Can I ask for a bit of help from my friends here?

[Tumbulu]

23. Oh my goodness I took no offense and thank you for your kind words of encouragement

It is just that I live and work within the farming community.

It seems that the same reductionist mechanistic type of thinking that gave to us the industrial revolution and mass production/assembly lines, etc infected the thinking of almost everyone involved in modern farming- trying to make it more efficient and cost effective and threw out most of the wisdom carried forth from the dawn of civilization.

I was only trying to say that these people who bred and commercialized these plants - that I consider so inferior in quality, however high in yield they are- thought that they were doing something good. I remember once being asked by a group of UC agronomists "how can organic farmers feed the world? And what about feeding homeless people- organic food is too expensive!" They really think that they are putting an end to starvation. And that using fossil fuels to make nitrogen fertilizers is a good idea. I am not kidding. They think it is the same.

And I do think that these breeders and researchers are motivated by doing what they think is best (however wrong I think that their idea of best is). The farmers are proud to be feeding so many people. I am just trying to express that the motivations of most of these people seem to be admirable. It is the result- the inedible grains, the grains high in testable protein, but not available protein.....foods without flavor, mineral poor and not capable of really giving energy to us- that we are left with.

I had a professor of nutrition here once and I asked him how the protein level in the wheat correlated to the ability of the animal to digest that protein. He said there are no such studies done. That they just test the protein- a rather quick chemical analysis. To see if the animal is able to utilize the protein long testing trials must be conducted and no one funds this sort of research.

And so it is left to people like me who hobble along trying to make sense of all this ourselves on our own farms with our own animals.

I started out growing spelt, as I cannot stand wheat, and was looking for the oldest spelt variety that I could find. The person I was buying the old variety of spelt from said that the protein level was low in this line- but he grew it for his livestock and they did much better with it than with the newer varieties that had a higher protein content......which got me wondering about accessibility of the proteins and then this led me to the woman reintroducing this Sonora wheat.

Another thing I have done is research how much people used to eat back when the food was low yielding, but highly nutritious. They ate way way less than we do. It is true, they were smaller than we are, but it is also true that they did a lot of work and ate far less. This is a clue to me that the food was far more nutrient dense than our current high yielding modern "wonders".

But again, I think it is motivated by limited linear thinking - and it infected agriculture in both the former Soviet Union along with the Industrialized West. There were only a few holdouts- Rudolf Steiner and Sir Albert Howard at the turn of the 19th Century, and we are still a very small part of ag the organic/biodynamic folk.

I am so sorry for everyone who suffers from these maladies created by an industry not humble enough, or who are pushed to commercialize things by the business folk when they are not ready or properly tested.