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There is growing
evidence that foot and mouth is not viral in nature.
Albert Howard, an Honorary Fellow of the
Imperial College of Science, was formerly the Director of
the Institute of Plant Industry and Agricultural Adviser to
States in Central India and Rajputana. His many years farming
experience and research into cattle disease and health led
him to believe quite firmly that FMD
is an opportunistic disease arising as a result of poor diet
combined with intensive and therefore unhealthy farming methods.
Howard's battle to establish these facts
were at first thwarted by his superiors. We discover that
vested interests were alive and well in the early part of
the 20th century, just as they are today. Please read the
following concise and very illuminating section. Links to
the relevant unabridged chapters can be found at the bottom
of this page.
This article
was written in 1945
Farming And Gardening
For Health Or Disease
by Sir Albert Howard C.I.E.,
M.A.
Honorary Fellow of the Imperial
College of Science,
Formerly Director of the Institute of Plant Industry,
Indore, and Agricultural Adviser to States
in Central India and Rajputana
Preface
The earth's green carpet is the sole source
of the food consumed by livestock and mankind. It also furnishes
many of the raw materials needed by our factories. The consequence
of abusing one of our greatest possessions is disease. This
is the punishment meted out by Mother Earth for adopting methods
of agriculture, which are not in accordance with Nature's
law of return.
About the year 1910, after five years'
firsthand experience of crop production under Indian conditions,
I became convinced that the birthright of every crop is health
and that the correct method of dealing with disease at an
experiment station is not to destroy the parasite, but to
make use of it for tuning up agricultural practice.
Foot-and-mouth
Disease
If this holds for plants, why should it
not apply to animals? I therefore put forward a request to
have my own work cattle, so that my small farm of seventy-five
acres could be a self-contained unit. I was anxious to select
my own animals, to design their accommodation, and to arrange
for their feeding, hygiene, and management.
Then it would
be possible to see:
1. What the
effect of properly grown food would be on the well fed working
animal.
2. How such
livestock would react to infectious diseases.
This request was refused several times
on the ground that a research institute like Pusa should set
an example of cooperative work rather than of individualistic
effort.
I retorted that agricultural advances
had always been made by individuals rather than by groups
and that the history of science proved conclusively that no
progress had ever taken place without freedom. I did not get
my oxen. But when I placed the matter before the Member of
the Viceroy's Council in charge of agriculture (the late Sir
Robert Carlyle, K.C.S.I.), I immediately secured his powerful
support and was allowed to have charge of six pairs of oxen.
I had little to learn in this matter,
as I belong to an old agricultural family and was brought
up on a farm which had made for itself a local reputation
for the management of cattle. My animals were most carefully
selected for the work they had to do and for the local climate.
Everything was done to provide them with suitable housing
and with fresh green fodder, silage, and grain, all produced
from fertile soil.
They soon got into good fettle and began
to be in demand at the neighboring agricultural shows, not
as competitors for prizes, but as examples of what an Indian
ox should look like. The stage was then set for the project
I had in view, namely, to watch the reaction of these well
chosen and well fed oxen to diseases like rinderpest, septicemia,
and foot-and-mouth disease, which frequently devastated the
countryside and sometimes attacked the large herds of cattle
maintained on the Pusa Estate.
I always felt that the real cause of such
epidemics was either starvation, due to the intense pressure
of the bovine population on the limited food supply, or, when
food was adequate, to mistakes in feeding and management.
The working ox must always have not only
good fodder and forage, but also ample time for chewing the
cud, for rest, and for digestion. The grain ration is also
important, as well as a little fresh green food -- all produced
by intensive methods of farming. Access to clean fresh water
must also be provided. The coat of the working animal must
also be kept clean and free from dung.
The next step was to discourage
the official veterinary surgeons who often visited Pusa from
inoculating these animals with various vaccines
and sera to ward off the common diseases. I achieved this
by firmly refusing to have anything to do with such measures,
at the same time asking these specialists to inspect my animals
and to suggest measures to improve their feeding, management,
and housing, so that my experiment could have the best possible
chance of success. This carried the day. The veterinarians
retired from the unequal contest and took no steps to compel
me to adopt their remedies.
My animals
then had to be brought in contact with diseased stock.
This was done by allowing them: (1) to
use the common pastures at Pusa, on which diseased cattle
sometimes grazed, and (2) to come in direct contact with foot-and-mouth
disease.
This latter was easy, as my small farmyard
was only separated from one of the large cattle sheds of the
Pusa Estate by a low hedge over which the animals could rub
noses. I have often seen this occur between my oxen and foot-and-mouth
cases. Nothing happened.
The healthy, well-fed animals reacted
to this disease exactly as suitable varieties of crops, when
properly grown, did to insect and fungus pests -- no
infection took place. Neither did any infection
occur as the result of my oxen using the common pastures.
This experiment was repeated year after
year between 1910 and 1923, when I left Pusa for Indore. A
somewhat similar experience was repeated at Quetta between
the years 1910 and 1918, but here I had only three pairs of
oxen. As at Pusa, the animals were carefully selected and
great pains were taken to provide them with suitable housing,
with protection from the intense cold of winter, and with
the best possible food. Again
no precautions were taken against disease and no infection
took place.
The most complete demonstration of the
principle that soil fertility is the basis of health in working
animals took place at the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore,
where twenty pairs of oxen were maintained. Again, the greatest
care was taken to select sound animals to start with, to provide
them with a good water supply, a comfortable, well-ventilated
shed, and plenty of nutritious food, all raised on humus-filled
soil.
One detail of cattle-shed management was
the provision of a floor of beaten earth, which is much more
restful for the cloven hoof than a cement or brick floor.
