Livestock Can Teach Us a Lesson On Nutrition From the Ground Up!
WHEN A COW BREAKS THROUGH the fence, you perhaps ask (in one way or another) “What’s in her mind?” If you correctly answer that question, there is a mutually beneficial solution to the broken fence problem.
If not, there is conflict between Mother Nature and you … conflict in which Nature strikes back with a recoil damaging to both you and the cow. For the fence-breaking cow more than likely is demonstrating her recognition of the higher quality feed growing “on the other side of the fence.”1 Grass on virgin soil along the highway or railroad right-of-way is better nutrition, in her judgment, than what is growing on depleted soils in her pasture. By such discrimination, animals were surviving naturally and in good health long before domestication.
Careful study of some of the soil and plant facts related to livestock behavior, and the behavior of all other living things, reveals that animals carefully consider their nutrition “from the ground up.” And accurate interpretation of such behavior is essential to the progressive stockman.
Organized knowledge of the distribution patterns of different kinds of life on the earth’s surface is the science of ecology. The search for reasons why a particular kind of life is in a specific place has yielded a list of possible responsible factors that includes rainfall, temperature, geology, topography, soil acidity and many others. More recently, however, we have realized that all factors can be summed up in the word “food” as the major determinant of any ecological pattern. Of the various food components, proteins are the major constituents which life struggles to obtain.
Soil science in its recent remarkable development, with much help from other sciences, has pointed to variations in yield and quality of proteins according not only to the different crops but to any crop according to differences in fertility of the soil growing it. Those differences in soils’ capacities to create living proteins in crops and animals result from variations in the climatic forces of rainfall, temperature, topography and other weathering agencies acting on the rocks to produce soil. Consequently, “We are what we are because of where we are” and “We are what we eat” (“Mann ist was er esst”), in the words of a geologist and a German geographer, respectively.
In observing animals, plants and microbes as life forms in that order below man in the biotic pyramid where all rest on the soil as their creative foundation, we need to be reminded that when man came on the scene he was met by each of these forms as healthy “climax crops” (Figure 1). By natural evolution, each was probably at its height of (a) growth, (b) self-protection and (c) fecund reproduction. They were discovered and domesticated only because they had achieved natural healthy survival through their own instinctive nutritional struggles. In other words, they had proven fit to survive in a climatic and soil setting responsible for a particular degree of soil development that undergirded their survival with proper nutrition. It was for each a case of ecology at its best.
Unfortunately, we have no “natural climax crops” left as standards of “fitness” and excellence for plants and animals in agriculture. We have transplanted from anywhere to everywhere, and healthy survival has not been among the objectives of such reshuffling. This has brought more life forms into conflict with the natural instincts and struggles that originally kept them healthy. Transplanting, but with neglect of the virgin soil as to its origin and climax, is now gradually resulting in malnutrition and failing health — deficient nutrition from the ground up. Some observations in support of this thesis will be discussed under the headings of (a) interdependence, a natural law, (b) survival depends on selection of foods according to soil fertility and (c) the struggle for proteins and evolution of helpful body organs.
A. Interdependence, a Natural Law
I. Legume Plants and Soil Bacteria
The biotic triumvirate of (a) the soil as foundation, (b) microbes as decomposers and (c) plants as major producers of energy and growth substances emphasizes their own essential interrelations and interdependencies as linkages, cooperations and symbioses by which they are the foundation of all other higher and more complex life strata. But the latter also have interdependencies with microbes and plants, thereby with the soil.
Fig. 1. The many life forms arrange themselves in a biotic pyramid illustrating the decreasing population of each life form according to its increasing bio-chemical complexity. All rest on the soil as their creative foundation.
It was as late as 1888 when we first recognized the interdependency, nutrition-wise, of legume plants and the nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria in their root nodules as a case of symbiosis or mutual benefit. We discovered years later that legumes are not nitrogen fixers purely because of pedigree. They are such only because of ample soil supplies of their delicately-balanced requisites for many inorganic nutrient elements, of which calcium (not listed among contents of commercial fertilizers) is the foremost.
