When was the last time you were blown away by a blueberry? If you found some that taste out of this world, it might be the healthy soil that is making the difference.
In this episode, we learn all about this topic from Hugh Kent with King Grove Farms in Florida. Hugh is a blueberry grower who has impressed top chefs and children alike with the incredible taste that come from his Real Organic Project blueberries.
In this interview with Hugh, learn about the regenerative practices he uses, how this is a big differentiating factor in the taste of his berries compared to hydroponic berries (which are becoming the industry norm), and how he is building up his direct-to-consumer business.
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Click here to subscribe on your favorite platform or click here to listen on our website.
Support the show through Patreon -- Patreon.com/TastingTerroir
When was the last time you were blown away by a blueberry? If you found some that taste out of this world, it might be the healthy soil that is making the difference.
In this episode, we learn all about this topic from Hugh Kent with King Grove Farms in Florida. Hugh is a blueberry grower who has impressed top chefs and children alike with the incredible taste that come from his Real Organic Project blueberries.
In this interview with Hugh, learn about the regenerative practices he uses, how this is a big differentiating factor in the taste of his berries compared to hydroponic berries (which are becoming the industry norm), and how he is building up his direct-to-consumer business.
Support the showBrought to you by the Global Food and Farm Online Community
Click here to subscribe on your favorite platform or click here to listen on our website.
Support the show through Patreon -- Patreon.com/TastingTerroir
The difficulty is that our measuring metrics are way behind. They're still so primitive. If we don't even know what these microbes are, are we really able to do a competent job of evaluating what the value is of the food? I would argue that it's very significant that our gut microbiome, which is a similar complex universe that exists in our digestive system, coevolved with soil microbiome over eons. So we developed as an animal over all of these eons, eating this food grown in soil. I believe they're completely complementary systems. And we definitely need soil in order to have a healthy gut. We need a healthy gut in order to have a healthy body. I think that's also related to taste. And we go back to that question you asked about why do our berries taste different? Why do they taste so good? And I continue. The feedback we get is extraordinary from all over, including from very sophisticated palates and professional chefs, and we get an enormous positive feedback. And I'm asked that question constantly, and I don't have a great answer. But I think what makes the most sense to me is that our bodies know what's good for us, and we can be fooled. The food scientists are very sophisticated at this. They're very good at it. It's like McDonald's. You can make a big, beautiful blueberry, big, beautiful tomato very quickly. That's like McDonald's. You can make somebody really big by feeding McDonald's every day. But I would argue that it's not the same thing. It's really not the same kind of food at all. We do have, I think, a natural desire to eat what's good for us. And when we have a good piece of produce, it tastes good. And that's an evolved mechanism. Feedback loop. If this tastes good, I'm going to have more of it. If I have more of it, my body is going to be healthier. I'll live longer, I'll reproduce. It's the evolutionary chain. So I do think we like the taste of things that are good for us. And I see that all the time with little kids. We have children eat our berries all the time, and they just light up. I think they know their bodies, know what's good for them. And I don't have the science, but I really find it hard to believe that we can replicate that with a simplistic solution of some primary and secondary nutrients that we drift through inert growth media.
