If you're at all passionate about health, it's likely you will eventually reach the conclusion that you need to grow your own food. Hendrikus Schraven, founder of Hendrikus Organics, is a magnificent resource in this regard.

Hendrikus has an innovative approach to environmental landscape design, including a focus on edible landscaping, and he's an expert at restoring contaminated soils, which so many of us have. The key to this approach, of course, is to improve the quality of the microbiome in the soil.

Early Lessons in Chemical Farming

Born right after the end of World War II on a farm in Holland, about 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) from the German border, he learned to farm the organic way right from the start.

"In those days, farming was done with horse and plow … You smelled your soil to figure out what it needed. It's a technique I still teach people today. Smelling the soil is actually [picking up on] the activity of the biology. That is what creates the smells …

We, of course, knew that the healthier the soil was, the healthier the [end] product … That was just called farming."

Then a kind of chemical revolution in farming took place, and the Schraven family started using chemical fertilizers like everyone else, having fallen for the promise of being able to grow more food for less money and time.

"Of course, they didn't tell you how dangerous it was to the body. We started applying [fertilizer] with our bare hands. Everybody did. You spread it out of buckets over the fields. After doing that for a few days, your fingernails were bleeding.

I finally said to my dad, 'Growing food shouldn't hurt. There's something really wrong here.'

He said, 'Yeah. We are [also] needing more of this stuff. The first two times it was fine, but now we need a little bit more to get the same results. The soil doesn't smell as good as it used to. OK, let's go back to the old ways.'"

Today we call the old way of farming "organic farming." But truly, this is how it was done for ages before chemicals became the norm of farming. There's nothing really "new" about it, historically speaking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjyT1UeYuzo