When the soil failed to supply calcium more abundantly than any of the many other soil-borne inorganic nutrients, soybeans when first transplanted to the United States produced much vegetative matter but no seed. Disregarding fertile soils to guarantee reproduction and, thereby, survival of the species, superficial thinkers pronounced this plant immigrant “an excellent hay crop but not a seed crop.” They overlooked the undernourished crop’s low feed value when the forage plant could not even synthesize the necessary proteins to be mobilized later into seed for reproduction and procreation of the species. It required research by colloidal clay techniques to demonstrate that such soybean hay crops (roots and tops combined) contained less nitrogen, less phosphorus and less potassium (only ones tested) than were in the planted seeds.
II. Non-Legume Plants and Soil Fungi
The nutritionally advantageous alliance between either non-legume or legume plants and soil microbes (fungi) on soils well stocked with organic matter is not even yet significantly appreciated. Attention has been intensely focused on soil fungi lately because they are the commercially-lucrative source of the many antibiotics, death-dealers to bacteria. But the bacteria in soil are secondary microbes there. Fungi are the primary ones, more capable of obtaining food for both energy and growth from the woody carbonaceous organic matter of crop residues, the main energy source for all life within the soil. Much like any other higher life form, soil microbes are also struggling for proteins.
Accordingly, since bacteria have narrower carbohydrate-protein ratio requirements than fungi (as we know from manure-making, composting practices and commercial mushroom production), nitrogen will be conserved longer and held in insoluble organic forms rather than in water-soluble forms when there are more highly-carbonaceous residues in the soil. While fungi are holding nitrogen in their cellular compounds along with residues of less solubility or wider carbon-nitrogen ratios, bacteria are using organic matter of narrower ratios to make their nitrogen highly soluble. Soil rich in natural nitrogen must also be relatively rich in carbon compared to nitrogen to hold the latter there.
It must also follow axiomatically that the addition of nitrogen salts to the soil works against natural nitrogen conservation in soil organic matter. Soluble nitrogen is used by microbes, both fungi and bacteria, to help build their cellular protein tissues (provided carbon of soil organic matter as food energy is present). But while that process occurs, about twice as much of the combined insoluble carbon in the organic matter is respired or converted into gaseous carbon dioxide that escapes into the air.
III. Microbes Give Nitrogen but First Take It
According to such natural laws, we can understand why 25 years of continuous wheat on Sanborn Field, fertilized by either ammonium sulfate or sodium nitrate only, lowered the totals of both nitrogen and carbon (organic matter) in the soil below amounts in similar soil given no treatment — when in both cases all crops were removed. Simultaneously, the use of 6 tons of manure per acre annually under similar continuous wheat increased both nitrogen and carbon as constituents of organic matter in the soil. We dare not forget that not only plants but all life forms are interdependent in one way or another on soil microbes. All are supported by the soil; but microbes, the lowliest and simplest, always eat at the first sitting.
Fig. 2. The bovine paunch at top right is similar in many respects to the fertile prairie soil profile. Neither dare be water-logged to allow only anaerobic fermentation and its intoxicating by-products. Each must offer aerobic and oxidative conditions above the water line where constructive microbes can build protein compounds to be plants’ organic food and the animal’s protein supplements. Unlike the soil, however, the bovine rhythmically shifts its paunch profile to put roughages through anaerobic and then aerobic treatments.
Just as fungi are more capable than bacteria in decomposing insoluble carbohydrates, allowing bacteria to profit by using secondary fungi products as bacterial nutrition, so we find fungi more capable than bacteria in decomposing rock minerals. Fungi are more powerful in separating the cationic elements like potassium, calcium and magnesium from the anions like silica. Fungi in symbiosis with algae, in the form of the lichen, live on what appears to be clean rock. In this living combination, fungi supply the inorganic essentials and the green algae provide the organic carbohydrates (possibly proteins, too), so this union again supports a distinct flora of bacteria. This is, then, a unique almost cellular or microscopic association of fungi, bacteria and plants (in very close contact) converting rock surfaces into soils to support all three. It is a case of the lowest three strata of the biotic pyramid reduced in concept to symbiosis and interdependence at cellular dimensions. It represents almost twice as much thermo-dynamic potential for chemical mineral decomposition as any plant root contact with rocks.
