutrality are nutrient deficient and contain toxic overloads of undesirable minerals. In the Albrecht equation a touch of acidity is preserved—about 10 percent. But the bottom line is that too much calcium or magnesium represent imbalance even if they adjust pH to the neutral point.
Other Albrecht lessons reveal that many high pH soils are built to neutral pH and beyond by sodium and potassium, yet remain calcium deficient. With these few words, I now invite the reader to join William A. Albrecht in his classroom via the agency of his papers on calcium. Each paper asks to be read more than once, for each reading seems to turn on the light on some fine point, some truth, some revealing Albrechtism.
— Charles Walters, Editor