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fold tests with scores of ordinary people who have compared the taste of my juice with that of oranges from many other groves, and they all selected mine as the most lip-smackingly superior.” While McClurg was happily harvesting his oranges, Harold Aungst, a dairy farmer milking a two-hundred-head herd of Holsteins in McVeytown, Pennsylvania, was equally happily applying the Sonic Bloom method to a hundred-acre field of alfal- fa, the deep-rooted leguminous plant grown for hay, brought to Spain in the eighth century by invading Moors and since spread to create agricultural wealth all over the world. Nor did his animals have any difficulty distinguishing the high-quality fodder sprayed with Sonic Bloom. fold tests with scores of ordinary people who have compared the THE ORIGINS OF SONIC BLOOM taste of my juice with that of oranges from many other groves, and The idea was seeded in the mind of its developer one bitter cold they all selected mine as the most lip-smackingly superior. winter day in 1960 in the Demilitarised Zone between North and While McClurg was happily harvesting his oranges, Harold South Korea. Dan Carlson, a young Minnesota recruit serving Aungst, a dairy farmer milking a two-hundred-head herd of with the US Army motor pool, happened to see a young Korean Holsteins in McVeytown, Pennsylvania, was equally happily mother deliberately crush the legs of her four-year-old child applying the Sonic Bloom method to a hundred-acre field of alfal- beneath the back wheel of a reversing two-ton GMC truck. fa, the deep-rooted leguminous plant grown for hay, brought to Tearfully, the woman explained in distraught and incoherent Spain in the eighth century by invading Moors and since spread to _ English that, with two more children starving at home, only by create agricultural wealth all over the world. Nor did his animals _ crippling her oldest boy could she beg enough food in the city to have any difficulty distinguishing the high-quality fodder sprayed _ feed her entire family. with Sonic Bloom. There and then, Carlson decided he would single-mindedly That year Aungst took off five cuttings, one shoulder-high and _ devote the rest of his life to finding an innovative and cheaper way so thick he had to gear his tractor down to low-low to pull his cut- to grow food, accessible to anyone with even the smallest and ter through it. With this harvest, Aungst won the Pennsylvania _ poorest plot of land. Back home in Minnesota, he enrolled in the State five-aCrc 2fA/f2 2TOWiDE COMIC! TTTTaTTTauMn——!! University’s Experimental College. Like David over ninety-three other contestants by Vetter at Ohio, he was allowed to design his producing an unheard-of 7.6 tons per own curriculum and reading programme in hor- acre as against a state average of 3.3 ticulture and agriculture. . tons. : at least a 30 per cent Soon he concluded that in poor soils, if plants To dairyman Aungst, the size ofhis Increase In yield, plus an could be map| fed, not through their harvest was not its most important « roots, but through their leaves via the minute characteristic. Hay from this alfalfa increase of 121 per cent in mouthlike openings called stomata—which fed to his herd that winter allowed the natural vitamin C over plants constantly use to exchange gaseous cows to step up milk production from aerosols and mists with the surrounding atmos- 6,800 to 7,300 pounds per hundred- normal oranges... phere—they might flourish and even grow weight of cow, yet eat one quarter less rapidly in soils that were acidulous, alkalinely feed. "I could hardly believe it," said _. Salty, arid, desert, or otherwise deprived of bal- the usually peppery Aungst, third- anced nutrients. generation owner of his property. "My cows were devouring the But some motive force, he soon realised, was needed to awaken alfalfa, stems and all. Other years they'd leave the stems just lay. the stomata to action. Puzzling as to what this might be, Carlson A cow's nose is the very best barometer to tell how good your crop _ stumbled on a record called Growing Plants Successfully in the is. Cows are really finicky about what they eat. I threw downhay Home, devised by George Milstein, a retired dental surgeon who from another of my fields alongside this record-breaking alfalfa had won prizes for growing colourful bromeliads, members of an and the cattle first went for the feed exposed to that funny sound extended plant family as diverse as the pineapple and Spanish every time, changing over to the other only when the good stuff moss. Milstein's innovative idea had been to get a recording com- was all gone." pany, Pip Records, to amalgamate into a popular tune the pure One clue to the cows’ preference was revealed in a test run on sound frequencies broadcast by University of Ottawa rescarchers protein analysis by an infrared scanner at the Pennsylvania State to increase wheat yields, which he had read about in The Secret University ‘Ag-Days' exhibition and fair. Aungst's sound-exposed Life of Plants. hay scored a record 29 per cent for protein and an extremely high Picking up where Milstein left off, Carlson focused on finding 80 percent for Total Digestible Nutrients (TDNs). At the fair the frequencies that would motivate the stomata to open and imbibe. same test showed similar percentages for Aungst's soybeans. Though he did not at first suspect a tie with the sound that caused Across the United States in the Tiwa Indian pueblo of San Juan, _the birds to flock to McClurg's orange grove, he managed through New Mexico, twenty minutes’ drive north-west of Santa Fe, the 4 Stroke of spiritual insight to hit upon a combination of frequen- highly alkaline desert soils, composed of playa clay called adobe, cies and harmonics exactly accordant with the pre-dawn bird con- best suited when mixed with straw to make cheap building blocks _ Certs that continue past sun-up into morning. for houses, can be as hardpacked and impenetrable as a New York To help create a new cassette tape of popular music into which sidewalk. Yet a garden under the ministration of the same aurally- _his non-musical sonics could be embedded for inclusion in a Sonic spiced nutrition as used in McVeytown and in Florida was grow- Bloom home kit for use in small backyard gardens and greenhous- ing as if in Eden. % EE 4 Alongside more than fifty kinds of herbs, vegetables were flour- ishing, including tomatoes and carrots never before grown in that arid region at the confluence of the Chama and Rio Grande rivers. To Gabriel Howearth, a bearded, pony-tailed master gardener employed by the tribe, veteran of several years’ working with Maya Indian farmers in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, Sonic Bloom was as miraculous in its results as was the Mayas’ ability to grow crops with no chemical additives by simply mentally communicat- ing with them in some mysteriously hermetic way, long part of their ethos. "As you can see,” said Gabriel, parting the purplish-green leaves of a German beet to cup his hands around the top hemisphere of a swollen mauve-maroon root much larger than a softball, "I can't get my hands completely around it. All these beets, which nor- mally scale off at no more than four pounds, will weigh at least nine, possibly ten." NEXUS¢23 DECEMBER 1993 - JANUARY 1994