SEER Centre: Scotland’s Remineralized Oasis

Yet it was exactly here that Cameron and Moira Thomson set­tled and decided to become self-sufficient by cre­at­ing their own gar­den, grow­ing their very own fruits and veg­eta­bles. “Our dream was to grow and use our own food, and to live as much from the local envi­ron­ment as pos­si­ble and as lit­tle from the shops as pos­si­ble,” Moira Thomson told Organic Connections. “So we ded­i­cated our lives to that—but it was hard work with such poor soils.”

In 1984, the cou­ple hap­pened to be lis­ten­ing to the radio one day and heard the review of a book enti­tled The Survival of Civilization by John Hamaker and Donald Weaver. The book describes the func­tion of ice ages as that of glac­i­ers crush­ing rock, releas­ing nour­ish­ing min­er­als into the earth, and the fact that, at present, min­er­als are nearly gone from the soil. Armed with this new infor­ma­tion about soils, the Thomsons had the answers they had been seeking.

“We read this book and we thought, This is it; now we’ll be able to grow the proper crops that will sus­tain us,” said Thomson. “It just made such sense to us it seemed right. So we started to use quarry dusts in our gar­dens and have never looked back.”

The dust Thomson is refer­ring to is obtained from the nearby Collace Quarry, oper­ated by Tayside Contracts. They sud­denly saw their gar­dens come alive—quite lit­er­ally. “We’re totally hooked. It def­i­nitely works,” Thomson remarked. “Not only does it put min­er­als back in the soil, it con­se­quently grows giant vegetables—giant lovely veg­eta­bles that are full of min­er­als and trace ele­ments that are miss­ing in most of today’s soils.”

The ben­e­fi­cial effects of glac­i­ers are repli­cated when rock dust is used. Sprinkled on top of the land, rock dust is digested by earth­worms and thereby com­bined with organic mat­ter con­tain­ing nitro­gen, car­bon, min­er­als and thou­sands of microor­gan­isms, ulti­mately becom­ing organic mineral-rich plant food. The process is known as remineralization.

Remineralization also causes absorp­tion of a higher amount of car­bon from the atmos­phere, lock­ing it into soils and into mineral-rich plants. “In addi­tion to grow­ing won­der­ful food to feed the world, you can also take car­bon out of the atmos­phere and help sta­bi­lize cli­mate change,” Thomson said.

The Thomsons are cer­tainly not alone in their dis­cov­er­ies. Some of the world’s top chefs, includ­ing Alice Waters and Dan Barber, have dis­cov­ered in their search for the ulti­mate in tasty ingre­di­ents the enor­mous ben­e­fits of rem­iner­al­ized farm­ing. Waters’ Chez Panisse and Barber’s Blue Hill restau­rants each fea­ture rem­iner­al­ized produce.

As pointed out by Moira Thomson, there is the issue of nutri­tion as well. Dr. Arden Andersen, both a soil con­sul­tant and a med­ical doc­tor, has found that the nutri­ent con­tent of foods today com­pared to half a cen­tury ago ranges from 15 to 75 per­cent less—due to deple­tion of nutri­ents in the soil. Restoration of the soil nutri­ents brings back the full nutri­tional ben­e­fits to fruits and vegetables.

Telling the World

The Thomsons were so impressed with their results they decided to make it their life’s mis­sion to export their find­ings to the farm­ers who could really use the infor­ma­tion. After 13 years of pio­neer­ing work, they estab­lished the SEER Centre in 1997, a char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion com­mit­ted to regen­er­a­tion of soils to ben­e­fit the grower and the envi­ron­ment. SEER is an acronym for Sustainable Ecological Earth Regeneration. Armed with two shov­els and a wheel­bar­row, along with the rock dust and Dundee Council’s award-winning locally made com­post, they had their magic for­mula for soil cre­ation. Beginning with 220 tons of these resources, they cre­ated two deep ter­races of “Rocksoil” in which to grow their veg­eta­bles, and thus began the build­ing out of the remark­able show­place that the Centre would become.

By July 1997, the Thomsons’ five chil­dren were bit­ing into the first of the Centre’s rem­iner­al­ized crops, and by 2000 the young rem­iner­al­ized trees were begin­ning to grow pro­fusely, pro­vid­ing shel­ter and wildlife habi­tats around the perimeter.

And the word did spread. First it was local media, then national media, then inter­na­tional media. The esteemed BBC aired tele­vi­sion news items and spe­cials focus­ing on the SEER Centre and the work of Cameron and Moira Thomson.

