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Rochelle Arnold is a freelance journalist whose article, Don’t Kill the Dandelion Messenger, appears in the #1040 December issue of River Cities’ Reader.
Pursuant to her article, Arnold conducted phone interviews with Ed Thomas, Vice President of Government Affairs for the Fertilizer Institute; Monte Bottens, a sixth-generation farmer who lives with his wife, Robyn, in Cambridge, Illinois, and are both advocates of regenerative crop and animal farming and soil health; and Pat Miletich, a UFC Hall of Famer in mixed-martial arts and coach to thirteen world champions, who turned his lifelong fascination with the effect of nutrients upon the human body into a literal religion, a 508c ministry, called Soil Saviors — more on that presently.
In September 2025, TFI issued a news release that reads:
TFI Statement on Release of Second MAHA Report
ARLINGTON, VA – The Fertilizer Institute (TFI) today released the following statement in response to the publication of the second Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) report. The Fertilizer Institute (TFI) welcomes the opportunity to make soil health a larger part of the public dialogue concerning agriculture and the overall health of the American people. American agriculture shares many of the MAHA movement’s goals, such as improving the health of our children, as well as ensuring we are taking great care of the health of our land. We are only as healthy as the soil our food comes from and there is a role to play for both industry and the public sector. TFI has for years been supportive of and actively promotes both expanded farmer adoption of 4R nutrient stewardship plans and the implementation of other conservation practices such as the use of cover crops and no-till farming. TFI has promoted stewardship practices through the ongoing 4R Advocate program, as well as the industry’s collective goal of having 70 million acres of US cropland under 4R nutrient stewardship management by the year 2030. Congress can help promote healthy living and farming by ensuring that conservation funding and a focus on grower education and adoption of nutrient stewardship practices remain a cornerstone of the ongoing Farm Bill discussions. TFI thanks the Trump Administration and the MAHA Caucus for the opportunity to provide feedback and insights into the report and looks forward to continuing towards our shared goal of healthy soils and healthy Americans.”
Thomas’s org, The Fertilizer Institute, advocates regenerative farming practices which stress the importance of The Four Rs: The Right Fertilizer, The Right Place, The Right Time, and The Right Amount. In the absence of federal regulation on fertilizer, the FI believes it all the more important to educate farmers and non-farmers alike about the harm that certain accepted farming practices pose to the environment.
In the course of these interviews, you’re going to hear quite a bit about nitrate run-off, where the chemicals used in fertilizing crops wind up bleeding into our groundwater and surface waters. If someone offered you a cup full of fertilizer to quench your thirst, you would sensibly enough smack it out of that miscreant’s hand. However, the amount of runoff that does make it into the watershed might make you paranoid about the water you’ve poured yourself, and whether it has been put through your Brita filters enough times to get the bad stuff out. (Mental Note: There will never be enough times. You’re paranoid, remember.)
Thomas would also like to see certain misconceptions about fertilizer cleared up — for one, that fertilizers are entirely man-made, synthetic substances. As a matter of fact, there are nutrient-rich substances that occur naturally in the soil; and figuring out the balances would be a worthy goal of any research outfit that professes concern for the environment. So get to it already, ag-heads.
Bottens, who has spent much of his life studying the soil, has built up a store of direct knowledge on the subject that ag-orgs would do well to hear plain. Ag Solutions Network was one that listened; and both Bottens and the ag-docs have developed a combination of commercial/commodity fertilizers and biological and nutrition products. Bottens also lays out his insights on a fairly regular basis on his AgEmerge Podcast.
Back on the farm, the Bottens abide by their own five-point system of principles: Minimize disturbance; keep the soil covered at all times; maximize diversity; maintain a living root; and integrate livestock — in short, bring it all back to the land. The point of it all is not to squeeze every last bushel from the land that you can for maximum profit; that way lies disaster. Woody Guthrie wrote whole folk songs about why it’s a bad idea.
So you know, the corn the Bottens mill is big in Japan and Italy; the meat they raise can be purchased at the QC Farmers Market in Rock Island and through their own website, GratefulGraze.com. Bottens explains how the absence of fertilizers (and antibiotics, pesticides, dewormers, and insecticides) provides the food he provides to customers a salutary result, most importantly better tasting. You know the cliché “the proof is in the pudding”? There are vegan alternatives to classic pudding you might try out. But the cliché isn’t a cliché because it’s bonkers. Try out the products of the Bottens’ labors and taste for yourself.
Miletich, for his part, survived the blows of numerous opponents to co-found the Soil Saviors. Distilled to its essence, the Saviors’ ethos holds that organic matter needs to be fed back into the soil eventually — and that includes you, too, Scooter. If you can give a little more back at the end — say, by adding ninety essential elements and minerals with a diversity of non-GMO soil borne probiotics — then you’ve done at least that much right with your life.
Miletich and his comrades are also responsible for Cell Saviors, which offers users a fulvic-humic-acid-colloid-mineral extract for detoxification and reinvigoration. In the interest of science, and her own health, Arnold is taking one of their products. So far, so good.
Miletich’s fascination with the organic began back in his childhood, when he suffered from severe respiratory illnesses that limited his participation in sports. His skepticism about doctors seems to stem from their inability to diagnose what ailed him. He did his own research, concocted a medley of organic concentrated elements, and he overcame the debilitations to get into mixed-martial arts in the UFC.
That he might have been on to something cannot be denied: The proof was in the punching. His skepticism about medicine has led him to question some of the basic assumptions about illness theory, which he documents herein. As has been mentioned, he’s made a religion out of the tenets of organic recycling. Their beliefs might not sync up with your own dogmas. But hear him out.
Arnold heard Miletich out again when she and Reader publisher Todd McGreevy arranged a phone conference, which closes out the podcast without Bottens.
— Summary and analysis by Michael Helke. See his curation of important Iowa, Illinois and Quad Cities’ local news stories at QCAToday.com.