Soil Minerals for Organic Gardeners

Compost and Minerals or Why Does My Garden Need a Soil Test?
By Agricola

We all know that a fertile soil grows better crops, just as we all know that nutritious food grows a healthier body, and the same minerals that make the soil fertile are the minerals that make food more nutritious.

The lack of essential minerals in the soil will have the same sort of detrimental effect on crops that the lack of minerals in our diet has on our health. The analogy goes even further: It is largely the presence of healthy soil microorganisms that make the minerals available to the plant, and it is largely the same sort of microorganisms in our digestive systems that make the minerals in our food available to our bodies. Neither the plants nor our bodies can do much with simple ground-up rocks; the minerals first need to be changed into a form that can be absorbed. That is what a healthy, biologically active soil does for the plants, and what a healthy population of probiotic organisms does in one's digestive system. http://www.soilminerals.com/index.htm