Dan Kittredge: Farming for Nutrient Quality

When Dan was four, his par­ents pur­chased an organic farm in Barre, Massachusetts. He grew up on that land and in his adult years man­aged it. But after he got mar­ried at age twenty-six, he saw that some­thing had to change. “I real­ized that I needed to be able to make a liv­ing, not just sub­sist,” Dan told Organic Connections. “I wasn’t mak­ing very much, and I didn’t know how to cre­ate a higher income. The only thing I knew how to do was farm, so I fig­ured I should actu­ally learn how to do it instead of just
going through the motions that I’d been brought up with.”

Dan set about read­ing books, attend­ing sem­i­nars, and ask­ing ques­tions of those more knowl­edge­able. He was try­ing to get to the bot­tom of how a bio­log­i­cal sys­tem worked, and as he researched he began apply­ing what he was learn­ing to the land.

“When I first started doing this, I was strug­gling with the fact that I was an organic farmer yet reg­u­larly expe­ri­enced high lev­els of pesti­lence and dis­ease in the crops that I grew,” he related. “It seemed to me there was some­thing wrong with that pic­ture. So I began ini­tially by read­ing and by talk­ing to peo­ple, then started apply­ing var­i­ous locally occur­ring basalt and gran­ite mate­ri­als to the soil. I next moved on to vol­canic mate­ri­als; then I deeply engaged in spe­cific min­er­als, soil test­ing, and a whole array of man­age­ment, mon­i­tor­ing and fer­til­ity practices.”

Quality, Not Volume

“As part of the process it became clear to me that the objec­tive of agri­cul­ture should be qual­ity and not vol­ume,” Dan con­tin­ued. “No one was really talk­ing about qual­ity and focus­ing on that as the objec­tive. To obtain this qual­ity, I found that there are basic prin­ci­ples involved in how bio­log­i­cal sys­tems operate—soil and plant inter­ac­tion being the key one in this case.”

It wasn’t long before Dan real­ized that, as a farmer, he had struck pay dirt. “When I really began putting these fac­tors into prac­tice, I found that it was remark­ably easy to make a liv­ing through farm­ing. Pests and dis­eases do not have to be present in your fields. Yields can be much larger than you’ve ever expe­ri­enced. Flavor can be aug­mented dra­mat­i­cally through fer­til­ity and man­age­ment practices.”

As to that fla­vor, Dan cer­tainly isn’t alone in the obser­va­tion that high-nutrient crops yield the best taste. Some of the world’s top chefs—such as Alice Waters, Rick Bayless, Dan Barber and Suzanne Goin, to name but a few—firmly agree, and will only cook with ingre­di­ents that pos­sess this exact quality.

“We’re talk­ing about a liv­ing sys­tem,” Dan added. “The real essence of what we’re try­ing to do is remove the lim­it­ing fac­tors in that liv­ing sys­tem. If we assume that the genetic poten­tial of our crops is far beyond what we experience—which is what the geneti­cists will tell us—then the sim­ple objec­tive is to remove the stresses to our plants that are keep­ing them from ful­fill­ing their full poten­tial. If we’re view­ing it from that lens, we need to talk about min­er­al­ogy, biol­ogy, hydrol­ogy, irri­ga­tion, tillage and struc­ture. There are a num­ber of com­po­nents to this liv­ing soil sys­tem. What we’re try­ing to do is lay out what the nor­mal stum­bling blocks and lim­it­ing fac­tors are, help peo­ple under­stand them, and give peo­ple the tools to address them.”

Getting the Word Out

While con­duct­ing his research, Dan con­nected up with like-minded indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions with sim­i­lar paths. One notable exam­ple was Remineralize the Earth (RTE)—a non­profit orga­ni­za­tion assist­ing the world­wide move­ment of rem­iner­al­iz­ing soils with finely ground rock dust, sea min­er­als, and other nat­ural and sus­tain­able means to increase plant growth, health and nutri­ent value. He became a board mem­ber of RTE and its president.

While work­ing with RTE, Dan founded the Real Food Campaign—since renamed the Bionutrient Food Association—a non­profit research, edu­ca­tion and advo­cacy orga­ni­za­tion whose objec­tive is to apply bionu­tri­ent farm tech­niques to improve qual­ity in the food supply.

The needed change of view­point in pro­duce qual­ity is expressed in the name of Dan’s orga­ni­za­tion. “We’re coin­ing a new term—bionu­tri­ent—that doesn’t exist any­where,” Dan explained. “We’re going to use a term that describes that goodness—the nutri­ents that are bio­log­i­cally viable and valu­able. Our focus is a shift from only con­cen­trat­ing on var­i­ous stan­dards and processes to a qual­ity metric—the bionu­tri­ent level.”

