If he’d had another, perhaps lesser mission, it might have been the search for the Lost Ark or the Crystal Skull. But instead, Dr. Christopher Daugherty has scoured South American jungles, befriending and aiding indigenous peoples, searching out lost farming techniques and rare nutrient-dense foods that we back here in the “real world” have never imagined.
This true story begins with a chance encounter (although Dr. Daugherty would call it anything but “chance”) between a middle-aged gentleman farmer and a fiveyear- old boy on a country bridge. The man introduced himself as “a friend,” and told the boy of the secret lives of plants and soils—that they actually had emotions and feelings. He related stories of the lost crops of the Incas, Aztecs, Mayans and other ancient peoples, and about cultures surrounded by flavors and colors that died along with the people who had farmed the land. He told of the life force of the earth and the power of plants to heal our wounds and give us vibrant long lives.
The man’s name was Gordon Biggar, and his family were agriculturists who were also the last major homesteaders in Florida. Biggar himself had a degree in agronomy— the science of soil management and the production of field crops.
The boy was Christopher Daugherty, and this meeting set his feet firmly onto the path that was to become his life.
As Daugherty grew up, studying agriculture for over 13 years and attaining an ND (naturopathic physician) degree, Biggar was his mentor. And then came another turning point: while Daugherty was running a farm for a wealthy man in Ohio, Biggar asked him if he’d like to “do something” with organic pecans and organic olives.
“I told him that I had no idea what he was talking about, but I’d look into it,” Dr. Daugherty related to Organic Connections. “And I started getting into the business of import/export. Two years into that business, I traveled down to Peru and then to Ecuador and Colombia. I visited with different growers and saw a massive example of sustainability, far beyond mere ‘survival sustainability.’ I mean it was true ‘thrivability,’ what they created. From there, I started to create various products.”
These products are now available from Dr. Daugherty’s company Essential Living Foods. Included in his exotic offerings are camu-camu powder (a potent antioxidant with 30–60 times more vitamin C than oranges), goldenberries (like chewy citrus raisins, bursting with nutrients), purple corn kernels (which can be soaked to make a refreshing, nutritive powerhouse drink) and raw chocolate.
Symbiotic Relationships
But Dr. Daugherty wasn’t simply an enterprising capitalist looking to exact a fortune from the fruits of indigenous peoples. His mission then—as it is now—was to also create symbiotic relationships, so that while he was reaping his crops he was also bettering the survival of these peoples and their environs.
“From a cultural standpoint, we’re strengthening cultural pride,” explained Dr. Daugherty. “Socially, we are empowering the voices of women and children. Financially, we are enabling the community to be more selfsustaining, which is most important.
“We are also including them—involving a broad range of community members in planning and implementation. We ask ourselves, is this planning emerging from the needs of the community, and is indigenous wisdom being incorporated into the planning? And then there is the sustainability of the project. Does it truly represent the ecological principle that the earth is taken into account as an equal partner?”
Stabilizing these cultures can be a bit of an uphill battle, given temptations offered by major corporations looking to procure resources cheaply. An example was the situation he encountered in the Atacama Desert region of Peru. “Most of the people only have jobs working in mines, which are extremely dangerous,” Dr. Daugherty said. “The corporations very commonly have strikes and issues with paying people. They provide no insurance. We give the people a much healthier opportunity. One of our farms employs 160 to 200 people for several months just cracking and collecting pecans. We give them consistent jobs and organic foods and we provide them the opportunity every year, so they know they can come back to us. Most of them get challenged and want to leave and want to check out one of these mining opportunities, but they come back to us because of the quality of what we’ve created at each one of our locations.”
Dr. Daugherty’s synergistic enterprises are also having a very positive effect on the rain forest. “Living in the rain forest is like living in a constant storm—nothing is ever the same for more than a couple of days there,” he said. “So we’ve created collaborative efforts in which, in Pucallpa and up into Iquitos, Peru, for example, people can be gathering camu-camu berries for us instead of going out and chopping down trees, which they don’t want to necessarily do anyway. We pay premium rates, which equates to their having jobs instead of cutting lumber. They inherently know that chopping down the rain forest is wrong and is very disheartening to their communities. “There is another situation in a different area of the Peruvian rain forest where we work directly with the Indians for producing our jungle peanuts. ARCO has been influencing a lot of these tribes and basically stealing land from them to drill their property for oil. The fundamental problem is that these indigenous people are not able to acquire funds in any way, shape or form, and their government is basically saying, ‘Hey, you guys need money and this is how we’re creating funds for you, regardless of whether you like the outcome of it or not.’ What we’ve done is establish a collaborative effort for collecting jungle peanuts. It creates a consistent revenue stream for them—unlike many of these flyby- night enterprises down there that will give them an immediate surplus of cash but which totally rob them of a future.”
What has the experience co-producing with indigenous peoples given Dr. Daugherty? “It’s been very heartening to see the relationships that have been built on trust with a lot of these extremely intelligent indigenous peoples. It has created a form of understanding and new ways of language. The spoken word is only 2 to 3 percent of how we actually communicate. It has also empowered in me that mentoring aspect, motivating me to really want to get these types of principles into the communities where I live, bringing back that inherent enriching factor about localized food systems and helping people to feed themselves, and to actually start people thinking about what’s in the different types of foods that they’re eating, and creating more of a society of thinking people.”
