Farmer Bob Wilt: Soil biology, nutrition and taste

Such taste is not at all com­mon­place today. Produce is grown from soil devoid of nutri­tion, forced to life with harsh chem­i­cal fer­til­iz­ers and “pro­tected” with toxic pes­ti­cides. The lack of taste in super­mar­ket pro­duce is a reflec­tion of the lack of nutrients.

Bob didn’t always have such stel­lar pro­duce. In fact, it took nine years for him to make the jour­ney from con­ven­tional farm­ing to a prac­tice known as Biological Farm Management. Beyond the USDA require­ments for organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, these meth­ods begin deep in the soil and con­cen­trate on pro­duc­ing plants rich in nutri­ents. The result is pro­duce so tasty that top chefs such as Wolfgang Puck, Alice Waters, Rick Bayless, Suzanne Goin and a host of oth­ers value it highly for use in their restaurants.

From Dead to Alive

Bob didn’t start out to be any­thing other than what his fam­ily had been. Raised on the very land he is farm­ing now, he grad­u­ated from Oregon State University and started farm­ing on his own in 1970. In the nineties he decided he wanted to improve his farm, and he turned to the per­son he thought could help: the sales­man who sold him the chem­i­cals he used for fertilizer.

“Basically he’ll sell you every­thing off the shelf,” Bob said. “We started using more nitrates. We added more potas­sium in the form of potas­sium chlo­ride, and we also began using more harsh her­bi­cides, like one called gramoxone—where you sprayed today, every­thing was dead tomorrow.

“Our fields became very man­i­cured and very clean. In fact they were too clean. But appear­ance wasn’t good enough—we wanted more yield. We began apply­ing heav­ier quan­ti­ties of fer­til­iz­ers and were also putting on extra nitrates. The more we put on, the more it seemed we needed and the amounts got really high.”

The chem­i­cals didn’t stop there. In 1998 Bob’s plants started suf­fer­ing from fun­gal dis­eases and he lost 40 per­cent of his crop. To solve the prob­lem, his sales­man had him imple­ment a fungi­cide pro­gram in which he had to rotate four or five dif­fer­ent fungi­cides so that none would build up.

For a while it seemed to work. “We kept the fun­gal dis­eases away,” Bob remarked.

But after three years Bob real­ized that despite every­thing he was doing he wasn’t rais­ing his yield at all—in fact it was quite the oppo­site. “In April 2001—I remem­ber this just like it was yesterday—I went out and looked at my berries,” he said. “I saw that maybe the best fruit-bearing limbs I had were 6 inches long rather than 18 or 20 inches. And instead of the 10 to 15 buds to the limb that I should have had, I might have had 2, at best 3. Well, you can do the math pretty fast. You can fig­ure out you’re going backwards.”

Finding Answers

Bob now knew that his adopted meth­ods weren’t being effec­tive. He began ask­ing around and found that there was a soil biol­o­gist named Elaine Ingham in nearby Corvallis, who had at one time been on staff at Oregon State University but now had her own lab­o­ra­tory. One day Bob walked into Ingham’s office—and that was the move that changed his farm, and his life.

“Because of the con­di­tion of my farm, I felt that I had to learn what I was doing wrong in a short period of time,” Bob recounted. “I made sev­eral vis­its to this biol­o­gist, and after nine hours of con­sul­ta­tion we both agreed that I had grad­u­ated Soil Biology 101.

“I found out that I was killing off the soil biol­ogy. We were putting things on that were absolute poi­son. One basic prin­ci­ple a lot of grow­ers don’t under­stand is that you’ve got to have bio­log­i­cal organ­isms in the ground because they’re the stom­ach for the plant. They do the digest­ing. Biology will process min­er­als in a form that the plant can use. Without those min­er­als, you’ve got a plant but it’s not healthy. It’s empty. And that’s a lot of what’s wrong with our food today: it’s empty.”

The Changes

That very year, Bob started adding a nat­ural liq­uid solu­tion called com­post tea to his soil to sup­ply it with nutri­ents. He also quit using her­bi­cides and began using fish fer­til­izer in place of the chem­i­cal nitrates.

He saw results right away. “That year was kind of tough weath­er­wise,” Bob noted. “Growers around here had a 20 per­cent loss—but I held my own. That was enough to say let’s try this again.”

Bob con­tin­ued with the prac­tices he had learned and began adding to them. He real­ized he would need a very good com­post, and spent the next four years devel­op­ing it. Interestingly, he found that one of the best addi­tives to his soil came about as a result of a com­post he pro­vided for a friend’s worm farm. “I would trade him my com­post, which he wanted to use as a food stock for his worm farm, and in return I got his worm cast­ings,” Bob said. “It is a way bet­ter product—like turn­ing a Volkswagen into a Porsche. In the end, we had a very pow­er­ful com­post tea. If you are going to play the game, you want the best tools you can get your hands on.”

The com­post tea also assists in keep­ing away fun­gal dis­eases. In the spring he applies it to the soil, and for the remain­der of the sea­son he applies it directly to the leaves every 10 to 14 days.