We apparently have not appreciated the ability of fungi to hydrolyze insoluble cellulose into simpler carbohydrates like sugars, to hydrolyze proteins into available amino acids or to weather rock minerals for plant use, since scientific studies of this order have not seemed potentially as lucrative as many other avenues of organizing natural facts into sciences. Nor have we regarded agriculture as biological performances first and economics second, with the former the cause of the latter.
Instead we have searched for economic opportunities even at the cost of dire conflict with matters biotic. By that view we have created Frankensteins within biology that are now giving us so-called “health problems.” We apparently don’t realize that the so-called “dangerous” soil microbes or “germs” are not demons of destruction … save as failing health invites their natural acts of premortal decomposition. Instead of recognizing ourselves as responsible for the conflict with Nature, we are designing by means of our technologies the most powerful chemical poisons to destroy lower life forms completely. We have most seriously accepted Pasteur, so capable in his public relations during his time, but are not familiar with Bechamp, the scientist on whom the former as publicist depended.2
We are trying to destroy the lowest life forms, those next to the soil from which all creation takes off. We are learning that microbes give but, under our seeming ingratitude, we are slow to learn of Nature’s recoil when microbes also take — and we call it “disease.”
IV. Higher Life Forms Dependent on Microbes
Insects, as one of the lower animal strata of the biotic pyramid, are also in symbiosis with microbes when the latter must be harbored internally or be “nursed” by insects. Termites (wood-eating roaches not considered strictly insects though a corresponding low-life form) harbor a number of species of cellulose-digesting protozoa in their highly-developed hind intestine. These roaches depend on the protozoa for their major food supply, while most of the protozoa are dependent on their roach hosts for their restricted habitat and for food of wood particles.
Another group of insects dependent on microbes includes the screw-worm larvae, the sheep maggots of several species and the special ones discovered and used in World War I for cleansing badly-infected wounds, including bones. It has been established that those maggots feed not so much on the infecting bacteria but rather on the protein products resulting from microbial digestion of protein tissue. It is said that the “wounds are cleaned,” and the specific fly maggots used do not seriously harm living tissues.
In one experiment, a house fly laid its eggs on wood shavings in the corner of the cage where an experimental cancerous white mouse was regularly urinating and manure was accumulating so as to result in a composting process. It was observed that the mouse was very cautiously searching out and eating the house fly maggots regularly. Soon thereafter the cancerous tissue of the mouse began to atrophy, with increased activity of the mouse resulting.3
Such natural behavior suggests the stages of dependence and the chain of interrelated struggles for protein building upward to warm-blooded bodies by means of (a) the decomposition of organic matter supporting microbial synthesis of their own proteins from the cellulose composted with urine of the mouse, (b) the maggots’ required proteins supplied by the microbes and their digested products and (c) those proteins required for the mouse supplied by the house fly maggots via initial urinary body wastes of the mouse in cycle of re-use via that catenation of the several biotic strata. Through them, man at the apex of the pyramid is able to hoist his nutrition from the soil upward.
Like that of the termite, the hind intestine (or the large one) of all higher life forms harbors microbes, particularly bacteria, of many kinds. That holds true for all the strata above plants, including insects, birds, herbivora, carnivora and man. That those microbes render services of nutritional and survival value is a slowly-growing conviction. The “sterilizing” effects of antibiotics taken either orally or hypodermically, often with serious health disturbances, support this fact.
Products of both microbial decomposition and synthesis in the large intestine are currently lending themselves to fuller elucidation and recognition. Those include synthesis of vitamins, enzymes, recycled compounds and other reactions not yet completely cataloged.
V. Microbial Biochemistry Favored in Special Body Structures
The herbivora are a unique case of close connection with soil microbes at both the anterior and posterior ends of the digestive canal. At the anterior end, the true symbiosis of the ruminant with microbes occurs in three alimentary organs especially designed for advances microbial services before digestion by the true stomach takes place. This arrangement is highly essential for ruminants, which are nourished so extensively by bulky high-cellulose vegetation. The rumen is particularly equipped for microbial digestion and synthetic services by which the microbial substance itself is a very important nutritional factor, digested en route through the animal and supplying many essential nutrients not initially ingested. Thus the significance of soil fertility4 is connected with the fore as well as the rear anatomy of the animal in biochemical ways still unknown (Figure 2).