Products from the Jungle
For consumers, Dr. Daugherty’s efforts have produced products that have never been seen outside these jungle communities. One example is raw chocolate. “Raw chocolate has more vitamin C than oranges, more antioxidants than pomegranates, more magnesium than almost anything on the planet, and one of the highest counts of iron,” Dr. Daugherty said. “These are four elements that are necessary for the body that people are not getting enough of in today’s society.”
Given these incredible nutritional properties, it’s surprising that raw chocolate has never before been broadly produced and sold. Dr. Daugherty explained why. “All chocolate that was sold until the date that we started working on this project six years ago is cooked and processed chocolate. They ferment the product to create all the different acids to bring out the various flavors and aromatic qualities, mainly for processing milk chocolate.
“When you actually look at a cacao bean in its raw form, it’s purple. If you eat one or two of the chocolate beans you can feel a euphoric brain rush. It activates your brain; it activates your coherency and your clarity. We started doing some research on it and we found out that cacao has over two thousand different subtle nutrients and antioxidants that have never been listed as ingredients for any chocolate bar. When you cook chocolate down, all you’re left with is caffeine, and then they’re adding sugar to it. We all know what caffeine and sugar do.”
Researching further, Dr. Daugherty and his associates found the reason that no industry has ever worked with raw cacao: it has a very high count of microbes and is, in fact, classified as TNTC (microbial content “too numerous to count”). Through a proprietary process, they have been able to create a cacao that lowers the microbe count to be well within safety regulations while conveying its inherent nutritional content.
Sustainability
Sustainability is a word bandied about greatly today in relationship to environmentally friendly products and services. But through his work, Dr. Daugherty has dug down deep to the very heart of the word and its concept and has emerged with a full working understanding.
“From a sustainability standpoint, from the ecological, social and economic standpoints, there’s an undeniable need to know how foods are being processed and if they are being grown sustainably,” Dr. Daugherty explained. “This means that there are mineral-rich soils, that there’s a high nutrient content at the time of harvesting the food, that there’s been an empowerment of the society from which the product is derived, and that long term there’s a soil-food web around the people who are providing these foods.”
It all starts right down in a mineral-rich soil. Crops won’t have that high nutritional content at harvest if nutrients don’t make it into the plants in the first place. But therein lies the first problem that must be overcome. “I haven’t found one soil in the world that’s not lacking in nutrients right now,” said Dr. Daugherty. “There are some soils that are completely mineral devoid. They have no minerals at all, meaning that there’s no life in the soil-food web anymore. Even in most of the areas that we’re working—even if we’re working in very alluvial soils*—we still have to constantly add nutrients.”
Dr. Daugherty and his team have found very workable ways to restore soil vitality. “There are a lot of desalinization plants in South America, and we’re constantly pushing people to get the minerals coming from these desalinization plants and then to mix them one part per hundred with all their different soil nutrients,” he said. “We are utilizing certified organic chicken manure and feather meal as well.”
Sustainability also has much to do with the size of a farming operation—and Dr. Daugherty has found that smaller farms produce the best products. “There’s a closed-loop perspective on a smaller farm,” he said. “It’s much simpler to manage as opposed to the large corporate farms, which very easily get out of hand. It’s easier to work with individuals, because then you can create a relative structure with diagrams to illustrate the effective things that each farmer is doing differently and how to potentially combine them so that the farmers are growing and evolving with one another. These small farms also have a smaller amount of product to grow and process, so they’re not constantly struggling with the concept of planting more trees, harvesting more crop, hiring more people and expanding, expanding, expanding. They’re really focused on internalizing their structures, making sure that they have the best processing and that they’ve got committed people who come back to their farms for years on end. It makes for a stronger harmonic or vibration in the food.”
In addition to assisting farms to grow crops for Essential Living Foods products, Dr. Daugherty has now founded another company, Dynamic Growing Systems, an organization that provides the nutrient-rich, ecologically sound localized food-growing systems to local communities and businesses worldwide. “DGS dramatically reduces the dependency on fossil fuels through its localized, ecologically sustainable systems, growing the most nutrient-rich foods for optimal health and the highest yields,” he said. “The model of DGS is centered around optimized health and well-being and creating nutrient-rich foods—foods which are also medicines. Having a strong environmental stewardship mechanism, I intend to be where we’re incorporating alternative energy with zero waste pollution, regenerating the land, being very biodiverse, and creating our own heirloom seed banks. We are also focused on the economic vitality and the local living economies.”
Dr. Daugherty leaves us now, to continue on his many quests, with these words: “With a little knowledge and care, our planet truly can become the Garden of Eden. I know it’s possible because I’ve done it again and again all over the world, in small farming communities in Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Thailand, Costa Rica and many other places. I’ve also witnessed what happens in the lives and communities of the people who learn to live with the earth in this way. An abundant, healthy planet creates peaceful, healthy people, joyful families and communities who only want to give to each other and share in the bounty of life.”
To learn more about Dr. Daugherty’s work and products, visit Dr. Daugherty’s website: www.drdaymaker.com,
Essential Living Foods: www.essentiallivingfoods.com, Dynamic Growing Systems: www.dynamicgrowingsystems.com
*alluvial: of, found in, or made up of alluvium (sand, clay, silt, etc., gradually deposited by moving water, as along a riverbed or the shore of a lake); relating to the deposits made by flowing water; washed away from one place and deposited in another; as, alluvial soil, mud, accumulations, deposits.