This was changed every three months, the dry, powdered, urine-
impregnated soil afterwards being used as an activator in
humus production, for which it proved most suitable. In this
way it was possible to bank the spare urine under cover without
loss by rain-wash or fermentation. The
result of all this was a complete absence of foot-and-mouth
and other diseases for a period of six years.
But this is not the whole of the foot-and-mouth
story. When the 300 acres of land at Indore were taken over
in the autumn of 1924, the area carried no fodder crops, so
the feeding of forty oxen was at first very difficult. During
the hot weather of 1925 these difficulties became acute.
A great deal of heavy work was falling
on the animals, whose food consisted of wheat straw, dried
grass, and millet stalks, with a small ration of crushed cotton
seed. Such a ration might do for maintenance, but it was quite
inadequate for heavy work. The animals soon lost condition
and for the first and last time in my twenty-five years' Indian
experience I had to deal with a few very mild cases of foot-and-mouth
disease in the case of some dozen animals.
The patients were rested for a fortnight
and given better food, when the trouble disappeared never
to return. But this warning stimulated everybody concerned
to improve the hot-weather cattle ration and to secure a supply
of properly made silage for 1926, by which time the oxen had
recovered condition.
From 1927 to 1931 these animals were often
exhibited at agricultural shows as type specimens of what
the local breed should be. They were also in great demand
for the religious processions that took place in Indore city
from time to time, a compliment which gave intense pleasure
to the labour staff of the Institute.
This experience, covering a period of
twenty-six years at three widely separated centers -- Pusa
in Bihar and Orissa, Quetta on the Western Frontier, and Indore
in Central India -- convinced me that
foot-and-mouth disease is a consequence of
malnutrition pure and simple, and that the
remedies which have been devised in countries like Great Britain
to deal with the trouble, namely, the slaughter of the affected
animals, are both superficial and also inadmissible. Such
attempts to control an outbreak should cease.
Cases of foot-and-mouth
disease should be utilized to tune up practice and to see
to it that the animals are fed on the fresh produce of fertile
soil.
The trouble will then pass and will not
spread to the surrounding areas, provided the animals there
are also in good fettle.
Foot-and-mouth
outbreaks are a sure sign of bad farming.
How can such preventive methods of dealing
with diseases like foot-and- mouth be set in motion? Only
by a drastic reorganization of present-day veterinary research.
Instead of the elaborate and expensive laboratory investigations
now in progress on this disease, which are not leading to
any practical result, a simple preventive trial on the following
lines should be started.
The animals should be carefully selected
to suit the local conditions and should first of all be got
into first-class fettle by proper feeding and management.
Everything will then be ready for a simple experiment in disease
prevention. A few foot-and-mouth cases should be let loose
among the herds, the reaction of both healthy and diseased
animals being carefully watched. The diseased animals will
soon recover. There will most likely be no infection of the
healthy stock. At the worst there will only be the mildest
possible attack which will disappear in a fortnight or so."
Originally Published 1945
My name is
Trevor Osborne. I was trained as an agricultural scientist
and farm advisor in the UK in the early 1950's. This was the
time when the chemical farming era just began. We were taught
age old methods that worked with nature, not against it as
we now do. Pests and diseases were controlled naturally by
what was known as good husbandry... both crop husbandry and
animal husbandry. The premise was, if your soils are healthy,
then your crops will be healthy.
If your crops are healthy then your animals
will be healthy. Healthy
crops and animals have natural resistance to all disease.
If it were not the case those species
would have died out eons ago. Nature does not rely on drugs
and mass slaughter to control diseases, it relies on the species
natural immunity and they survive because that's the way nature
works... when you let it!
It seems we have chosen to ignore the
lessons we learned over many centuries. How long is it going
to take for humanity to wake up
to this fact? What we need to do is learn and practice "health
creation" not "disease eradication" both in
agriculture and in human health. Then, and only then will
be start to reverse the disastrous situation we find ourselves
in both sectors.
This brings me to the current Foot &
Mouth Disease (FMD) situation. FMD
is not a fatal disease under normal classification methods.
It is akin to flu in humans... yes, people
can die from it but usually only the weak, elderly and undernourished.
In other words those people whose immune systems are low.
Simplistically, the same applies to FMD... those animals with
very weak immune systems may die. Those with weak immune systems
will suffer the symptoms and then recover. Those with strong
immune systems will not even exhibit the symptoms.
This being the case the obvious LONG TERM
answer to the problem is, build the immune system of the animals.
And this is done by practicing good husbandry. This doesn't
mean we have to go back 50 or 100 years. No, it is about using
what we know of the old, and combining it with the new.
For example, it is well know in some circles
that most agricultural soils have been depleted of certain
minerals and humus... both of which are necessary for healthy
and nutritious crops. There is a quick and economic answer
to this. It involves applying mineral-rich volcanic rock dust
and organic carbon to the soils.
Two companies I know of in Australia are
involved in this, there are probably more in other counties:
1. International Mineral Consultants Pty
Ltd: www.minplus.com.au/
2. Sustainable Agriculture & Food
Enterprises Pty. Ltd. www.mineralfertiliser.com.au/
To supplement my above statements I have
attached a document taken from Hansard (Australian Parliament
records) and one from the US Congress both of which elude
to the importance of soils to animal & human health. If
you require more evidence regarding the above please contact
me at wharmony@iinet.net.au
I hope this brief overview may provide
you with an inkling of where we are collectively heading and
what needs to be done to change to a win-win-win direction.
Regards... Trevor Osborne, NDA
whatareweswallowing.com
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