Sara Harper:Welcome back to our podcast, tasting Terroir, a journey that explores the link between healthy soil and the flavor and health of your food. I'm your host, Sarah Harper. That clip was from Hugh Kent, a blueberry grower in Florida who has impressed top chefs and children alike with the incredible taste that come from his real organic blueberries. More about the regenerative farming practices he uses to get that fantastic flavor later in our feature interview with him. In our last episode, we got into the issue of standards and how thinking about regenerative in comparison to the organic standard could present some challenges. It could be easy to see that discussion as being against organic certification. That's not the intent. Rather, I was trying to explore the limits and challenges of certification systems as the primary way of knowing, of verifying the outcomes of a dynamic way of farming like regenerative agriculture. It gets into the point that regenerative has a lot to do with the mindset and the motive and the differences in the land where it's practiced, and standards have a hard time factoring in all those variables. In this episode, in addition to learning more about how soil health contributes to outstanding flavor in food, we also explore how this certification challenge is true for the organic system as well. As you will learn from Hugh, much of the blueberry industry is moving toward hydroponics, or growing the fruit in a nutrient fed system with water or some other medium instead of soil. Yet in the US, this way of growing is allowed to be considered organic so long as it doesn't use synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to differentiate his organic produce grown in soil. Hugh has also been involved with the real organic project. But once again, I'm left to wonder if either of these certifications really captures the regenerative way that Hugh is building up his soil. We'll let you decide. Listening to Hugh talk about how top chefs rave about the standout taste of his blueberries and how he attributes this difference to the fact that the berries are grown in healthy soil, it's a perfect example of what this podcast is about, about how terroir is detectable in so much more than just wine. Here's my interview with Hugh Kent of King Grove Farms. Hi, Hugh. How are you?
Hugh Kent:Hi, Sarah. I'm well, thank you. How are you?
Sara Harper:Good. Well, first, let people know where you are, the name of your farm and what you grow.
Hugh Kent:I'm in central Florida, which is the old part of the state, what emerged from the ocean first. So where there's a central ridge that runs along the middle part of the state called the Mount Dora Ridge. And it's quite beautiful. A lot of topography here. Not the flat part of the parts of the state most people are used to. The name of the farm is King Grove Organic Farm. It's an old family farm started by a guy named John King in 1874, and he moved down here with this young family, went by steamship from Buffalo to Savannah and horseback from Savannah to Eustace, Florida, which is, of course, just not that long ago. It was a while ago. It wasn't that long ago. 150 years. So he started the farm and sold it to one of my ancestors in 1890, and I bought it from my family members in 2003. Used to be a citrus grove, and like most of the farms in this area and we? We started blueberries about twelve years ago and started organic from scratch. Didn't go through any transition period but we knew that's how we wanted to do it.
Sara Harper:Maybe it's just my ignorance about where blueberries are grown but I've thought of as more of a cold weather plate kind of crop.
Hugh Kent:Are they not around the world now? And it's a function of some dedicated plant breeding. Not genetic modification, but plant breeding over many, many generations of plants. There is a Florida native blueberry. Something very close to one goes by different names but this is a vaccine I and these are what we grow are basically crosses of the native plant and northern high bushes which were developed in the northern parts of the United States. And now of course, blueberries are grown virtually throughout the world and we have different seasons. We start in the South American season for what we consume in this country and then Central America which competes directly with Florida and Georgia and then the harvest throughout the United States goes up the East Coast. It goes to North Carolina, New Jersey, Michigan and then the Pacific Northwest in the fall before it starts over again. So it's quite a long domestic season as well as a long international season.
Sara Harper:And you're about to come into your harvest season, right?
Hugh Kent:Yeah, that's why I seem a little distracted. We have about ten weeks to harvest and make enough money to pay the bills for the entire year. So it's very hectic, it's very intensive agriculture and the harvest is always challenging but of course that makes it fun. And this year we're doing something a little bit different which I'm very excited about. We're a fairly small farm but we're a wholesale operation mainly. We grow way too much to sell through farmers markets and retail. We have to go through the wholesale channels. We're trying to sell more and more retail because that's where we find the people who appreciate the quality that we grow. But we've always had to rely on third parties for packing a few years ago, up until a few years ago for cold storage up until last year. This is the first year that will do everything here on the farm. So we take and sort and pack, refrigerate and then ship all from the same location without any reliance on other people, which I feel really good about because our niche has always been the highest quality that we can possibly produce and I think we're there. And last year was the missing link. Cold storage for us. I think one of maybe we'll talk about this later. But a quality difference has to do with how quickly blueberries get down to 34 35 degrees where their longevity goes way up. And lots of people believe that the nutritional value goes hand in hand with that. So the longer they stay at ambient temperature 80, 90 degrees when they're picked or even in the 50s. They're losing nutrition, they're losing quality. They're losing flavor, taste, freshness. Unlike commercial third party packing houses, we don't have to do that. So we can go from the field and immediately sort and pack and then right down to 34 degrees in our own cold room here. So that makes a huge difference. Instead of maybe 36 or 48 hours with the berries spending their time in the mid to upper 50s goes right down to the temperature where it stays until it gets to the customer.
