Dan Kittredge

April 8, 2022 Global Earth Repair

Founder of Bionutrient Food Association – USA

Internationally renowned as one of the leading proponents of “nutrient density,” Dan Kittredge has been an organic farmer for more than 30 years and is the founder and executive director of the Bionutrient Food Association (BFA), a non-profit whose mission is to “increase quality in the food supply.” He grew up on the Many Hands Organic Farm in central Massachusetts with his parents, Julie Rawson (NOFA/Mass Executive Director) and Jack Kittredge (Natural Farmer publisher). After a career of establishing himself as an international proponent of food and seed activism (including working in India, Russia, and Central America), Dan returned to the U.S. and launched the BFA in order to ignite a movement around food quality. Over the years, word of the Association spread west across the U.S., so in 2012 (as a response to overwhelming invitations to share their expertise, and along with several contemporaries), the annual Soil and Nutrition Conference was formed. It soon became a landmark, international event, showcasing cutting-edge science as a backdrop for the broader topics of soil sciences, agriculture and nutrition. The Conference continues annually to this day, with registrants from dozens of countries attending both virtually and in-person. Meanwhile, Kittredge himself now sports a much increased presence online through social media, a YouTube channel, and an upcoming online education course.

Kittredge and the BFA have worked tirelessly to educate and demonstrate the connections between soil health, plant health, and human health. These efforts have born out the creation of the Real Food Campaign, which has engineered a prototype of a hand-held consumer spectrometer designed to test nutrient density at point of purchase. With their “Bionutrient Meter,” they intend to empower consumers to choose for nutrient quality and thereby leverage economic incentives to drive full system regeneration in farmed foods. In 2013, the Alliance also created a system of chapters as local and like-minded farming community leaders began to emerge. To date, there are twenty-five active BFA chapters, with more to come.

“We want to use economics to incentivize farmers and facilitate that rapid global transformation to a more balanced climate and culture. The fastest potential point to kickstart this transition to more regenerative approaches, more farms, and more soil being regenerated is the focus on quality. This includes paying our farmers who are growing quality food and moving up the rest in that process. It’s going to be more economically advantageous to focus on quality.“