The word “Fertility”, when used by agronomists and farmers, refers to the abundance and vigor of crops, the ability of the soil to sustain growth and fend off disease. “Fertility” for the rest of us usually paints a picture pregnancy, birth, and vigorously swimming sperm. These are different topics at first glance, but indeed, these two fields of “fertility” are much more alike and interwoven as one might think.
I recently read a book written by two soil health geeks/MacArthur Fellows/wildly competent experts, which presented an impressive battery of data and firsthand experience showing that biodiversity in soil improves the nutritional value of the food we eat. In short, the vast majority of large-scale agricultural operations worldwide are monoculture (meaning, one crop grows in a field at a time). They rely heavily on chemical fertilizers to provide critical nitrogen and phosphate to the crops for growth, and they suppress insects from eating the crops with insecticides, and other ‘weeds’ from growing in the fields with herbicides. After each harvest, they till the soil to get rid of old roots and plant matter, aerating and mixing up the soil to prepare it for a new set of seeds.
Year after year, the tilling, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides/herbicides, and growing the same one plant that uptakes the same quantity and type of nutrients from the soil, the soil loses all characteristics of fertile soil. It becomes just dirt- infertile, empty, a non-participating vessel for chemical fertilizers. The field still looks like a field- wide open and brown, but there are no worms, there are no fungal allies. Birds do not dip in and out, lunching on insects. There are no bees, no pollinators of any kind. There is just dirt. And nothing grows in dirt.
So farmers add fertilizer. Fertilizer gives plants the basic building blocks they need to grow. And grow they do! Massive cauliflower, plump watermelons, pound-heavy tomatoes, all aesthetically perfect for grocery store aisles, but, as the research in the book demonstrates, devoid of flavor and devoid of the vast variety of micronutrients and phytochemicals our bodies need to function well. We have conflated the amount of protein, carbohydrates, and fats in our food with varying degrees of health, and have ignored that our soil and our food are being stripped of diversity and whole nutrition.
We strip down nature, then rely on our shortsighted, incomplete knowledge to try to recreate what she did best without any help.
Now, let’s take a look at human fertility. If you’ve been trying to conceive, or experiencing infertility, perhaps you’ve worked with an acupuncturist, nutritionist, gynecologist, naturopathic doctor, or reproductive endocrinologist. Chances are, you’ve either read something in a book or on the internet, or one of these providers has suggested you add supplements into your daily habits. Maybe some magnesium, some vitamin B complex, maybe some fish oil, iron, DHA, the list goes on.
This advice is not wrong. The prevalence of micronutrient deficiency in the US population is increasing. We are not getting the magnesium, the LHA, the omega-3s, the copper, the bioavailable iron, the beta carotene from our food that we used to. Our food cultivation has been taken out of the hands of nature, stripped of biodiversity, and manufactured by humans. Our food does not deliver the hit of nutrition that we need, so we must ADD IN supplements, just as conventional farmers ADD IN fertilizer.
Now, getting a bit more ‘meta’, if you've gone through medically assisted fertility treatments, perhaps you’ve been put on a drug called Lupron (or another GnRH agonist or antagonist) which shuts down your body’s natural cycle of developing egg follicles before ovulation. This is done so we can eliminate any interference from the body’s natural hormones, and then so we can ADD IN a cocktail of follicle-stimulating drugs to develop eggs, followed by a trigger shot to mature the eggs. Once again, we shut down nature, so that we can add in what we deem to be the key ingredients for cultivation, and then control the process.
I want to be clear that I am not against IVF or medically assisted cycles. For many people, it is the BEST or even ONLY choice, and it should be widely available at a lower cost to patients. And I also believe that the medical system is altogether too quick to dismiss a person’s natural cycles, preferring to halt them altogether, and take the wheel through pharmaceuticals, rather than finding the root cause of hormonal imbalance and coaxing it back toward homeostasis. Perhaps, if we embraced the nuance and complexity of our physiological and nutritional needs, we might start seeing the links between how we tend the soil of our earth and the soil of our bodies.
Lastly, I want to end with a story, to tie in labor and birth.
One of the first births I attended, the mom, after hours and hours of labor, chose to get an epidural. Of course we, as her birth team, were supportive. She had been working hard, and was getting tired and discouraged that her baby wasn’t moving down. She had been suffering and she wanted relief. After hours of howling, moaning, showing her strength, pacing, holding her husband, dancing, bathing in the shower, trekking back and forth to the bathroom, swinging her hips, she lay still, napping gently on the hospital bed. For her, I was relieved. She rested, she gathered strength that she used hours later to push out her baby. But in that shift that occurred minutes after the anesthesia hit her body, I saw a profound shift from nature to control.
Before the epidural, the hospital staff had left her alone, only checking in once every few hours. After the epidural, she had intensive medical management, nursing staff rushing in and out constantly, monitors beeping, bags of fluid and pitocin filling and emptying. And the mom, lying on her side, resting. Aside from the staff shuffle, the labor and delivery floor was quiet, serene, muted. I thought to myself, “This isn’t what a floor full of laboring humans should sound like.” Labor isn’t muted. It may be quiet at times, but this quiet was not the inward, reflective quiet of natural labor. This felt matrix-like: humans plugged in, with a control center monitoring each person’s vitals from a different room. Physiological needs were met in a non-physiological way. The mother wasn’t allowed to eat, so they gave her glucose through a tube in her vein. The epidural stunted her sensation and connection to her labor and her baby, so they gave her doses of pitocin through her IV to do the work for her. She couldn’t walk to the bathroom with her numb legs, so they put a tube in her urethra so her bladder could empty. I saw a controlled human. I saw nature stripped of its power, and I saw the simplified, short-sighted way other humans tried to fill the role of nature
Nature cannot be manufactured. Humans hold a lot scientific discovery, knowledge, and some wonderful tools to support health in certain circumstances, but we are limited. We are just beginning to understand a fraction of the complexity of symbiotic relationships with other organisms in our own bodies and in the earth we borrow to grow our food. If we can throttle back our urge to control, and let our bodies and our land rewild themselves, we may find better health.