“It was a pub­lic­ity cam­paign from the start, try­ing to attract atten­tion to what we were doing,” Moira Thomson related. “It started locally, and even­tu­ally it widened out and became more national, and we’ve had quite a bit of inter­na­tional inter­est too. A lead­ing Swedish daily news­pa­per came over in 2006 and did a big spread—a cover story. This was after they had learned of the release of a book called We Want Real Food by Graham Harvey, in which he addresses the decline of min­er­als in mod­ern foods. We’ve since gone to Sweden to launch our ‘Rockdust’ prod­uct and orga­nized a sup­plier over there. Swedish TV News has also fea­tured our achievements.”

Today the SEER Centre is open at dif­fer­ent stages of the grow­ing sea­son, offer­ing tours, courses and work­ing hol­i­days. Cameron and Moira will even travel to give talks and demon­stra­tions of their dis­cov­er­ies. The SEER Centre Trust owns a trad­ing sub­sidiary, Rockdust Limited, which sells their very own brand of min­er­als, called Rockdust, all over the UK and beyond. Sales infor­ma­tion links can be accessed directly from the Centre web­site. They make and sell two dif­fer­ent rock-dust/compost mixes as well: “Rocksoil”—their grow­ing medium, which is in the SEER Centre terraces—and “Rockmix,” the top dress­ing used at SEER Centre, an organic chemical-free fer­til­izer. Proceeds all go to sup­port the Centre and its activities.

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

The Results

A good mea­sure of the results of rem­iner­al­iza­tion at the SEER Centre comes in the exam­ple Moira Thomson gives of their grow­ing of potatoes.

“We have also done tri­als here at SEER Centre with soil, sim­ply because we want our vis­i­tors to see the rem­iner­al­ized, rich com­post soils along­side the poor soil that is nat­u­rally here,” Thomson said. “You can grow pota­toes in the native soil, but they’re not high yielding.

“So on half of a soil ter­race we went with no rock dust and on the other half we put rock dust. We had big­ger plants and big­ger crops on the rock-dusted side, big­ger pota­toes. We reckon we quadru­pled the yield in com­par­i­son with the orig­i­nal soil, because not only did we have big­ger pota­toes but we had more of them.”

The Thomsons have found a suc­cess­ful for­mula in their Rocksoil blend. Compost is mixed with rock dust in spe­cific quan­ti­ties and it lasts for years. For the first 12 years they sim­ply planted into the Rocksoil mix­ture and added no more rock dust, tak­ing bumper crops year after year. Even though it didn’t seem to need it, they’ve recently added more rock dust, just because they rec­om­mend it be added every 5 to 10 years.

In another exper­i­ment, the Thomsons dis­cov­ered the potency of the rock dust by itself, even with­out compost-enriched soil. Within a green­house, they divided up two areas sep­a­rated by a cement and brick path, with a deep rub­ble infill to pro­hibit the pas­sage of worms between the trial areas. One side con­tained com­post and rock dust, while the other con­tained poor soil and rock dust. Both sides grew equally giant tomatoes!

Into the Future

The SEER Centre is now up to 11 thriv­ing ter­races and a large bed where they grow a full range of pro­duce as well as bushes, hedges and fruit trees. “We grow as many dif­fer­ent things as pos­si­ble to make a whole bio­di­verse ecosys­tem,” Thomson explained, “and we try to show as many dif­fer­ent plants as pos­si­ble so dif­fer­ent kinds of grow­ers can see how their par­tic­u­lar spe­cialty would grow with rock dust.”

The suc­cess of their ven­ture can be seen sim­ply by its con­trast with the sur­round­ing land­scape. “It’s very much an ‘oasis in the glen,’ as we call it,” said Thomson. “It’s lush growth sur­rounded by hedges, which we’ve cre­ated since we came here. The rest of the land­scape is very bar­ren and bleak—Scottish hill­sides with lots of sheep on them.”

The SEER Centre is con­nected with Remineralize the Earth (RTE), an orga­ni­za­tion that helps facil­i­tate projects such as SEER Centre the world over. “Remineralize the Earth has been closely aligned with the Thomsons since the 1980s,” said Joanna Campe, RTE’s exec­u­tive direc­tor. “Cameron and Moira are pio­neers of turn­ing bar­ren lands into incred­i­bly fer­tile soils with the addi­tion of rock dust; and with a min­i­mum of gar­den main­te­nance they are demon­strat­ing the poten­tial of rem­iner­al­iza­tion to SEER Centre vis­i­tors on a daily basis as well as through the enthu­si­as­tic media cov­er­age they receive from the BBC and oth­ers. Seeing these dra­matic results from the Thomsons and var­i­ous grow­ers else­where has sus­tained my mis­sion for the last 25 years to rem­iner­al­ize and regen­er­ate soils everywhere.”

With the help of vol­un­teers and con­tri­bu­tions from around the planet, the SEER Centre con­tin­ues its remark­able work. To find out more, and to learn how you can help, visit the SEER Centre web­site at www.seercentre.org.uk.

For more infor­ma­tion on Remineralize the Earth and its many projects, visit www.remineralize.org.