Beyond Organic: Nutrient-Dense Blueberries from Heaven

Bob Wilt of Sunset Valley Organics in Oregon is one such farmer. His blue­ber­ries are known far and wide for their unbe­liev­able fla­vor. People drive for miles to buy them—or even order from all over the country.

Over a period of nine years, Bob has learned the needed pro­ce­dures and has made the con­ver­sion from con­ven­tional farm­ing to the meth­ods that pro­duce such nutrient-dense fruit. The rea­son he made these changes could per­haps act as a har­bin­ger for today’s farm­ers who are still using con­ven­tional meth­ods; it was a mat­ter of change or watch his farm slowly die.

Before the con­ver­sion, Bob was also a con­ven­tional farmer. He’d grown up with such meth­ods (his father had been a farmer too), and it was all he had ever known. So, in the mid-nineties, when Bob took a look at his farm and real­ized he wanted to improve it, he turned to the per­son who sold him his fer­til­izer. The sales­man told him he needed to apply more nitrates, potas­sium and harsh her­bi­cides. Bob fol­lowed the advice.

In 1998, his plants con­tracted a fun­gal dis­ease that ruins whole crops. His all-too-helpful fer­til­izer sales­man put him on a fungi­cide pro­gram. Bob did the pro­gram and the fun­gal dis­eases disappeared.

But by 2001 all of these tox­ins had taken a heavy toll. “I remem­ber this like it was yes­ter­day,” Bob told Organic Connections. “I went out and looked at my berries in April of 2001, and the fruit-bearing limbs from the bushes were maybe 6 inches long, instead of 18 or 20 like they were sup­posed to be. And instead of 10 to 15 buds to the limb, I had 2, at best 3. Doing the math, I real­ized I was going back­wards, and it was obvi­ous what I was doing wasn’t working.”

He did a bit of research and found a soil biol­o­gist right in nearby Corvallis. Over the next six weeks he made three vis­its to her, and she con­sulted him on the care of his soil. It was intense study. “I learned that what I was doing wrong was putting things on that were absolutely poi­son to the soil biol­ogy,” Bob related. “It’s a basic prin­ci­ple that a lot of grow­ers don’t under­stand: you’ve got to have biology—meaning the right bacteria—in the ground because it’s the ‘stom­ach’ for the plant. The bac­te­ria will do the digest­ing. The biol­ogy will trans­form the min­er­als to a form that the plant can then pick up. Without those min­er­als, you’ve got a plant but it’s not healthy. It’s empty. That’s what’s wrong with a lot of pro­duce in our food sys­tem today; it’s got no taste and no nutrition.”

Over the next nine years, Bob made the changes that have resulted in the farm he has today. He quit using fungi­cides, her­bi­cides and chem­i­cal fer­til­izer. He put in fish fer­til­izer. He spent four years devel­op­ing an ideal com­post. He learned how to impart min­er­als to the soil.

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

About five years ago, dur­ing the tran­si­tion, Bob attended a sem­i­nar put on by one of the pio­neers of nutrient-dense farm­ing, Dr. Arden Andersen (see Organic Connections, July–August 2008). Dr. Andersen con­vinced Bob that “if you grow nutrient-dense crops, they will come.” Bob ended up attend­ing a num­ber of Dr. Andersen’s sem­i­nars and had him out to his farm sev­eral times.

Along the way, Bob dis­cov­ered just how right Dr. Andersen was and real­ized how he could turn the nutri­tion he was putting into his plants to a mar­ket­ing advan­tage. “Knowing that blue­ber­ries were going to be over­planted on a gen­eral basis, I real­ized I had to have a plan that would make my berries unique,” Bob said. “Why would some­body want to buy my blue­ber­ries instead of every­body else’s? Well, I knew that I was mak­ing mine far more nutri­tious with vit­a­mins and min­er­als. When you have more nutri­tion, you have more fla­vor too. The con­sumer isn’t nec­es­sar­ily going to care that there are more min­er­als in blueberries—but they’re sure going to notice the flavor.”

They cer­tainly are notic­ing. With the berries Bob grows now, he has learned from expe­ri­ence that if he can get one of his berries into someone’s mouth, 90 per­cent of the time he’ll have a new customer.

The fact that higher nutri­tion equals higher fla­vor is not just hope­ful spec­u­la­tion either. Third-party inde­pen­dent test­ing, the results of which can be found on Sunset Valley Organics’ web­site, shows that nutri­ents in Bob’s berries range as high as 55 per­cent and more above the clos­est com­pe­ti­tion tested. Testing was done on reg­u­lar super­mar­ket fare as well as organic berries from other growers.

For Bob, the jour­ney is far from over. “It’s a story that’s going to go on as long as I can run my farm,” said Bob. “And that’s a good thing. There’s a lot more I’d like to do.”

To find out more about Sunset Valley Organics’ blue­ber­ries, or to place an order, visit their web­site at www.sunsetvalleyorganics.com.