Soil & Plants (Part 93)

By: John Ferguson

I was at the Environmental Fair last week put on by the Lutheran churches in our area and was listening to a professor from the University of Houston on biodiversity. She stated that the Earth’s Eco-system services (clean air, water, oxygen, etc.) is worth $ 147 Trillion per year to society. She also pointed out that humans consume 20% of all eco-system services yet humans are only less than 1% of the earths biomass. 

It seems like new information on the dangers of Round-Up (glyphosate) are coming out daily now that Monsanto’s Black Operations group has been exposed by the French government and disassembled. 

A couple of good articles on the lies about Round Up are: 

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/08/20/project-spruce.aspx?utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20190820Z1&et_cid=DM322534&et_rid=690256788 

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/08/20/home-depot-lowes-sued-over-roundup.aspx?utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art2&utm_campaign=20190820Z1&et_cid=DM322534&et_rid=690256788

A recent study reported in Science News stated that planting trees on 0.9 billion hectares of land could trap about two-thirds of the carbon released since the start of the industrial age. This is an are roughly the size of the USA. 

The Journal of Experimental Biology (July 2019) had a recent paper on how a beneficial fungus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) kills carpenter ants. This fungus may sit on a leaf or twig and when the ant takes a bite, the fungus colonizes the ant causing its jaws to lock up and freeze. The fungus then feeds on the ant devouring it and over time a fungal stalk grow out and sends out spores that rain down on an ants below, infecting more ants.