The Bionutrient Food Association was, how­ever, with­out fund­ing. Thanks to the inter­ven­tion of RTE board mem­ber Ken Whitman, pres­i­dent of the envi­ron­men­tally con­scious sup­ple­ment com­pany Natural Vitality, that was to change. “For about a year after start­ing the Real Food Campaign, I had not done much,” Dan said. “I had given a cou­ple of courses to grow­ers, but had to work a full-time job at the same time as try­ing to get the orga­ni­za­tion going. At an RTE board meet­ing we dis­cussed what we wanted and what it was we were able to do, and I said basi­cally that if I could work at this full-time we could really kick the cam­paign into gear.”

Whitman clearly per­ceived the impor­tance of Dan’s work and, through his company’s Natural Revitalization envi­ron­men­tal action ini­tia­tive, he and co-owner Justin Farmer pro­vided the nec­es­sary fund­ing. “As a coun­try, we eat too much and get too lit­tle from it,” Whitman said. “Nutrition is, after all, the pur­pose of eat­ing. I have tasted high-nutrient pro­duce grown by bou­tique farm­ers in the field and pre­pared by top chefs in their restau­rants. The truth is in the tast­ing, and I’m a believer. Supporting Dan and the BFA is an oppor­tu­nity to be part of chang­ing the way we farm, the way we eat, and, most impor­tantly, open­ing the door to improved health sim­ply from enjoy­ing this good food.”

With that sup­port, and the bless­ings of RTE, Dan was able to hire employ­ees and gar­ner a num­ber of enthu­si­as­tic reg­u­lar vol­un­teers as well. He went out full time, giv­ing talks and trav­el­ing around his native New England, teach­ing grow­ers through hands-on work­shops and classes how they could achieve these incred­i­ble results with their crops. Just a few short years later, some 700 farm­ers, land­scap­ers, home gar­den­ers and other grow­ers have come through Dan’s training—with out­stand­ing results.

“We give 30- to 40-hour year-long sem­i­nars for grow­ers, start­ing in the fall and going through the entire grow­ing sea­son,” said Dan. “We’ve seen some really major suc­cesses. One farmer’s pro­duce became so pop­u­lar that nobody would line up at any other farm stand at a farm­ers’ mar­ket because his tasted so much bet­ter. On another farm, four years ago they were gross­ing about 60,000 pounds of pro­duce, and this year I think it’s some­where in the ball­park of 150,000—without expand­ing their pro­duc­tion space. Elsewhere, we’ve seen decreases in har­vest times and 40 per­cent to 100 per­cent increases in yield. Pests don’t attack anymore.”

Farmer Jones

These are remark­able claims—but the farm­ers back them up. Farmer Phil Jones of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, raises veg­eta­bles, has about 180 CSA cus­tomers and also sells through farm­ers’ mar­kets. He has had amaz­ing suc­cess with meth­ods he learned from Dan. “The beauty of it is that what you’re doing is really inter­pret­ing what Mother Nature and God are telling you,” Jones said. “I think the won­der­ful part of the course is that you learn to really read the plants and the whole thing becomes part of you. To be able to see four flow­ers in my tomato clus­ter, to watch as I input more nutri­tion and more bal­ance, and then all of a sud­den see six, eight and ten on a cluster—I can read that and watch the leaves change and see so many things that the plants are telling me.”

Click any image above to see a larger version.

Jones also noticed the dis­tinct dif­fer­ence in fla­vor. “It’s much smoother on the palate,” he said. “To me, that’s the most phe­nom­e­nal thing—when you think that you’re going to be get­ting some­thing that will be a lit­tle bit­ter at the end of it and then that doesn’t come. The smooth­ness of the veg­etable and the sweet­ness of it is what changes.”

Jones has been wit­ness to the truth of Dan’s words regard­ing pests and their reac­tion to truly healthy crops. “It’s fun to see the insects go away,” he told OC. “You might have them for a week or two until the plants pho­to­syn­the­size the com­plex car­bo­hy­drates, but then they kind of dis­ap­pear. You change the fre­quency of the plant, or you make it so that they don’t want it.