These facts suggest that the ruminant is clearly a warm-blooded summation of its creation through a series of all the biosynthetic services from the soil via microbes, plants and the animal itself. Should we not, in consequence, accept the chemical picture of the blood of such an animal as the best index of the fertility of the soil? Should we not expect deficiencies in the latter to be reflected as irregularities in the nutrition and health of the former?
B. Survival Depends on Selection of Foods According to Soil Fertility
I. Animals Discriminate Among Compounds, Not Elements
For survival, any animal must respect its relation to all other biotic strata on which it either is dependent or with which it is competitive. Evolution tells us that no species can or dares extinguish another completely. Accordingly, an animal must capably assay what it chooses to consume. Since variable soil grows foods of variable quality, the animal’s successful discrimination must rest on its highly refined ability as a “connoisseur of soil fertility.”
In agricultural practice, then, we can premise better husbandry on our confidence in the cow’s choice of feed components and their qualities according to fertility of the soils growing them. Soils must be managed by us as caterers to livestock and not as dictators compelling animals to accommodate themselves to our technologies and economics of simple business transactions.
II. Calcium
Livestock often reach across the fence or graze one certain area in the pasture, telling us that the element calcium is perhaps the first soil fertility requisite for quality forage on soils in humid areas. The importance of calcium in the synthesis of proteins of pulses, clovers and other more nutritious forages (according to the animal’s choice of them as supplements to non-legume forages for balancing its diet) was emphasized in the Old World since the early days of the Romans and in the New World since Benjamin Franklin. Unwittingly and for many years, calcium has served to build proteins, though lately it is emphasized mainly for its carbonate serving to reduce the degree (pH) of soil acidity. In both respects, magnesium plays a similar confusing role … but less prominently because of the lesser quantities involved.
Animals naturally are not expected to be capable of assaying the ash content of forages. But rather we expect livestock to recognize the organic compounds created from inorganic elements in the soil. Animals in desperation will consume even crushed limestone and other inorganic elements to make up mineral and salt deficiencies in the soil on which they graze. Since calcium plays a major role in the synthesis of required amino acids composing proteins, we are apt to emphasize the individual nutrient element (calcium) of the soil rather than all the synthetic food substances, especially proteins, for which it is responsible.
It has been recently reported5 that, by assembly of proper laboratory chemicals under specific conditions, the energy of an electric discharge will synthesize a whole series of requisite amino acids. But it will occur only if calcium, even limestone, is present as the catalyst. The establishment of calcium’s role in amino acid synthesis helps us to see the animal’s choice as a most important instinct, antedating by eons the knowledge we have of it.
It should, then be no surprise that livestock graze first on the limed portion of a field and neglect that which has not been limed. Nor should it be a mystery why cattle in the southern piney woods will travel for miles to graze along the edge of a cement highway (Figure 3).
III. Magnesium
That animals should discriminate between magnesium and calcium as soil factors responsible for their choice might not readily suggest itself. But such was demonstrated some 15 or more years ago6 when a dairyman noticed that his Guernsey calves ate the second coat of plaster, containing magnesium, in a particularly sanitary barn but did not mar the first coat containing the calcium or the lime plaster. Suffering seriously from white scours, the calves (which had to be housed in the autumn before the new barn was completed) discriminated in what might well be considered an act of desperation.
Their observing owner — mentally prepared for this accidental discovery — noticed the damage to the second coat of plaster on the finished stall but none to the first coat in the unfinished one. His analytical mind caught the implication of magnesium missing in the calves’ fodder because of magnesium deficiency in the soil growing it. Dosing the calves with magnesium salts and later treating the soil with dolomitic limestone eliminated white scours and calf fatalities.
Magnesium is a divalent alkaline element and a close companion to calcium. It is also the ash element core of some presently-known two dozen enzymes (protein-like chemical structures). Accordingly, animals also struggle for life-promoting magnesium. This is emphasized even in our thinking of magnesium as an ash element only and as if the animals were discriminating between only the inorganic elements of plant delivery from the soil. We need to see that it is rather a manifestation of needed major synthesis by plants, struggling for organic compounds like the proteins, in which any one of the deficient essential inorganics will lower nutritional quality of the nitrogen-carrying compounds apt to be considered as proteins.
