Secrets of a Magnetic Farmer
July 2002, Acres U.S.A
by Alanna Moore

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   Kevin Heitman is a maverick farmer in the Moruwa district, northwest of Perth, Western Australia. The region is fairly hostile to farming — hot and dry, and the soils prone to salinity. Yet Heitman is well known for his cropping successes as well as his amazing dowsing abilities. In 1998 he won the top crop award in the state — for the best crop on the lowest rainfall — a result which has mystified many, but now engages scientific investigation.
   The farm is run as a clover-leaf system, generally running sheep for 2 years on rye grass and growing wheat the next year, with a stocking rate of one and a half sheep to the acre. It has had up to 11,000 sheep, but was de-stocked to a mere 1,200 when prices were low. Back in the ’60s there was a four-year rotational cycle, in the good years of the ’80s this went down to a two-year cycle. In the ’90s wool prices were down, so cropping was increased. Now better wool prices have brought an increase in stock numbers to 4,500, with a one-year-on/one-year-off rotation in the good paddocks. Hay is cut and taken over to the weaker paddocks. “I’ve been mining the soil for the last six years” Heitman lamented. Planting time is selected at a time close to the new moon and when soil moisture levels are adequate. In Moruwa this starts around the first of May.
   Heitman has been experimenting with ways of improving his wheat crop for some 30 years. “I started by magnetizing the grain to see if it would grow faster. It certainly did!”
   “In South Australia, the agriculture department has done successful trials on magnetizing seeds and watering crops with magnetized water. So it is accepted there, but the Western Australian farming community is generally more skeptical” he told me.
   Heitman showed me how he clamps magnets around the outlet of his air seeder, so that seed is passed through the magnetic field before it hits the soil (see photo). He also magnetizes water used on the crops, as well. I got to see Heitman’s new liquid fertilizer sprayer tank (for liquid cow manure, seaweed, etc.) that he has developed, with a generous-size nozzle and magnets around the outlet.
   Heitman has also worked on improving the farm’s soil fertility by selecting soil from areas with exceptional growth. “I fermented this soil with fish-meal and flour and then sprayed the mixture over the rest of the farm. This has resulted in a massive increase in yield and quality,” he enthused. Heitman uses three 5,000 gallon tanks full of water for his brewing, to which he adds the fish-meal and flour plus the good soil (with rocks and coarse bits screened out). This is aerated with a compressor, with a hose swirling around inside the tanks. After three weeks, the brew smells like mushrooms and is misted out over the paddocks before rain.
   With Western Australia in its fifth year of drought, common sense guided him to halve his cropping area in 2001— from 12,000 acres down to 6,000 — while some neighbors have doubled theirs to try to compensate for losses incurred over the last few years (some borrowing as much as $600,000 to plant crops). His gut feelings told him it would be another dry year — which it was — and it always guides his cropping decisions, as well as what he learns from internet weather reports. He predicts another two dry years and then seven good years — after which he intends to retire!
   Heitman’s wife, Betty, is also good on following hunches and took a gamble in 2001 with a new “wonder” crop — seradella, a legume from low-rainfall regions. The harvest was full-on when I visited, and she was ecstatic to report a very good result. After harvest, Heitman told me that both the wheat and serradella had done very well despite the very low rainfall — only 6.5 inches all year.
   In 1998 Heitman’s successful farming efforts were acknowledged when he won Western Australia’s Top Crop Award for the biggest yield and the best grain on the lowest rainfall. “But no-one around here asked me how I did it!” Despite consistently getting a 3 to 4 percent higher yield than neighbouring farms, he finds it hard to convince other farmers who are reluctant to try some of the secrets he is happy to share. “They don’t want to change,” Heitman concludes.
   Fortunately, a few scientists have shown an interest in Heitman’s work, and he is in contact with four agronomists. Dr. Margaret Roper of the CSIRO in Perth has been researching the soil bacteria that Heitman has been using, discovering some 300 varieties. The spraying of these beneficial microbes onto the soil has seen wheat yields at Heitman’s up by some 50 percent on the average in some cases. Now farmer groups around the country are trialling the best microbes that Roper has been breeding up over the last two years. Not only are resulting crops heavier, but plants are healthier and greener, too.

                             DESIGNING INNOVATIONS
   Neighbors did start to take notice when Heitman recently built a $500,000 shed. This is one huge shed, and what he is doing inside it is even more intriguing. Heitman tinkers in his spare time devising new innovations for his existing farm machinery and playing around with a few new invention ideas. He is working on a device to harness the power of lightning strikes, based on the Tesla coil, and a perpetual motion machine.
   He is also having a go at building a seed-cleaner for the serradella, to remove the herbicide-resistant rye-grass seed. Having been quoted $12,000 to clean 80 tons of seed, he decided to take up the challenge himself. When it is achieved, he will be planting some 2,500 acres of serradella this year and may be able to do some lot feeding of sheep with the seed seconds from the cleaning operation, as well.