“We expe­ri­enced a great learn­ing ses­sion about two years ago when there was a drought. We had a field of pota­toes, and potato bee­tles had been in the grasses, not on the pota­toes.” With the nutri­ent lev­els as high as they were, the bee­tles were leav­ing the pota­toes alone. But then con­di­tions changed. “We got into a drought sit­u­a­tion and ran out of water,” Jones con­tin­ued. “The nutri­ent lev­els dropped, and the bee­tles just moved right in. All of a sud­den the com­plex­ity of the plant altered; it became sim­ple sug­ars again and there they were. But it was inter­est­ing to see that whole thing hap­pen where they left, then they came back when it was good food for them.”

Farmer Hess

Farmer Don Hess raises veg­eta­bles and blue­ber­ries in Oakdale, Connecticut. In apply­ing the meth­ods he learned in Dan’s train­ing, his results have also been excep­tional. “The qual­ity of the crops def­i­nitely improved; there’s no doubt about that,” Hess said. “The plant vigor, pro­duc­tiv­ity and taste all changed. It was really excel­lent. The first year I applied the meth­ods it was also a fan­tas­tic grow­ing year here in south­east­ern Connecticut; so those two things com­bined just pushed the pro­duc­tiv­ity of the farm. It had to have at least dou­bled, if not a lit­tle more.

“The best crop I had this year was gar­lic, and a lot of peo­ple at the mar­ket said we had the best gar­lic going. People are also pretty much amazed at the fact that they can keep our let­tuce for two to three weeks, and can keep arugula for three or four weeks.”

Only the Beginning

But the train­ing is only the base. Dan has seen the future—and the future is bright, tasty and very healthy.

The ini­tial part of his plan, which is well under­way, is to get a high num­ber of grow­ers using bionu­tri­ent farm­ing meth­ods and record the prac­tices in a way that they can be broadly dis­sem­i­nated. “The first step that we’ve been focus­ing on the last cou­ple of years is cod­i­fy­ing the how-to prin­ci­ples for the gen­eral pub­lic,” Dan said. “This would exist in some­thing like a hand­book. While a larger-scale farmer might be able to hire a con­sul­tant to help with these issues, the aver­age small organic farmer does not have access to the foun­da­tional prin­ci­ples about how to max­i­mize vital­ity. It’s not that this infor­ma­tion isn’t known—it’s just not well dis­sem­i­nated. We feel it’s very impor­tant that a clear how-to guide be pre­sented and made pub­licly avail­able to any­one on the planet as a first step.”

Dan is also aim­ing at broad­en­ing the Bionutrient Food Association’s web­site so that grow­ers can inter­con­nect and ben­e­fit from each other’s knowl­edge. “We really want to build out the web­site so that farmers—and every­body who is engaged in this mission—can find each other. Right now there is no facil­ity for peo­ple to coor­di­nate around qual­ity in the food sup­ply. It’s all rela­tion­ship based; if you’re not in the know, you’re not in the know. There’s no easy way, if you’re a farmer, to find con­sul­tants or min­eral distributors—or if you’re a con­sumer, to find farm­ers and so on. We don’t have the infra­struc­ture for com­mu­ni­ca­tion in place, so that’s one impor­tant piece we’re work­ing on.”

Measuring Nutrient Levels

A key part of Dan’s mis­sion is the objec­tive quan­tifi­ca­tion of plant nutri­ent lev­els. He is work­ing with a sci­en­tist to develop a device that would mea­sure crop nutri­ent lev­els in detail. Not only would such a device allow grow­ers to eval­u­ate their own efforts, but it would even­tu­ally give retail­ers and con­sumers the facil­ity to mea­sure nutri­ents in pro­duce as well. “What we’re propos­ing is a near-infrared spec­troscopy device, which looks like a lit­tle flash­light or a pointer,” Dan explained. “Basically you flash the light at a car­rot and mon­i­tor the light that bounces back in the near-infrared spec­trum, which con­tains the vibra­tion of the min­er­als in com­pounds. The tech­nol­ogy for this exists cur­rently and is used to a large degree in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try man­u­fac­tur­ing. We’re look­ing at two to three years to develop it for our uses.”

Boiling It Down

“We fig­ure if we broadly put out the infor­ma­tion about how to grow high-nutrient crops and the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of doing so, we can then expose these farm­ers for the qual­ity of their pro­duce. Then we can really drive con­sumer power to bring about dif­fer­ent fer­til­ity prac­tices in agri­cul­ture,” Dan concluded.

Real food is for every­one. With Dan’s vision brought to full real­ity, the stan­dards of high-nutrient crops will become mainstream—and change the whole dynamic of how pro­duce is grown, processed, dis­trib­uted and purchased.

For more infor­ma­tion on the Bionutrient Food Association and their work, visit www.bionutrient.org.