/Nexus - 0305 - New Times Magazine/pages/0029/image.png)
Page Content (OCR)
'" This elusive group of substances defies orthodox science and medicine. Is this a miracle in-the-making for the next millennium? Part 1 My name is Dav,id Hudson. I'm a third generation native Phoenician from an old fami.lYin the Phoenix area. We arc very conservative. I had no concept [ that I would ever be doing what I'm doing right now when I began this work. In 1975-76 I was very unhappy with the banking system here in the United States. I was farming about 70',000 acrcs In the Phoenix area in the Y.uma Valley. I was a very large, materialistic person. I was farming this amount of ground. I had a 4O-man payroll every week. I had a four-milJion-doliar line of credit with the bank. I was driving Mercedes Benzes. I had a Ilr5,000-squ'are-foot home. I was Mr Material man. In 1975 I was doing an analysis of natural products here in the area where I was farm ing. You have to understand that in agdculture in tbe state of Arizona we have a problem with sodium soiL This high-sodium soil, which looks like cDocolate ice-cream on the ground, is just crunchy black. It crunches when you walk on it. Water wiJI,not penetrate this soil. Water will not leach the sodium ·out of the ground. It's called black alkali. What we were doing was going to thc copper mines in the state of Arizona and buying 93 per cent sulphuric acid. For those of you who Gon't know, the battery acid in your car is 40 to 60 per Icent acid. This was 93 per cent sulphuric acid; very, very high concentra tion. We were bringing in truck-and trailer-loads of this sulphuric acid to my farm and I was injecting 30 tons to the acre into the soil. We were putting six-inch ribbons on the grounl:! that wO\Jld penetrate about three or four inches into the ground. When you irrigate-nothing will grow in Arizona unless you irri gate-the ground would actually froth and foam due to tI'Ie action of the sulphuric acid. What it did was convert the black alkali to white alkali, which was water-soluble. So, within a year-and-a-half to two years, you would have a field that could actually grow crops. In Ithe work that I was doing with these soils, it was very important to have a lot of cal cium ion the soil in the form of calcium carbonate. The calcium carbonate would act as a buffer fOJ all the acid thaI was being put on the soil. If you don't have enough calcium, the acidity of the soil goes down, you get a pH of 4 to 4.5 and it ties up all of your trace nutrients. When you plant you!: cottoIl, it will only get so tall; then it won't grow any more. It's very important when you are putting all of! these amendments on your soil that you understand what is in your soil: how much iron is there, how much calcium is there, and so on. In doing the analysis of these natural products, we were coming across this material out no one was able to tell us what it was. We begal1 to -trace this material and we found that it seemed to come from a specific geological feature. Whatever the problem was with this material, we felt that the area where it was in greatest abundance would be the best place to study it. We took the material into Chemistry and we dissolved it and got a solution that would be blood-red. Yet when we precipitated this materiab out chemically by using a reductant of powdered zinc, the material would c'ome out as a b'lack precipitant just like it was sup posed to be if it were a noble element. With a noble element, if you chemically bring it out of the acid, it won't redissolve in the acid. So we pr.ecipitated this material out of the black and we took the material and dried it. In the drying process we took a large porcelain funnel called a Blic!mer fUQu.el which had a fil\ter paper on it. This material was about a quarter of an inch thick on top of the filter paper. Al thal time I didn't have a drying furnace or a drying oven, so I just set it out in AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1996 NEXUS • 29