Sara Harper:Yeah, well, and tell me about the flavor and the uniqueness of your berries, because I learned about you because Jill Clapperton, our co host here, had experienced them and had met you and talked with you and just was wowed by your berries. And she's, being a plant scientist, of course, is curious as to why. And she knows all the links between how things are grown and that affects the nutrient value and all of that. So maybe tell everybody a little bit about that discussion or what Jill kind of took from that since we don't have the benefit of having her here right now.
Hugh Kent:I wish you were here, because I'm not sure I understand it completely. A lot of times I think I do my best farming when I get out of the way, and I do as little as possible, let the soil take over and let the plant do what it knows how to do. I find myself taking more and more of that attitude as time goes on. The less interventionist I can be, the better the quality seems to be. But we grow in soil. Our entire operation is designed around improving, really doing nothing more or nothing less than improving soil quality. And this is increasingly rare in blueberries, especially the ones that are grown in the springtime. Most of the blueberries consumed in this country now comes from Mexico. The ones that are grown in the spring, some come from Chile, then Peru, and then Mexico. But the lion's share of organic blueberries are coming out of Mexico now, and they're hydroponic. So they're grown in plastic pots or plastic bags and then earn substrate in them. Instead of soil, they have something like coconut quar or something else that's lifeless. And then there's a nutrient feed that is dripped through that pot or through that bag, and that's how they grow them. It couldn't be any different, a growing system than what we do, really. If you see them side by side, it's very dramatic. Unfortunately, they're allowed to be called organic. Only in this country is the USDA allow that nowhere else in the world can you get away with labeling hydroponic produce as organic. But in the United States at the moment, you can. But we grow what's called real organic. We're involved with the Real Organic Project, which is an advocacy group of farmers that are trying to raise this consciousness that the USDA organic label allows hydroponics and it allows Kfo operations. Also, in my view, that's not allowed under the law at all. But the USDA does not enforce it. Real organic project does. So if you have that label, as we do the Real Organic Project label on top of the USDA label, you're getting soil grown organic produce.
Sara Harper:That's great to let people know that I've heard of the Real Organic project but I wasn't as clear on that soil piece that that's a big part of that and that gets into regenerative and regenerative practices. And what would you say are some of the obviously your focused on soil health? How do you enhance the soil so that you get this great taste?