During the early period of increasing use of agricultural limestone and other fertilizing materials, the practice of drilling superphosphate with the wheat-clover seeding brought many reports of farmers observing the livestock taking clover in the part of the field given the phosphate on limed soils but neglecting the same legume where no phosphate was used. Similar observations were reported where rock phosphate was the fertility uplift on unlimed soils.
Acid phosphate supplied not only the required phosphate in such cases but supplied also gypsum, a compound of both calcium and sulfur. Hence, one might believe the animals were choosing in favor of one or both of these last two elements also connected with (or retained in) protein synthesis. But since limestone had already provided calcium and since rock phosphate supplies no sulfur, it was established that phosphorus was the element limiting the nutritional qualities the animals were assaying. Since phosphorus so commonly limits growth, is also connected with the energy-transferring feeds and is becoming more limiting as soils are more depleted of their virgin organic matter by which insoluble phosphorus is made available, animals are more and more emphasizing phosphorus by their discriminations.
V. Sulfur
In similar situations we can recognize livestock’s emphasis on deficiencies in sulfur when this element, measured in amounts by analytical procedures like ignition, duplicates phosphorus in soils and crops very closely.
VI. Potassium
Since potassium — a highly soluble, monovalent, alkaline element — is more intercellularly than intracellularly distributed in plant tissue and since within the cell it is found in the vacuole rather than within the living cytoplasm (protein), we would not be so prone to emphasize the animal’s common discrimination in favor of forages growing on soils given extra potassium treatments to affect plant protein directly. But in experiments with legume forages on heavily-limed soils, with heavy infestations of root-rot on corn given phosphate but showing low exchangeable potassium by soil test, animals showed decided preference for forage grown with extra potassium.
In this case again, the legumes were improved through possible help in their synthesis of carbohydrates as forerunner compounds in the synthesis of proteins or other essentials preferred by animals rather than just by increased concentrations of inorganic alkaline potassium. Potassium gives indirect support to protein production.
VII. Nitrogen, Only a Symbol of Protein
The element nitrogen is normally a gas. It appears inorganically in combination with hydrogen as the positive ammonium ion and with oxygen as the negative ions of nitrites and nitrates. Organically, its extensive combinations with carbon and hydrogen make up 16% (as a mean) of the living protein tissues and fluids. It is readily transformed analytically and synthetically by microbial life, especially in the soil, from either organic to inorganic forms and vice-versa by many kinds of chemical and biochemical reactions, with its final simplification through oxidation or even by reduction to gas that returns to the atmosphere. In animal metabolism of proteins, its simplification results in its elimination in the form of organic urea.
In the struggle for nitrogen for proteins, only microbes (when amply supplied with energy foods) can combine elemental gaseous nitrogen with carbon and hydrogen to produce proteins. Hence, all higher forms of life, so far as we now know, ultimately depend on the lowly microbes for their combined nitrogen.
The fact that animal choices are determined so generally by proteins more than by other feed components is not evidence that nitrogen is the element characterizing the choice. Rather it is the organic nitrogenous compounds that are responsible. Animal choice is not guided by the ash element nitrogen.
In support of that contention, one needs only to see the spots of lush green grass in a pasture that mark the urinary droppings, which liberally fertilize the grass with nitrogen broken down by soil microbes into either ammonia or nitrate form. But livestock refuse to take this forage so heavily fertilized with nitrogen, though they crop closely around the distinguishing spots. In spite of animals’ refusal of that much greener and more abundant growth, there is an increased concentration of nitrogen in it. Though measured by chemists as more “crude” protein and considered quality feed worth eating, it is simply “too crude” for the cow customers to buy.
That ignition analyses do not show us the determiners of animals’ choices among the soil-borne nutrient elements was shown by making bio-assays and chemical analyses of alfalfa hay grown with different soil treatments. The hay was grown on four plots given:
(a) No treatment, plot No. 3.
(b) Nitrogen, 60 lb. per acre in spring and after each cutting, plot No. 1.
(c) 100 lb. ammonium sulfate and 200 lb. superphosphate per acre annually plus 60 lb. potassium chloride in alternate years, plot No. 6.
