A Charred Life 
The Old Man and the Secret
An eccentric Texas inventor discovered a magic formula he believed could save the earth. Fifteen years after his death, scientists and entrepreneurs are betting he was right.
Joe says: i heard they working a new type deal on the BP oil spill. Not sure if it is synthetic or organic. Anybody know what it is? DoctorPeppe@gmailcom (October 17th, 2010 at 3:30pm)
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Appropriate Technology
Beginning in 1974, Martin had cemented a relationship with yet another disciple—a Dallas-based manufacturer’s representative for electronics products named Robert S. Sinks, Sr. The year before, Bob Sinks had become a regular traveling companion on Martin’s frequent trips into the desert to collect materials. All the while, of course, Martin was subtly doing what he always did: impressing his pupil with the potential of his process and demonstrating how to use nature and natural law as Martin understood it.
“We’ve got a lot to do, and we only have a year to do it,” Martin abruptly told Sinks in the fall of 1974. After that, Sinks said, Martin proceeded with a fervent intensity to teach him many of his processes and methods, preeminently his method for activating microbes. When Sinks asked why the remarkable water worked as it did, Martin snapped, “If you try to understand why, we’ll never get this done.”
In late July 1975 the old man suddenly became quite weak and infirm, and Sinks put him in a Hondo nursing home. Even then Martin’s mind remained clear. On September 23 Sinks rose from his chair in Martin’s room and told the old man he was heading back home to Dallas. “He kind of got a smile on his face and said, ‘You’ll be back,’” Sinks recalled. “Then he said, ‘Remember the work.’”
After hitting the road, acting on instinct, Sinks stopped along the way and called his Dallas office. He was told that his friend Jim Martin had just died.
Today, after fifteen years and some modifications to Martin’s original process (Alpha, Medina, BioPlus, and Spray-N-Grow also say they have made changes), Sinks and his three sons operate a Dallas-based alternative agriculture company named Appropriate Technology Limited, or ATL. The Sinkses have been faithful to Martin’s injunction to take his invention to the world. They have carried his microbe-activating technology via their own agricultural product, called Agrispon, to more than seventy countries.
Since 1977 ATL has commissioned toxicity studies at the University of North Texas in Denton (the most recent of which was reported in March 1989) and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. The tests report that Agrispon isn’t toxic to mice or fish and isn’t carcinogenic.
For a little outfit with about ten employees and about $500,000 in annual sales, ATL has devoted remarkable effort to documenting superior performance of its product versus or in concert with chemical fertilizers. A 1977 test by a researcher at the University of Zagreb, Yugoslavia, for instance, demonstrated a 10 to 20 percent increase in the yield of Jonathan apples treated with Agrispon and a low application of nitrogen fertilizer compared with the yields of trees receiving a high dose of nitrogen fertilizer alone. Tests around the world on green peas, melons, oranges, peanuts, peppers, potatoes, sugar beets, sugar cane, tomatoes, wheat, bananas, rice, and coffee also showed significant increases attributable to Agrispon when it was used with a fertilizer.
According to Bob Sinks and researchers acquainted with Agrispon, the soil additive achieves dramatic results when applied to soils regarded as highly stressed. A 1988 test conducted by the Agricultural Production Department of the Ministry of Defense in Egypt, for instance, showed a nearly 100 percent increase in alfalfa yield using Agrispon.
Such positive results aren’t limited to food crops. ATL cites half a dozen university tests in Texas and eleven government tests in China and Egypt showing that Agrispon-treated fields produced from 13 to 45 percent more cotton than similarly fertilized controls.
The Waste Treaters
Even as ATL, Medina, and other Martin successors seem poised for success in the burgeoning world of organic agriculture, Medina continues to expand its business by selling in the U.S. and abroad, a dozen liquid formulations of Martin’s water. Two named d-part and Actina are used for wastewater and sewage treatment. Similarly, Alpha has begun to use microbes to treat municipal sewage systems and is working with other companies to design new sewage plants. Both Alpha and Medina seemed determined to market an application Jim Martin identified and successfully tested nearly forty years ago.
Like Alpha, Medina is now being seriously examined by those interested in getting rid of hydrocarbon pollution. Mike Piotrowski, senior project scientist for Woodward-Clyde Consultants, a large national environmental consulting and design firm, recently tested a Medina product as part of a study for the U.S. Air Force. Piotrowski said that in just three months the Medina product reduced the concentration of jet fuel contaminants in soil from 1,350 parts per million to 50 parts per million. One other substance worked slightly better than Medina, Piotrowski said, but it was much more expensive.
Piotrowski is monitoring yet another project that tests various products to see how well they reduce contaminants in soil from a decommissioned Air Force base in arctic Alaska. In four weeks, before cold weather stopped biological activity, bacteria unleashed by Medina soil activator devoured 50 percent of the weathered diesel fuel in a sample of dirt, reducing the concentration of that pollutant from 10,000 to 5,000 parts per million.
“I’ve read the literature over the last fifteen years and it’s been verified time and again that bacteria eats all kinds of hazardous organics—compounds like TNT, formaldehyde, PCBs, DDT, dioxin, and benzene,” Piotrowski told me. “In fact, we’re finding out that almost every organic compound on the EPA’s priority pollutant list is eaten by bacteria.”
