Drought
Tolerance
by Barry Carter
Much of Australiahas been going through a prolonged
period of drought for the last several years. I spent a month and a half giving ORMUS lectures
in Australiaduring October-November 2008. Here are
some plant related reports from my time there:
After my first presentation
in Queensland, I was contacted by a gentleman who said
he had a radish in his garden which was as big around as a CD. He offered to drive me to his place to see
this radish and I took some pictures of it which you can see at:
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/Wizards-of-Oz.htm
These radishes were grown with second
generation seeds that he collected from his ORMUS garden last year. He said that his giant radishes were
not "woody" and that they tasted very good.
This gentleman also had built some ORMUS
traps simply by following the instructions on my web site. These traps were quite rewarding to see since
I always like to be able to show people traps, which have been built locally, when I give my
presentations. You can see two of the traps he built at:
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/OzTrap01.jpg
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/OzTrap02.jpg
My presentation in
Perthhappened at a place called the City Farm.
See:
http://www.cityfarmperth.org.au/new_lite/about.html
The "City Farm is an organic community
garden, education and network centre that operates on permaculture
principles". Inspired by the opportunity to talk to a good number of farmers in the City Farm network, I
moved my Wet Method demo and my ORMUS Plants slide show to Sunday. This worked very well as many people
at the Sunday presentation came specifically for this info.
All of my time in
Australiacoincided with some significant global and
local changes. The global economic changes and the American presidential elections stimulated my desire
to see some evidence that ORMUS might help people get through the tough times that might be coming. The
drought that Australiahas been enduring for the last few years
also stimulated a desire to see some evidence that ORMUS might help plants to make it through severe
weather conditions. This desire was also expanded by my hope to eat another salad from my home garden
despite the fact that there have been 26 freezes in BakerCitysince I left on October
first.
My desire to see some evidence of ORMUS
helping out under drought conditions was fulfilled when Alfred Goolsbee
showed up at my Melbourneworkshop. His new information about plants
given ORMUS during drought conditions was so significant that I asked him to give a short talk about it
during my Melbourneworkshop. Alfred told us about some plants
he had that were given some sea water precipitate ORMUS and survived serious drought conditions when
accidentally left in a closed greenhouse without water. You can read more about how the ORMUS plants
survived this ordeal and the non ORMUS plants did not on Alfred's web site at:
http://ormus.net/ormus_coop_pages/ormus_agriculture.html
andyou can read about a controlled experiment
with sprouts at:
http://ormus.net/ormus_coop_pages/water-deprivation-sprouts.html
By the time I got to my last weekend
presentation in Canberra, I was feeling quite hopeful that ORMUS
might help to mitigate all of the world's food problems including drought. Throughout my sojourn in Oz I
had regularly encountered people who were interested in using ORMUS in agriculture as well as using it
for consciousness expansion and building community. Frankly, I kinda expected
my last presentation to be a bit anticlimactic after all the superlative things that happened at the
previous presentation gatherings.
I am happy to report that some of the best
news about ORMUS in Australiacame during my Canberraworkshop. Rob Gourlay, an environmental scientist and founder of the Environmental Research &
Information Consortium (ERIC) told us about how he has been combining Effective Microorganisms (EM) and
ORMUS in some of the ERIC products and Australian farmers have started asking him "where is all the water
coming from?" after using this product.
Sharon Rose, who helped set up this
Australian tour, first acquainted me with EM back in 2001 and she has been touting the benefits of mixing
EM and ORMUS ever since then. Sharonnoticed that magnetic trap ORMUS "liked to
hang out" in the carbon filter before going into the trap and she used the Effective Microorganisms to
extract the ORMUS from these "clogged" filters. Rob speculates that the increased ORMUS in the soil
increases carbon sequestration and that the EM organisms play a major role in this process. He also
claims that the carbon, in turn, stores more water and nutrients for later release to the plants. You can
read more about this on Rob's web site at:
http://eric.com.au/html/papers_soilmap.php
Rob does not mention on his site that sea
water ORMUS is the "secret ingredient" in his soil preparations.