(d) 100 lb. ammonium nitrate, 200 lb. superphosphate and 60 lb. potassium chloride per acre annually, plus 2 tons of limestone every six years, plot No. 10.
The four lots of hay were offered for measured consumption by choice as supplements to a single lot of corn. Four weanling rabbits per pen in five pens were used in five trials — the equivalent of trials by 100 animals. The data is assembled in Table 2.
The test indicated that rabbits do not recommend chemical nitrogen as soil treatment for legume hay. Their consumption (quality evaluation) varies, because of those soil treatments, as widely as five to one. That variation was not correlated with order of nitrogen concentration, hence not with “crude” protein as measured chemically. Nor was it correlated with concentrations of calcium, magnesium or phosphorus. Nor were those correlated with each other. The rabbits simply preferred hay grown from nitrogen supplied by microbial decomposition of soil organic matter and by microbial nitrogen fixation on the roots of legume plants. Since the much larger portion of nitrogen in any legume crop comes from the former source rather than the latter, it is evident that the animals prefer protein nitrogen which comes from soil organic matter rather than from chemical salts. The animals distinguish between protein qualities to such a fine degree that they may separate them according to amounts of their components, i.e., their values in terms of nutritional balance of the required amino acids.
In another similar assay by rabbits, using fescue hay grown with only increasing additions of ammonium nitrate to the soil, the first increment of fertilizer brought about first choice; no treatment was second choice; and, with higher increments applied to the soil, choice dropped more and more below no treatment. Daily total consumption by choice in two trials with this non-legume hay was but 6.1 and 10.5 gm. hay per rabbit. By contrast, in two trials with alfalfa the corresponding figures were 31.1 and 33.9 gm. hay per day per rabbit.
The one plant species was apparently chosen under duress of starvation when the ratios of amounts consumed were as wide as five to one in favor of alfalfa over fescue. The animals separated differences in quality by spreads far wider than any shown by chemical analysis. When animals are such capable connoisseurs of the rations we offer, why not cater to their choices? Why not use them in research to discover the criteria by which animals judge what they want, with soil fertility as the major factor in the choice?
Fig. 3. This cow may have traveled miles for narrow strip of grass along this highway.
C. The Struggle for Proteins and Evolution of Helpful Body Organs
Anatomical and functional designs of the alimentary canal and other organs helping it pass food through for preparation, digestion, absorption, chemical censoring, metabolism, excretion, etc., impress one quickly with the complexities of body organs as they digest and conserve proteins in contrast to the relatively simple task of handling carbohydrates and fats.
I. Lower Life Forms
Anatomical arrangement of the digestive organs of sucking insects vary widely for separating low concentrations of proteins out of the plant saps and juices composing their diets. The protein-poor but carbohydrate-rich solution is not put directly into the stomach, arranged to attack proteins with strong acid (as is also the case with warm-blooded bodies). Instead, the liquid diet is shunted first through auxiliary canals and pouch-like structures adept in filtering out the proteins and other nitrogenous materials, while the sugary liquids are moved on for excretion. But the proteins are returned to the major alimentary canal for digestion.
One needs only to cite the common aphid as an illustration, with its sugary excretions collecting like mist on auto windshields or serving the honey bee, in seasons of low nectar flow, with resulting honey of little use save for its fermentations and thereby self-clarified alcoholic solution.
II. Warm-Blooded Animals
All ruminants, as herbivorous feeders, are particularly unique examples of the modification of the anterior portion of the alimentary canal into three extra pouches for treatment of food before digestion by the true stomach. Increasing acidity in that sequence to the very acid condition of the stomach suggests more complete hydrolysis of proteins into amino acids and increasing rates of many other reactions. It lengthens the incubation time under warmer temperatures for microbial syntheses before treatment of the microbes themselves by strong acid. It favors many other chemical reactions under nearly anaerobic conditions for initial fermentations and other attacks on more stable carbohydrates. That succession of increasingly drastic treatments seems necessary to handle high-cellulose feeds as well as proteins.
The pig and the chicken, habitually close followers for the droppings of cattle, reveal wisdom and unique nutritional values in their choices. These two non-ruminants pay tribute to the microbial synthetic services performed in the ruminants’ anatomy but not in theirs. They search out vitamin B12 (and possibly other essentials), because ruminants’ symbiosis with intestinal microbes synthesizes it. The uniqueness lies in the fact that this vitamin is required in only micro-units. Hence, with bio-assays of that refinement, discriminations between quantities of amino acids should not be an animal endowment beyond our imagination when survival by evolution is considered.