Hugh Kent:Our system relies on green manure, so most of our fertility increasingly it's not all of our fertility yet. I wish it were. We're getting there. We try and be better organic farmers every year. But we grow a lot of the food for the plants in the rows in between the plant rows. So in the middles and we cover crop there. And we also allow Mother Nature to go ahead and grow what she wants to grow. And I designed and fabricated specialized mowing machines and mulching machines that will take that area in between the plant rows, mow it, mulch it and throw it up on the beds where it feeds the plants provides two functions. One of them is food and the other as that organic matter decays. Decays and is worked on by the microbiotic community. But it's also a thatch develops there and that's what we use for the majority of our weed suppression also, which of course is the biggest challenge in agriculture, let alone organic agriculture. Weed control is always an issue. But I think what we have going now is a very complex and poorly understood system, intricate universe of physics and biology and chemistry that's going on in that soil. We try and get the microbes as healthy as possible. We don't know who they are. We don't necessarily know what they do. We don't have names for them. I have a Cornell AG professor cousin and I asked her, I said, well hey, I just heard that you only can identify 10% of the microbes in this universe of creatures that are living that are in healthy soil. And she said, well no, that's actually kind of generous. Somewhere between one and 10% really. We don't have names for them. We don't understand them very well. We don't know what they all do. We know that a lot of them exist only in relationship to others. It's extraordinarily complex. Which I think to get back to your question is the answer to why soil grown, carefully tended soil grown produce tastes so much different than anything else? It tastes different than conventional because it's got so much more biological activity in the soil. It tastes vastly different than hydroponic because there's almost no biological activity going on in that soil. It's the only system where there is this whole universe of interaction in the rhizosphere and outside of it between the plant and the soil, all the microbes that live in the soil, basically farming the soil itself on behalf of the plant. Of course, you and Jill understand this, I think, much better than I do. But I see it happen and I see the plants adjusting. I do believe that they are able to change the chemistry around them in order to grow, develop everything they need above ground, including the ability to fight off some of the pests that would otherwise bother them. So I've watched the plants almost as if they have an immune system which is external. It's not maybe in the plant itself, but if you take it as a whole integrated, integrated thing, then all of this interaction with the soil and the plant and the changes that they both can create with each other allows them to adapt to various stresses, whether they're water related or food related or pest related. Remarkable thing to watch.
Sara Harper:Yeah, I've heard soil health scientists and experts at conferences talk about it as the soil model is like our gut system, but inside out. So our gut is doing all this stuff internally. The plants have to do it externally through the soil. But the same things are happening that there's a remarkable similarity to your point about the nutrients that are getting in the difference between hydroponic. There's an interesting thing that I'm starting to see more and more as I look at Regenerative because there's a big push for fake meat to replace, to replace meat as a virtuous thing and all of that. But there are studies more and more that we're looking at. Even if there is the same nutrient profile or even a higher nutrient profile like, say, iron or something in the fake meat, it's not bioavailable when you eat it because of what they had to do to the oils and texturize the meat. And so the result is that it can look on the label like it's the same thing when it's functionally not. And I'm wondering if there's a similarity maybe with hydroponic. Like there could be some the same nutrients there because they were put in with the feed, the feed or fluid. But how it got in is different than what the plant is used to. And so how it puts it down and then how we digest it, it's just a really interesting area of understanding what really the benefit of the soil gives us.
Hugh Kent:Yeah, absolutely. And I think that you put your finger on it. The difficulty is that our measuring metrics are way behind. They're still so primitive. So if we don't even know what these microbes are, are we really able to do a competent job of evaluating what the value is of the food? And I would argue that it's very significant that our gut microbiome which is a similarly complex universe that exists in our digestive system, coevolved with soil microbiome over eons. So we developed as an animal over all of these eons, eating this food grown in soil. And I believe they're completely complementary systems. And we definitely need soil in order to have a healthy gut. We need a healthy gut in order to have a healthy body. And I think that's also related to taste. And we go back to that question you asked about why do our berries taste different? Why do they taste so good? And I continue. The feedback we get is extraordinary from all over, including from very sophisticated palates and professional chefs, and we get an enormous positive feedback. And I'm asked that question constantly, and I don't have a great answer. But I think what makes the most sense to me is that our bodies know what's good for us, and we can be fooled. The food scientists are very sophisticated at this. They're very good at it. They're very good at using things like soluble sugars to get our bodies to have a certain physical reaction after we eat processed food. And our bodies are fooled into thinking, wow, I got all this energy. That felt great. This must be good for me. Let's have more of it. And that's one way to get the body to respond. I think it's an artificial one and a dangerous one and an unhealthy one. But on the other side, we do have, I think, a natural desire to eat what's good for us. And when we have a good piece of produce, it tastes good. And that's evolved mechanism feedback loop. If this tastes good, I'm going to have more of it. If I have more of it, my body's going to be healthier, I'll live longer, I'll reproduce. It's the evolutionary change. So I do think we like the taste of things that are good for us. And I see that all the time with little kids. We have children eat our berries all the time, and they just light up. I think they know their bodies, know what's good for them. I don't have the science, but I really find it hard to believe that we can replicate that with a simplistic solution of some primary and secondary nutrients that we drift through inert growth media. It's McDonald's. You can make a big, beautiful blueberry, big, beautiful tomato very quickly. That's like McDonald's. You make somebody really big by feeding McMahon's every day. But I would argue that it's not the same thing. It's really not the same kind of food at all.
