18 MAN ON THE LANDSCAPE 



plants will make their own vitamins. It is much cheaper to let the 

 plant do this, and to supply the minerals which may be lacking, than 

 to spoon-feed it with a laboratory product. 



Plants do not make vitamins (or incomplete vitamins in some 

 cases) merely to serve the needs of animal nutrition. Plants create 

 them because they are an important factor in plant growth. The 

 fact that animals also need them simply shows our kinship to and 

 dependence on the vegetable world. Vitamins are not directly photo- 

 synthetic like sugars; but are biosynthetic, like proteins a result of 

 mysterious life processes still not understood by man. They are com- 

 plex chemical compounds and their parts come from air, water, and 

 soil. 



It is obvious by now that soil plays an important role in plant pro- 

 duction. While the sun is the prime mover and keeps the ball rolling, 

 we cannot have a full quota of chlorophyll, photosynthesis, and biosyn- 

 thesis unless the soil can provide the proper mineral base to build the 

 necessary bodies of plants. Thus, any force, or land management 

 practice, which reduces either the necessary depth of topsoil or its 

 fertility results in a waste of available sun power and in a poorer 

 environment. 



Loss of Vitamins: Persistent accelerated erosion, the washing or 

 blowing away of the topsoil itself, usually prevents a full quota of 

 vitamins and minerals from appearing in plants. Exhausting the soil 

 by heavy cropping, with no provision for returning minerals to it, 

 will eventually result in crops which are sick because of deficiencies. 

 The solicitous care which greenhouse men give their soils arises from 

 the fact that a perfect, richly colored plant cannot be produced from 

 an imperfect soil. The plant is a factory powered by solar radiations, 

 but it cannot be expected to produce a high grade product from in- 

 ferior materials. 



Finally, it does an animal little good for plants to produce nutriti- 

 ous food if the nutrients are lost between the field and the gullet. 

 This may occur in canning or cooking by too much heat, stirring air 

 in, contact with metal, too much water, exposure to air, using soda. 

 A recent study shows that cutting an orange with a metal knife de- 

 stroys by chemical reaction a significant fraction of the Vitamin C. 

 We cannot dwell on these losses here, but they are very important in 

 the use of plants for animal nutrition. Vitamins are often fragile and 

 elusive, and they can be lost from hay as easily as from lettuce. 



Vitamin pills, by their huge sales, indicate an intuitive public feel- 

 ing that modern foods fail properly to feed us. This is in part due to 

 processing the very life out of our crops. Milling and bleaching wheat 

 into white flour, for instance, reduces a nutritious, protein-bearing, 

 mineral- and vitamin-rich natural food to an emasculated, starchy 

 product. A most valuable and complete product of the reactions of 

 sun, plant, and soil is reduced markedly toward that of sunshine alone. 

 For instance, when whole wheat is converted into plain white flour 

 the protein goes down 17% ; the riboflavin drops 72% ; thiamine falls 

 90% ; niacin fades by 80% ; iron decreases 82% ; calcium drops 50%, 



