Drought Tolerance

by Barry Carter

Much of Australia has been going through a prolonged period of drought for the last several years. I spent a month and a half giving ORMUS lectures in Australia during 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.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/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.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/OzTrap01.jpg

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/OzTrap02.jpg

My presentation in Perth happened 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 Australia coincided 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 Australia has 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 Baker City since 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 Melbourne workshop. 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 Melbourne workshop. 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

and you 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 Australia came during my Canberra workshop. 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. Sharon noticed 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.