This is a first. The word “money” in the title and absolutely no mention of economics, the sequester, or political corruption in the blog. Forget the fiscal cliff. Forget “plunging the economy back into recession!” Forget Greece. This time it’s so much worse than any of those things. Because today I’m revisiting one of my favorite subjects: Going Green.

Going Green, as I reported back in May, 2011, is the latest trend in a long line of trends foisted upon the unsuspecting public. In a nutshell, “going green” means that you purchase or use things – whatever they might be – which are not so damaging to the planet, not so resource intensive, and not manufactured by soaking plutonium in PCBs to make baby bottles, pet toys, or what-not. It’s better for you, better for me, and better for the planet. Or so we’re led to believe.

As you might expect the Green Movement – as a concept, not as something you get after you overindulge on kale – has one major drawback: there’s no money in it. Nevertheless, Corporate America has rushed in with a vengeance even I couldn’t imagine to correct this little shortcoming; particularly when it comes to a subject near and dear to my heart: agriculture.

But first, let’s take a look back and see how we got to where we are. Here on the micro-farm I have written about how we strive to do things “organically” but that I’m not averse to tossing a bit of artificial fertilizer into the mix when needed. This allows us to take advantage of the fundamentals of the organic way of doing things but to juice the system if needed to save a plant. The “organic” way, a term bearing heavy implications from both ends of the agricultural spectrum, was long known by another term: “farming,” and was developed as the answer to a ten-thousand year-old question, namely: “What are we going to do with all that shit?”

Waste material: AKA – manure, AKA – clippings, AKA – chaff, AKA – and on and on and on, is the natural byproduct or life. Your lawn grows, you cut the lawn, you bag the clippings, and the trash-people come and take them away every other Tuesday. As early humanity developed agriculture, they learned that these waste-products vastly exceeded the product-products in volume and sheer mass. A thousand pound cow produces much more than a thousand pounds of waste over its short, brutish existence and something needs to be done with that waste. The natural solution turned out to be simple and effective. You let the cows nibble on either the first growth of something like wheat or the stubble left behind, the cows crap all over the place, fertilize the wheat which grows tall and strong (once you move the cows), and then you harvest the wheat to make your daily bread. It’s a closed system that takes advantage of what the wheat does – turn sunlight into carbohydrates – and what the cows do – turn carbohydrates into poo.

This is where you find out what end of the agricultural spectrum you live at. If your reaction to the last paragraph is: “I’m eating sunshine,” then you probably have a lot of hemp in your closet and enjoy the scent of patchouli. If, on the other hand, you gasp in disbelief and scream: “I’m eating cowshit!” then you’re probably among the vast majority of people who would prefer not to know what goes into that bag of trail mix you’re nibbling out of right now.

First, let me assure you that there’s no cow shit involved in your mid-morning snack. It’s worm shit, AKA humus. (No, not the middle-eastern spread you brought for lunch, only one “m.”) This is because plants can’t use cow poo very effectively. What happens is that worms come up and chow down on the cattle patties and bring that material back down their little holes where they digest it and leave it behind as worm droppings, AKA – worm castings, AKA – humus. Thisthe plants can use and it’s packed with wonderful nutrients that the plants can’t make for themselves and it has the ability to dissolve bits of mineral to provide even more.

The stuff is wonderful.

In fact, anything formerly alive that you throw on the ground is eventually eaten by worms and converted over into a wonderful, rich, organic fertilizer. All of the grass clippings from the first meadow mow, all of the vegetable scraps left over after dinner, all of the leaves, anything – except meat because it brings in the rats – that was once alive, we toss in the compost pile where it gets eaten by worms and recycled back into the garden. Just like what was going on for all those millennia prior to 1840 when Baron Justus von Liebig published his Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and all bets were off.

The bit of irony in the whole thing is that the scientific underpinnings of organic agriculture had to wait for the analytical developments of the late-1700s to really be understood. Ironic because just as we were getting a handle on organic the Bratwurst Baron came along using the same techniques and gave us the foundation for synthetic agriculture and the eventual battle we find ourselves in now.

Baron Liebig figured out that the main chemicals present in soil that plants use are nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. These are the Big Three and their percentages, by law, are printed on every bag of fertilizer sold. Over the ensuing decades we’ve learned that other minor nutrients are also required but the keystones of modern agriculture are those three: N-P-K.

Potassium (K) was always the easiest; it’s found in the ashes of your fireplace or cook stove. Sprinkle the ashes on the garden and you get a slow release of potassium that helps your plants take in water. Phosphorous was a bit tougher. It was available as phosphate minerals – that had to be mined and carried – but is also found in bones. Conveniently, when you tossed your cow into the fire, the bones became brittle, and the phosphorous was spread on the fields along with the potassium.

Nitrogen was always the toughest because it needs to be combined with hydrogen in order to be used by plants. This was done only by certain types of bacteria, and higher animals when they peed. The problem with pee et al is that the nitrogen is soluble – as ammonia – so doesn’t stick around very long. The bacterial nitrogen fixers, however, live in the soil, usually in the root nodules of legumes, so are available to keep sucking down the nitrogen and putting out the ammonia.

The Nineteenth Century, being what it was, saw major advances in the chemistry of war, including the synthetic production of bomb making material such as potassium nitrate and incendiary phosphorus. This industry grew and grew until, after World War Two, all of these explosive factories switched over to making fertilizer. The stuff was easy, plentiful and cheap which is why when you buy fertilizer today you also get taggants mixed in with your chemicals in case you might be a terrorist.

And agriculture was changed forever.

Not needing legumes to fix nitrogen the vast monoculture fields of corn, wheat and soy spread over what was once a carefully tended, rotation based, soilmanagement program called: farming. These vast fields grew tall, green, and productive with little more than some seed, a tractor, and a sprayer. Cows were banished from the farms. Vegetables were consigned to California, Mexico, and Chile. For most of the U.S. heartland, it was just one crop out of the big three, and with artificial fertilizers, those crops were growing like weeds. Year after year after year. Killing the soil.

The birth of the agricultural reaction known as organic can be traced back to one Jerome Irving Rodale (J.I. to his friends) who in 1942 started publishing Organic Farming and Gardening magazine (now called Organic Gardening) and became the guru – until his death in 1972 on the stage of the Dick Cavett show – of compost and books about the same. His legacy is Rodale Inc. publisher of books and provider of free information about the benefits of the organic method.

But his was not a perfect world from some points of view.

There was one major issue in the developing model of organic agriculture; one of those catch-22 things. If you used chemical fertilizers you wrecked the soil but the fertilizer people made a ton of money; if you followed the organic method, the soil benefitted but nobody got to sell you anything. Leave it to good-old American know how to sort out the solution and create a new monster in the process.

Forget Dr. Frankenstein. Next week we’ll meet the guy you really need to worry about: Dr. Earth.