Sara Harper:But the thing is, we go to those systems because they're easier or they're scalable or there are all sorts of reasons why people move in that direction. And I think that's kind of a similar thing that we see in agriculture in general. There's a there's a reason why agriculture moved toward you know, there's a lot of criticism about big food and cheap food and cheap food policy, and I'm certainly critical of it, too. But I grew up in Kansas, and so I grew up kind of in the midst of it. I kind of understand, I think, what so much of the interesting conversations I'm having with people like you. It all comes back to going back to nature, being seeing yourself as an assistant to nature, a constant, curious companion, almost. And that that's your role, as opposed to, I have to control this. It all depends on me. It all depends on the right decisions I make and the chemicals I apply and the whole system that you're it's a management system that agriculture has become which is more expensive and gives you actually not a superior outcome. But we feel like we have more control, so it seems like there's a real appeal on that level.
Hugh Kent:Maybe you could speak to I'm just stuck on what you said. I love that. The constant, curious companion. That's beautiful. I think that's absolutely right. It's so much different than what I see with conventional agriculture and this desire to make it sterile. Except for the monocrop you're working with, anything you see out there, just get rid of it. We're just going to clear the road and just have this one plant try and survive and do well. And I just think it's really misguided. It takes a while to get confidence in this because initially it's really disconcerting, and especially when you don't have a lot of organic growers in your area, you have to see results before you gain confidence. But I think I'm past that point, and I'm a real, true believer. And I had this conversation with Dan Barber, the chef, and who you know, well, the guy is wonderful, and he's got such an inquisitive mind, and he just takes it all in, and he asks more. And he was really about the only person who kept pressing me about the flavor of these blueberries. And he said, okay, why do they taste so good? And I said, I'm not sure, Dan. They're grown in soil. Give me more. I said, well, it's real organic. We don't cut any corners. And he kept pressing me, well, more. Tell me more. That doesn't explain it. And I had to think about it. And then I think you inspire me to another perspective, which gets out there a little bit. We almost get into quantum physics, or metaphysics even. I think it's about life. It's about life energy in a farming field, in a cropping field. When you get down to the quantum physics and the recognition that we're largely just energy as opposed to matter, that kind of thing makes you think. And when I go out in my field, there's an extraordinary amount of life, and of course, there's this life below ground that we don't see and this microscopic that we've talked about, this incredible universe that's happening in healthy soil, but there's also a lot of life above ground that you can see. So I go out and inspect the field, and we're lucky enough to be surrounded by some well managed property, some of it's ours and some of its other peoples. But there's good, healthy woodlands and wetlands around here and a lot of wildlife. And so this blueberry farm is in the middle of a thriving, healthy ecosystem. And I see all kinds of things on my plants. Some of them I know, some of them I don't know. Some of them I suspect may be beneficial. Some of them I suspect might not be if they got out of control. But it's an extraordinarily active, vibrant living environment. So the plants have all kinds of bugs and things that are walking on them and flying by. We have pollinators out there that they just pretty much finished up our flowers and now dumb being pollinated, and the berries are forming. But when we have the flowers out, we don't just have honey bees that we bring in in order to help pollinate. But there's a native Florida bumblebee. There's bumblebees, there's wasps, there are butterflies. There's all kinds of other creatures that are out there doing the pollination for us. And I'll give you one more example about this intricacy that we don't understand. We sometimes have mite problems in the buds that is pretty familiar for blueberry growers. And we'll share those with the academics at the University of Florida periodically and say, okay, what do you see in here? Should we be concerned something's getting out of control? And their response is usually, wow, we've never seen that before. So they look at some of these things under high powered microscopes, and they say, well, we have these mites that we haven't seen before, but you also have a whole bunch of beneficial mites that we haven't seen before. And this almost gets a little creepy when you think about these little things that are living in your blueberry buds. But the reality is that's what we're like as animals, right? We have extraordinary amounts of little creatures in and around our bodies that allow us to live. We couldn't live without them. So this is happening everywhere from a microscopic to a recognizable scale in our farm. And I really enjoy it. I just see all kinds of things that passing through or flying over or walking through or lingering on the plants. You have to look carefully. It's not like there's this big, creepy infestation out there. It's just that there's a lot of life.