                                  PSYCHIC ABILITIES
   As a young boy, Heitman grew up with the ability to see people’s etheric bodies. He would note where the etheric colors were distorted around injury zones and knew that his dying mother had passed away when her aura disappeared.
   Nowadays he has gained a reputation as a hands-on healer, and people queue up at the pub when he arrives to receive treatments. Heitman rubs his hands together to set up an enhanced energy field, then channels energy through them to relieve various ailments, aches and pains. He claims there is nothing special about this ability and often shows people how to do it for themselves.
   When Heitman was 12 his father had instructed him in water divining, a skill which had been passed down through generations. To Heitman it was as easy as learning to ride a bicycle, and his natural sensitivity developed further. Then he started to see the underground streams rather than relying on his divining rods.
Nowadays, Heitman water divines from his motor glider. “I can see the electro-magnetic field created by the underground streams from 10,000 feet — it’s quick, and it’s fun!” he says.
   He has trained many people in dowsing techniques at the local agricultural expos, such as the Dowerin Field Days.
Recently he flew at 8,000 feet to follow a 35-yard-wide underground stream for 20 miles to find the best spot to sink a fresh water bore — amidst salt lakes. A driller friend put down a test hole to the depth that Heitman had divined, and the water they found there was very fresh.

                          DISCOVERING GEOPATHIC STRESS
   When his grandmother died from cancer in 1958, Heitman observed that she had been sleeping over an underground stream. Later, an uncle and neighbors who died from cancer were found to have also been over underground streams.
   “This led me to investigate as many cases of cancer as I could,” he explained. “I went to the home of a child who had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. The child was sleeping over a crossover field — this is where two underground streams cross. When the boy went to Hayman Island on holiday, the tumour disappeared. A second boy with a brain tumour was also sleeping over a crossover field. When he went away to school, the tumour stopped growing — but when he came home during the holidays, the tumour grew.”
   The realization that moving away from an electromagnetic field can cure cancer spurred him on to water divine over 450 homes over the last 20 years. He says that in 100 percent of the cancer cases that he has checked the people were sleeping over underground streams (geopathic stress zones).
   Heitman also made observations about the effect of geopathic stress on emu chicks when he was farming these birds. One of his five emu chick pens was affected by geopathic stress, and those chicks did not grow. Twelve of them died, and a necropsy revealed they were deficient in vitamin B12. The others were healthy and grew normally, and when the stunted chicks were moved to other pens, they had no further problems.
   Children are particularly affected by geopathic stress, Heitman found, and often will not grow well and have difficulties at school. People who are affected in the work place don’t work very well and are often unwell and having strange aches and pains. “Just by moving their desk and office chair by half a meter, their well-being can change dramatically, and also their work output,” Heitman explained, pointing out to me that “gypsies never get cancer.”
   Heitman now has a theory that organisms exposed to geopathic stress react as if the body is in an out-of-control growth spurt, causing the hormones to direct a mineral shutdown. If this continues for more than three years, the body becomes mineral deficient, and they will eventually sicken and die, he believes.
   Heitman often has prophetic visions and makes all kinds of predictions. He predicted the destructive events of September 11, but with not enough specifics to be able to warn anyone. Recently he made a very specific prediction for a man at a pub who wanted to check out his abilities: “I reckon you are going to be picked up for drunk driving in about 9 minutes,” he told the man as they were both about to leave. Nine minutes later, after the man had driven just 30 yards down the road, Heitman’s prediction came to pass.
                              
                                            LANDCARE
   The Heitman property is something of an oasis, as Heitman loves trees and has been planting them around the farm for some 30 years, with tens of thousands planted in wildlife corridors and a fenced off swampland naturally regenerating. A drastically rising salty water table was killing off most of the trees in this swamp until he took the bold decision to put in a 15-kilometer drain to take the salt water into the creek system, which drains to the sea. (This was done without the blessing of the local council.)
   With the water table reduced, the trees have come back to life and are thriving — a beautiful sight. Across the drain on the neighbor’s property the swamp was not so lush, with far less regeneration. “What’s the difference?” I asked Heitman. “Mind power!” was the answer.
   The Salmon gum trees Heitman had planted years ago were gorgeous, with their pink trunks. “Salmon gums like to grow over underground water streams, as well as River Red Gums, and this helps to keep the salty water table down, while they don’t mind the geopathic stress,” Heitman noted. He has observed that in these drought times many trees growing over underground streams are dying.
   Heitman recently won an award for an ingenious tree nursery design he has developed, with an easy watering system. Last year, he tells me, they planted some 15,000 trees on the 50,000 acre property, but with the low rainfall only a couple survived. He is undeterred, however, and enthusiastic about the success of the direct seeding of local wattle seed (pre-treated with boiling water) into rip lines. The resulting seedlings are thriving. Tough plants, these wattles will fix nitrogen and improve soil life. His next project is to have a go at revegetating a 300-acre salt lake in the region.
   It was a great pleasure to meet Heitman and his family, who were very busy with the harvest when I visited, yet gave freely of their time to show me so much. I can only hope that the wonderful example they are setting is encouragement for others to take notice and follow suit.

   Alanna Moore is an environmental journalist and author living in central Victoria, Australia. She is the author of Backyard Poultry Naturally and Stone Age Farming, both available from the Acres U.S.A. bookstore. She has a website at <www.geomantica.com> and can be contacted via e-mail at <info@geomantica.com>.