ACID RAIN IS REAL.
HOW TO DETECT AIRBORNE TOXICITY AND SUPPORT THE SOIL TO COPE – AND EVEN THRIVE.
Many worry about acid rain and other airborne toxicity, if it is real, what it is, if they are affected, what it means and how to deal with it.
Yes, acid rain is real. It is caused by aerial pollution – ranging from burning fossil fuels and even volcanic eruptions, lightning, cloud seeding, chemtrails plus many others. Finding out if you are affected is easy – catch some rain water in a clean container – glass is ideal – and do a pH-test.
A pH-test technically measures the potential of hydrogen in a solution. The scale goes from 0 – 14, zero (0) being most acidic like battery acid, fourteen (14) is most alkaline like drain cleaner (sodium hydroxide) and seven (7) being neutral like distilled water.
Acid rain means that the pH of the rain water ranges somewhere between 4 and 4.5.
Many pH-tests only start at 4.5, so when test results hover at 4.5 that is enough for me. There are tests available that start at pH zero (0) but I find them less accurate overall. Ideally use several different pH-tests because not all of them are precise. I have the best outcomes with liquid tests rather than strips, and the best ones according to my experience are the top-of-the-range tests for aquariums available in pet shops. Play around and see which tests work best for you.
Our rain water is most acidic when we don’t have rain for a while. Once the air has been washed out the pH returns to a normal range – around 5.6/5.7, which is considered normal for rainwater, making it slightly acidic in nature. Most literature states that acid rain forms due to sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide in the air which undergo oxidation resulting in the formation of sulphuric acid and nitric acid getting washed out by rain onto land and into our waterways.
In my opinion this picture is incomplete as cloud seeding as well as chemtrails introduce many more chemicals in the air, which are omitted by many publications.
I am very aware of the debate if chemtrails really exist. Trust your body – I often taste chemicals several minutes after release, have a tight chest a little while later and find that my animals have gritty eyes and become wheezy a day after. This is enough proof for me.
Soil pH and rain pH are not interchangeable and acid rain certainly has an impact on the soil pH. When we measure soil pH we need to apply a carrier solution, which is usually distilled water with the pH of 7, thus having an impact on the result.
THIS AGAIN DEMONSTRATES THAT DUE TO THE MANY VARIABLES, TESTS CAN NEVER BEEN SEEN AS ABSOLUTES WITHOUT CONSIDERING THE CONTEXT.
Therefore in my work I use tests only as indicators of a trend to see if things are improving or deteriorating rather than as absolutes. Plus, there are many other methods we can use to ascertain if water is suitable for our soil.
Firstly we can always ask our worms. Collect some earthworms and soil from the same area. Add some of the water you want to test to the soil and lightly mix both. Please avoid the mixture being too wet or compacted, we still want a slightly crumbly texture with air pockets. Take a plastic container with a lid, like an ice cream or take away container, place your mix in one end and the worms in the other. Put on a lid with some small holes and cover with a towel as worms like it dark. Leave the container in the environment from where you have collected your soil and worm specimen and check after 24 hours. If the worms have returned to the soil the water is safe for them. If they have all curled up on the opposite side your water needs improvement. You can run the same test with the worms in your worm farm. Use the worm castings instead of soil and place the container back into the farm for 24 hours.
Everyone who has a garden or farm should have a worm farm – or three. Not only do they produce fabulous soil enhancers like worm juice and especially castings but the worms also are very helpful consultants testing water, soil and any other additives for you, too.
THE pH IS ALWAYS A SYMPTOM, NEVER THE CAUSE. THERE IS THE TEMPTATION TO ‘IMPROVE’ THE pH WITH APPLICATIONS OF LIME, IN SOIL AS WELL AS IN WATER. I HAVE WRITTEN IN DETAIL IN MY BOOK ‘RADICAL SOIL CARE’ THAT TREATING THE SYMPTOMS IS ONLY EVER A BANDAID SOLUTION AND DOES NOT AFFECT ANY LONG LASTING CHANGE, MUCH LIKE REARRANGING THE DECKCHAIRS ON THE TITANIC.
We can also use our own bodies to ascertain if a substance is safe for the soil and hence us – or not. I introduce some methods in my article ‘Ask You Body For Advice’. The most attention we usually give to information provided by our five senses – sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. Smell is our oldest sense and often treated secondary to sight, yet it is much more powerful and much harder to deceive – trust it. It is smells off, it is off. This is valid for food, plants, poo and animals for example. Have you ever found that an animal really smells rancid? Yep, something is wrong with it. If fresh animal dung does not smell wholesome but putrid, there is something wrong with that animal, if food smells weird and you don’t like that smell, don’t eat it. If someone else, however, likes that smell, like some cheeses for example, it might be good for them but not for you. Trust this. It will not lead you astray.
This is valid for soil, too. Everyone knows the smell of healthy soil – if your compost smells off, it is off – opposite to when it smells healthy and wholesome.
Smell your soil often until you become familiar with its ‘signature scent’. You will detect slight changes quickly by simply smelling them.
Our bodies constantly respond to our environment. We react with physiological changes whenever we move into a different location, into a car, supermarket or even from one room to another, for example. In can be a change in heart rate or blood pressure, a change in skin resistance, muscle strength and many more. This is called biofeedback. You can observe an increase in your heart rate when you – carefully – sniff on a bottle of herbicides. If you ever want to ‘geek out’ – measure your heart rate at the beginning of the herbicide aisle in a hardware store and again at the end after you walked past the bottles full of toxic substances – you will be surprised. I know of many people who experience heart palpations in supermarkets in the cosmetic and detergent aisles – food for thought.
We can use these biological changes as indicators for testing if substances are beneficial for us – or not. It is less complicated than it sounds. The easiest to measure is the change of muscle tone. With practice you get a feel for the muscle tone changing and you can test all kinds of substances, including acidity in water. More about how to use muscle tone and other biofeedback methods you find in my article ‘Ask Your Body For Advice’.
Have you ever tried to lift a hay bale when you are angry? Much easier when you breathe out and let the anger go…
Coming back to our acid rain – depending on the chemicals in the air, soil can get damaged by acid rain, yet we are not helpless in the face of environmental threats. Here comes the best part – the better and more resilient the soil organic matter and the soil biology, the more buffering capacity the soil has and the less it is adversely affected by acid rain. This emphasises – yet again – that ample soil organic matter with ample soil biology is not only the best indicator for soil health but also the best protector against environmental threats and the best possible buffer imaginable to deal with acid rain for soil health and as a flow on effect for our health.