Sara Harper:Yeah.
Hugh Kent:And I think a lot of life above ground and below ground, it creates a different kind of food than you find in a more sterile farming environment.
Sara Harper:Yeah, of course. And I think people are starting to realize that there's at least I hope that there's this whole world underground. And I keep saying, Why are we exploring space? Why are we exploring the deep sea. We should be exploring the soil. I guess the thing that we're most connected to and we still don't know it, but even though you can't understand all of what's going on, you do get a sort of a high level understanding by looking at if there's because the life underground is fed by fed by the roots. So it's fed by if you see a lot of plants, different species of plants above ground, it's going to be reflected in what's going on underground. If you see just one plant or just a very sterile, like you said, very sterile growing environment, just focused on one thing, well, you're starving the microbiome underneath it too.
Hugh Kent:Yeah, I think it's a great metaphor for our treatment of the entire planet. I think if you recognize all these systems are interconnected, then at some point you have to step back and say, well, wow, the whole thing, this whole third rock from the sun. It's all one big living system. The earth is living Just watched something interesting yesterday. Somebody talking about how our climate changes throughout the year because the Earth basically breathes differently. When the northern hemisphere starts to leaf out in the spring, you change a lot of the atmosphere just based on all of these forests and plants changing their cycle. So there's this constant movement and change and interrelationship on this whole macro level, and then it goes all the way down, like you're saying, to a microscopic level. Yeah. I wish we'd get a handle on all this before we export our current sinking out into other areas of the universe. We have some things to clean up here first, make our planet a little healthier.
Sara Harper:Yeah, well, and I'm wondering too, you know, some of what's going on, obviously. And you mentioned you plant different things in between the rows. Do you use a kind of science to decide which plants to plant in between the rows? How have you kind of made that decision about what things to encourage to grow in addition to your berries?
Hugh Kent:Yeah, that's a great question. That's evolved for me also. So initially I relied on a lot of soil tests and try to identify what I'm deficient in and then amend that either directly let's say I'm low in sulfur, so I'm going to put sulfur out, calcium, whatever and then started to look at different possibilities for cover crops that would help fix some of those nutrients and minerals and then make them available to the crop plant. I've backed off a little bit on that, and I tend now to be more trusting in what Mother Nature grows.
Sara Harper:Because you have a restored system, you have such a healthy system, so what grows is going to be healthy too. That's another thing. The difference between a place that's overrun with weeds, but it's overrun with weeds, but the weeds that it's putting out are from a depleted system. Different things will grow just. Naturally than a restored system.
