On December 21, 1992 I set up my own company for environmental cleansing: PURE-milieutechniek bvba (www.pure-milieutechniek.be).

PURE Abwassertechnik in Germany was our mother company (www.pure-umwelttechnik.de). The research for our technique was made by Dr.Kathe Seidel of the famous Max-Planck Institute in Germany. This was then commercialized by the family Rausch in 1976, the founders of PURE Abwassertechnik and with whom I still work together nowadays. Since 2003 we are embedded in a big family company BAUER in Germany.

During the construction of a modern plant purification system with planted lava filters, we determined that where we had spread the redundant lava sand in the garden, that the plants grew better and looked more robust. I began to examine the phenomena and through literature of the Austrian nature researcher Viktor Schauberger (www.pks.or.at), I came to the research of Julius Hensel, which lead me to John D. Hamaker. And through John D. Hamaker's work, I learned more about mineralizing the earth and your wonderful organization.

The water and marsh plants we work with are being utilized for environmental cleansing for three years in a ground substrate that exists from mineralized loam and domestic compost. If needed, our purification systems are being fed with lava-basalt dust, a treatment which has a very positive influence on the growth of the plants and therefore also on their performances.

Our intention is to restore the circular courses in nature and to heal the earth and the water (i.e., waste water purification with overgrown plant filters, and use the produced biomass as cattle forage, as usable raw material: the effluent for the irrigation and making green of the deserts!)

I also want to devote myself in Belgium to the spreading of the knowledge about remineralising the earth.

For the last five years a group of friends and I have been building up a 4 hectare organic farm in the north of the Czech Republic. We do everything including the farm work, all building by hand no tractors, no power tools), so it is a slow but a great learning process. We are vegans and keep no domestic animals and use no animal manure except what the wild animals leave.

Our soils are heavy with a pH around 7.4 and quite rich in calcium. The climate is relatively dry, around 400mm/year rainfall. We belong to the most northern region of commercial wine and apricot growing with relatively warm summers and frosty winters.

Healing the soil has always been among my favorite interests, and I am especially fond of studying nature’s own recovery after human exploitation- succession. When we started at our land five years ago, the soil was in an extremely bad condition. I experienced that the absence of tilling and leaving the previously plowed land to become a meadow was the fastest and most efficient way of getting structure and vitality back to the soil. Today the soil cannot be compared to what it was when we started, but still I suspect there to be a trace element deficiency. Some plants get red leaves in late summer, and some just don’t grow even when adding compost and watering. That is why I decided to try rock dust, and when searching for it I found out that no one is using it here and all dust produced (as by-product) in Czech quarries goes to the dump. What a waste! I want to change that.

I have recently gotten 20 tons of basalt rock dust and dumped it on our farm. About half I am spreading by hand on all our land, and the other half goes on the land through the compost, little by little. I am working on organizing trials of rock dust on other organic farms, and will be helpful with everything I know to those wanting to remineralize their soils.

I see remineralization as maybe the most natural and simple way of taking care of the soil that gives us everything we and our society needs. The process is exactly the same which Nature herself uses when vitalizing soil; we just speed it up a little. I'm not personally sure what's going to happen with the climate, if it's going to get freezing cold or scorching hot, but either way it's going to be a disaster of unheard proportion to human society. Using remineralization on farmland can help us produce more food on the land that's already been converted to cultivation, and in the just as necessary wild habitats it can help to deal with the surplus carbon dioxide by helping plants thrive like they were meant to do.

I've noticed that many forms of industry produce a lot of perfect stonedust for remineralization, yet it's considered a problem by them that's just dumped away like any other trash! If we could get this "waste" spread to fields and forests, it could make a real difference in a short time.

I think that many people have a hard time believing that material made from rocks could help plants grow better. Spreading this basic information is vital to the movement. I'm very proud that I can be a part of RTE's work, and wish that everyone who gets interested in the idea gets connected to others here in RTE to spread to word.

Our growing technique, like NFT, is another part of our business with a focus on durable, sustainable, and water saving growing techniques.

We are happy to be a member of your organisation and cooperate with you in PR, research, and networking.

The practice of remineralization is not only an important step for ecological responsibility but also at another deeper level. It reconnects us with the Earth and gives us the feeling that there is still a solution to recover the harm that we humans are doing to our only home, our only planet, by re-establishing the balance of the natural world. This task is a titanic one but more and more people are called to take care of the environment, and practice as planetary healers. I consider remineralizing the earth as a really good medicine for restoring Gaia's health and therefore to improve the life of humans in every way.

I am currently looking for my own source of minerals to remineralize here at the Earth Sanctuary and I am expecting to create pilot projects in the near future for the rest of Spain. The land has an important number of trees, and of ecosystems which makes the research on remineralizing for a diversity of soils even more interesting.

To find viable mineral sources in this country would be a very important step towards sustainability and independence from chemical fertilizers, but also to give ecological agriculture a new direction. I am sure that to bring the information on remineralizing the earth to the public and make it known through the media, would encourage interested people like farmers and ecologically oriented individuals or on a bigger scale, garden centres and conservation groups to take action.

We will be organizing meetings for the public, coordinators and professionals for remineralizing the earth, as well as initiating specific research/practice here at The Earth Sanctuary.

Michaela is currently translating the website into Spanish. This is an exciting project, one we have dreamed of for a long time! Thank you, Michaela! -Joanna Campe