Organic Gardener's Composting by Steve Solomon

The lists in this table of carbon/nitrogen ratios are broken out as general ranges of C/N. It has long been an unintelligent practice of garden-level books to state "precise" C/N ratios for materials. One substance will be "23:1" while another will be "25:1." Such pseudoscience is not only inaccurate but it leads readers into similar misunderstandings about other such lists, like nitrogen contents, or composition breakdowns of organic manures, or other organic soil amendments. Especially misleading are those tables in the back of many health and nutrition books spelling out the "exact" nutrient contents of foods. There is an old saying about this: 'There are lies, then there are damned lies, and then, there are statistics. The worse lies of all can be statistics.'

The composition of plant materials is very dependent on the level and nature of the soil fertility that produced them. The nutrition present in two plants of the same species, even in two samples of the exact same variety of vegetable raised from the same packet of seed can vary enormously depending on where the plants were grown. William Albrecht, chairman of the Soil Department at the University of Missouri during the 1930s, was, to the best of my knowledge, the first mainstream scientist to thoroughly explore the differences in the nutritional qualities of plants and to identify specific aspects of soil fertility as the reason why one plant can be much more nutritious than another and why animals can be so much healthier on one farm compared to another. By implication, Albrecht also meant to show the reason why one nation of people can be much less healthy than another. Because his holistic outlook ran counter to powerful vested interests of his era, Albrecht was professionally scorned and ultimately left the university community, spending the rest of his life educating the general public, especially farmers and health care professionals.