Perhaps a more challenging evolutionary adaptation of body organs for more favorable management of the struggle for proteins is exhibited by the camel. Because it inhabits the deserts, our attention focuses first on shortage of water. But such arid ecological settings forcefully remind us that equally as (or more) hazardous is the shortage of proteins in any vegetation rooted in salt-saturated soils and with its tops in an atmosphere of maximum temperature and near-zero humidity.
That the camel can tolerate severe water depletion of its body by going without water for days is well known. It has been reported7 that this domestic animal can deplete its body’s water content to the extent of a body loss of one-fifth its weight. Then by drinking once it can restore that weight and body appearance to normal in a very short time.
But the camel’s metabolism includes a practice of conservation rather than excretion and later intake as is true for water. Urea, as the end product of protein metabolism, is not sent from the liver to the kidneys for excretion. Instead, urea is retained in the system by recycling from the liver back into the rumen. Thereby this metabolite of previously-ingested feed is merely the chemical nucleus passed up front again to be built into microbial protein, then later to be digested en route through the alimentary canal and become urea again for the repeated process.
In this particular case, evolution has given us Nature’s practice of adding urea to the feed of the ruminant, possible at least under duress of near-starvation. This is done by a simple modification of the anatomy in the form of a vessel from the liver to the paunch. By that method, we believe urea is protected against the rapid changes to ammonium carbonate or to ammonia, carbon dioxide and water as moist urea salt does on atmospheric exposure. The amino nitrogen of the urea would remain linked to the carbon and save the synthetic costs of restoring that connection distinguishing the protein nitrogen and that is so costly in laboratory synthesis.
In case of the camel, Nature has long been feeding urea for maintenance of the body proteins. Much is yet to be learned about what the ruminant herds and flocks of primitive man may have been doing for survival of man in his closer connection, via the animals, with his own nutrition from the ground up.
D. Summary
Much is yet to be learned by studying microbial metabolism in its primordial setting, namely, on rocks and within the soil. Nutrition of the microbes, as the first forms of life, started there on simple minerals mixed with microbes consuming their own dead bodies, all as life in single-cell stages.
This discussion emphasized the simple natural fact that all life is dependent upon (or is in symbiosis with) microbes when the provision of nutritive substances, especially proteins for growth rather than carbohydrates for energy, is considered. The symbiosis so universal in the lower end of every alimentary canal has not occupied much of our thought (so shadowed by “fear of germs”), but it is a requisite for health to which life forms lower than man cling.8
Biotic strata other than man are gifted in assaying their food intake according to (a) different plant species and (b) different degrees of rock development into soil on which plants grow. While this has been animals’ means of survival by evolution during the ages, we humans are just beginning to recognize the ecological patterns of various strata in the biotic pyramid that reflect the soil as the major factor underlying food quality and, thus, health. According to the degree that such natural facts are accepted as essential truths by which man must also survive, so will the soil be more carefully and completely conserved; and thereby higher quality nutrition for more abundant health of all life will be the result.
1 Phillips petroleum Co., Bartlesville, Okla. Motion picture title.
2 E. Douglas Hume. Bechamp or Pasteur. A lost chapter in the history of biology. C. W. Daniel Co., Ashingdon, Rockford, Essex. 1923, 1932, 1947.
3 Paul O. Sapp, Ashland, Mo. Reported in person.
4 W. H. Plander et. al. Rumenology. Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 619. 1954.
5 Melvin Calvin. Communications: From Molecules to Mars. Bulletin, American Institute of Biological Sciences, XII 29–44 (5). 1962.
6 E. R. Kuck. How Guernsey Calves Helped Solve a Feed and Crop Fertilization Problem. Better Crops. December 1946.
7 Knut Schmidt-Nelson. The Physiology of the Camel. Scientific American 201:140-151 (6). 1959.
8 William A. Albrecht. Guest editorial: Nature Teaches Health via Nutrition journal of Applied Nutrition 12 (4). 1959.
