Yeah, buttrick chose a good handle for himself. At the very least he's confusing a couple quite dis-similar words. Plants certainly don't need nutrients 'in synthetic form'... they take up nutrients as ions. They may be called 'inorganic ions'; but they are not 'synthetic ions'. That wouldn't make any sense...considering plant systems predate man-made laboratories. The question is then where do these ions come from, in nature, and the answer is the soil food web. Microbes are the foundation of the soil food web (bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes). The 'soil' part of that is also pretty fucking important, since it has to be able to support such life. You help build up the foundation with organic matter.
You don't dump fertilizer on an old growth forest, and yet forests sustain massive amounts of growth with no end in site. If it wasn't for us (humans), virtually all of the USA would be lush, green, beautiful forest. It would grow on forever without our interference; without any man ever having to pour one ounce of chemical salts upon it. If you walk through a forest and examine the floor carefully you'll gather some hints as to what is actually going on there. You'll see the ground covered in litter; fallen leaves and twigs and other organic wastes that the arthropods are shredding up. Dig into it a bit and you'll see fuzzy white mycelium growing upon the moist litter nearest the ground, breaking it all down. Chances are beneath the litter is rich, black, casting-rich soil. These are the more obvious things you'll be able to witness with a naked eye; the rest of the party is invisible to us without an electron microscope