Shortly after Bob started down his nat­ural farm­ing path, he attended a sem­i­nar put on by a med­ical doc­tor and one of the pio­neers of Biological Farm Management, Dr. Arden Andersen (see Organic Connections, July–August 2008). Dr. Andersen con­vinced Bob that if you grow nutrient-dense crops, peo­ple will come. Bob ended up attend­ing a num­ber of Dr. Andersen’s sem­i­nars and had him out to his farm sev­eral times.

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According to Dr. Andersen, “Nutrient den­sity means the quan­tity of nutri­ent per quan­tity of food. Typically, the USDA ana­lyzes how many mil­ligrams or how many micro­grams of nutri­ent there are per 100 grams of food. With nutri­ent den­sity, we want to increase the amount of nutrients—calcium, mag­ne­sium, sele­nium, chromium, iodine, what­ever there might be—per 100 grams of that food. If you eat an apple and it is highly nutri­tious, highly nutri­ent dense, you get a lot more nutri­ents out of that sin­gle apple than if you pick up another apple which has half that nutri­ent density.”

This gave Bob a bright idea for com­pet­ing with other blue­berry grow­ers. “Knowing that blue­ber­ries were going to be over­planted, we had to have some sort of a plan that made our berries unique,” he said. “Why would some­body want to buy my blue­ber­ries instead of every­body else’s? Well, when we started going down the road of plant nutri­tion we dis­cov­ered that nutri­tion is all about vit­a­mins and min­er­als. So we decided we wanted to be noted for good nutri­tional blue­ber­ries. And if you have good nutri­tious blue­ber­ries, you have fla­vor too.”

Through lis­ten­ing to Dr. Andersen and from his own research, Bob dis­cov­ered the use on his fruit of a mea­sure­ment called “brix.” Brix is a scale that relates to the nutri­ents the fruit has absorbed. “We have found out that the higher the brix in the berries, the more nutri­tion, fla­vor and sugar they have. Those are all extremely pos­i­tive things if you’re try­ing to sell your berries to a con­sumer. That’s good stuff, a win-win for every­body; it’s a win for the con­sumer and it’s a win for the guy grow­ing the berries.”

“You’re aim­ing for a higher per­cent of dis­solved solids in the plant—a higher per­cent­age of com­plex car­bo­hy­drates, sug­ars and pro­teins,” says Dan Kittredge, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Real Food Campaign and an expe­ri­enced organic farmer him­self. “These are the ele­ments that cor­re­late directly with increased fla­vor, increased nutri­tion, increased shelf life, and increased pest and dis­ease resistance.”

Bob also found that the more effi­ciently he was able to get min­er­als into his berries, the higher the brix mea­sure­ment went. Hence, he con­cen­trated on doing that and still does to this day. And as the brix has gone up, so has the flavor.

“The aver­age brix mea­sure­ment for fresh berries is gen­er­ally between 10 and 12,” Bob explained. “Ours tend to begin around 15, but this last year we had one vari­ety that was aver­ag­ing around 16 and another vari­ety called Jersey that had num­bers between 19 and 21. It gave us an aver­age of a 20 brix.”

The cor­re­la­tion between nutri­tion and great taste is no longer just the­ory. Third-party inde­pen­dent test­ing was con­ducted on reg­u­lar super­mar­ket fare as well as organic berries from other grow­ers. The results can be found on Sunset Valley Organics’ web­site, which show that nutri­ents in Bob’s berries gen­er­ally range higher—sometimes significantly—than other blue­ber­ries grown with dif­fer­ent farm­ing methods.

The steps that Bob employs have actu­ally taken him “beyond organic.” “If I talk to any­body, I’ll tell them I’m a bio­log­i­cal farmer,” he said. “I just get paid to call myself an organic farmer. If you’re a good true bio­log­i­cal farmer, you’re going one to two lev­els above what most organic farm­ers do because you’re so involved in what’s good for the soil, in what the nutri­tion of the soil is or the life of the soil.”

The nutrient-dense plants and Bob’s new farm­ing meth­ods have also meant being able to do away with insec­ti­cides and her­bi­cides. The wrong sorts of insects gen­er­ally don’t bother his plants, and so far fun­guses have been a thing of the past.

Testament to the Taste

One story demon­strates the fla­vor dif­fer­ence in Bob’s blue­ber­ries almost bet­ter than any other. Several years ago, Bob went into part­ner­ship with a packer who obtained busi­ness from a large gro­cery store chain for their south­west dis­trict. Consumers were so amazed that they began e-mailing the stores to say what an incred­i­ble taste the berries had, which led to a sec­ond year of sales.

A change came in the third year, how­ever. “This last year, 2009, the berry price really plum­meted,” Bob related. “There were a lot of berries avail­able, so con­ven­tional berries took a huge dive. Well, this store chain decided that since con­ven­tional berries were so cheap they were just going to go with con­ven­tional and wouldn’t be inter­ested in organic.

“About six weeks went by and they had got­ten so many e-mails from their cus­tomers demand­ing a return of the fla­vor­ful berries that the com­pany came back and we nego­ti­ated a price. It was a lower price than what we had been get­ting, but as it worked out we sold our whole grade A crop to them at 50 cents over the mar­ket. If you have good, sweet fruit, peo­ple will come.”

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,” Bob con­cluded. “And that’s a good thing. There’s a lot more I’d like to do.”

To find out more about Sunset Valley Organics and their amaz­ingly tasty blue­ber­ries, visit their web­site at www.sunsetvalleyorganics.com.