As a microbial ecologist, Piotrowski—whose Ph.D. is from Boston University in a field called biogeochemistry—is untroubled that he doesn’t know exactly why Medina works or precisely which microbes it activates. As Professor Nightingale believes about Spray-N-Grow, Piotrowski assumes that Medina supplies tiny bits of things microbes need to eat—he calls them micronutrients. The fact that his tests confirm the Medina product energizes a community of microbes equal to the task is good enough for him.
The point, he believes, is to find something that adjusts conditions in the soil so that all natural bacteria can work together. “Natural bugs can do the job,” Piotrowski said, “if you give ’em a chance.” Because of their comparatively low price, he said Medina products may be “the best way to go” in sparking microbial activity for many pollution cleanups.
The Bandwagon
And what about that puzzling company called Natural Oxygen Products in El Paso? Though NOP disavows any connection to Martin, it has a process similar to Martin’s for making its water, right down to the cow manure and the yeast and the blue-green bacteria. Its 68-year-old proprietor, Al Gough, who patented his process in December 1974, told me he had never heard of Jim Martin. Nevertheless, Gough’s water seems to work much like the others. Moreover, NOP cites as related patents one that directly credits Martin’s original discovery and another that cites it indirectly as a related invention.
Howard G. Applegate, a retired professor of environmental engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso, has been working with Gough on a modest, Meadows Foundation-funded pilot project to use Gough’s product called AG-14 to treat wastewater in home sewage lagoons of El Paso County’s unincorporated, disease-ridden colonias, one of Texas’ longest-running national scandals. The crowded colonias—where residential cesspools pollute home water wells and rates of infection rival those in the Third World—certainly need the help. The yearlong study is already halfway finished and so far looks like a success, Applegate says.
Like those scientists studying Alpha’s biocatalyst, Medina, and Agrispon, Applegate (who holds a Ph.D. in chemistry) can’t say exactly why AG-14 works. But he has tried the substance on a variety of pollutants in the laboratory, and he knows in part how it works. Applegate said that in respirometer tests AG-14 added to sewage produces “oxygen in enormous amounts very quickly.” That’s how water treatment plants work too—but they have to use lots of expensive electricity to aerate sewage.
Yet another company in the Martin tradition is BioPlus of Hawkins. J. L. (Bob) Wellmaker incorporated BioPlus in 1981 to produce a “soil-builder” called HV 682, which seems a lot like Medina, Agrispon, Spray-N-Grow, and Alpha’s biocatalyst. “All these products work,” the former Agrispon distributor told me. “The real secret is how you market and sell them.”
The other secret was how to survive attacks by the chemical manufacturers. “Over the years, the fertilizer boys have been hammering on us pretty hard,” Wellmaker said. Now he thinks that’s nearly over. “I’m negotiating with several multi-million dollar chemical companies to [produce a] private label [product] for them,” he said. The companies have taken samples of his products and have told him they have “eighteen different universities testing them.”
Coming Full Circle
My yearlong investigation of Jim Martin and his amazing discovery had started with a tip about a little company in Austin that claimed to have bugs capable of eating the Alaskan oil spill. Three weeks after the Exxon Valdez disgorged eleven million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in 1989, Alpha made its pitch to an emergency meeting of microbiologists and other scientists, which the EPA had assembled to consider how to clean up the spill. Alpha’s chief scientist, Carl Oppenheimer, told his peers that his company was prepared to unleash up to fifty tons of oil-eating microbes on the mess. Never before had anyone claimed to be able to deliver so many bugs so fast.
The microbiologists listened politely and thrashed over his proposal for half an hour. The decisive argument killing the idea was that importing “foreign” bugs to Alaskan waters was unwise—a consensus which ignored the fact that the Japanese current carries billions of “foreign” microbes daily to those same waters.
But there was yet another reason Oppenheimer’s proposal was rejected. He had said little about the biocatalyst Alpha used. That substance allowed Alpha to pack a thousand times more bugs into a pound of powder than any other company ever had. He wouldn’t say much more about it for the same reason that no one at Alpha would tell me the name of the old man who made the mysterious substance: Alpha regarded Martin’s discovery as its trade secret. For that reason, and because Oppenheimer couldn’t explain why it worked, he faced an uphill battle persuading skeptical fellow scientists to accept Alpha’s offer. More than fourteen months later, the EPA still hasn’t decided whether to use Alpha’s microbes in Alaska.
Science demands an open environment where information is shared freely, allowing successful experiments to be repeated by others. But those businesses marketing Jim Martin’s technology, including Alpha, consider secrecy essential to keeping their competitive advantage. This may be one reason why the world has not learned about Jim Martin’s discovery.
Maybe now Martin’s breakthrough will be looked at seriously. Maybe rising demand for its myriad uses will make the substance cheap enough for everyone. Envision Jim Martin’s catalyst-dispersion units, devices that look like hot-water heaters, dotting every city and farm from the developed nations to the Third World. They are all busily ginning out the water of life to clean up sewage, grow crops, and help restore the lost balance of nature. Who knows? Maybe the creation of that obscure Texas inventor, a man who labored tirelessly not for money but for humanity, will really make a difference.
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