Hugh Kent:Yes, and I haven't heard that discussed very much, but I believe in that. And I believe that when you disturb soil so let's say you take a piece of land in Florida and you disturb the soil down to a depth where you're turning up what's in the seed bank and getting it to a level of zero to two inches, where it then gets enough light and air and water to germinate. It's extraordinary what will grow. So some of these things might be six, eight inches, a foot down. If you bring them up and then be dormant for a long, long time, if you disturb the soil and you bring them up, you'll get very vigorous growth. And typically there are certain weeds which will outcompete all the others in this part of the country anyway, and you can count on some of them doing very well. Nuts, edge, ragweeds. There's all kinds of real beauties. But I think what happens is the earth has a natural tendency to try and heal itself. So if we don't continually pick the scab, we allow it to go ahead and make itself healthier over time. I do believe it tries to create productive topsoil for us. And around here, one of the initial plants that comes up is in the gopher. It's a hairy indigo. It's a nitrogen fixer. Not much nitrogen in soil, in sandy soil in Florida. But you'll see this plant come up and it does an excellent job of taking nitrogen out of the air, fixing it in its root system. And then when that's plowed, or when that's allowed to decay, lightly plowed in, that becomes part of the soil chemistry. So I have seen, over time, an evolution from these initial pioneering opportunistic weeds that come up when you first disturb soil, and then as the soil gets a bit healthier over the years, you have other soil, other plants finding their way in there. And I can't prove this, but I do think that nature has got a tendency to recognize the deficiencies in the soil. And there are plants that will thrive in that deficient soil, which actually, over time, will make the soil less deficient.
Sara Harper:Have you going back to the berries themselves, have you had them tested for different qualities or properties or anything you could share about, I'm sure, like what Chef Dan was searching for. Anything you can tell us about what's been found in the berry that makes sense.
Hugh Kent:I don't I've been really curious about.
Sara Harper:That, like nutrient density and that kind of stuff.
Hugh Kent:Yeah. I think Dr. Van Bleat has got a sample of mine out in where is he? Utah or somewhere.
Sara Harper:That's great. We interviewed him about the beef project.
Hugh Kent:No, ask him what's going on with my berries.
Sara Harper:I will have to come back around.
Hugh Kent:They were sent out there, and I think he came up with a budget for testing. They were sent out there with some hydroponic berries. Of course it's expensive to do this kind of stuff. So they were looking for the funding to do it. I paid to ship them out there, but I didn't have the resources to say, yeah, go run them through the lab. So I'm hoping that happens at some point and I think that would be very useful. But again, I'm not convinced that there are the metrics yet that we have the technology for the reasons you were saying. A lot of stuff with really synthetic stuff, fake meats and so forth. They look good on paper. They look good based on the measuring devices we have at this point. And I don't know if those really tell the whole story. I think our bodies and society as a whole, if you look at the health of our society, that might be a better indicator of how good our food is at the moment.
Sara Harper:I work with a lot of farmers across the different parts of the regenerative kind of spectrum and regenerative itself, that word is kind of reactive and people are trying to define it different ways and there's a battle over it and all of that. But I was struck by what you're talking about with organic, the battle that organic has with hydroponic or maybe even with organic and regenerative, we see some differences about what that means there. What keeps coming to me is that it really is about there's such differences in the places that you're growing, things, in the crops that you're growing. But the unifying thing is this companion to nature, working with nature, really always continuing to enhance nature. But that's hard to certify. You can certify it that you didn't use these pesticides. But as you've seen with the organic standard, then things start splitting away. And it's technically organic, but it's not what people think. And what seems like there's like two things that I want to get your impression on. One is if you know the farmer and obviously you have a website you sell direct to people, if you know the farmer and you know what they're doing, that is a way that you can be more certain of what you're getting. Obviously tasting it too. But then the other end is like what Dr. Van Bleed is doing. And he's already found kind of like a chemical signature in grass fed, in multispecies grass fed animals. And it's a chemical signature that you can find that it's there, you can see it, so you can test for it. You can say this is whether just grass fed because that's the other crazy thing. That the benefits from meat are really not just grass fed, it's multispecies grass fed. It's this diversity. Back to your point about it's life, it's access to diverse life that brings the benefit. But it's findable, it's testable. And I think that's going to be there in your berries and in everything because it's just about like you said, that the metric is catching up. So in between when the metrics catch up, then you can go back to aggregating it all because it's all of a like it all has a signature. But until then, I think people have to just buy their berries directly from you. If you care about not everybody can do that for everything. But you pick one or two things that you're going to really prioritize and you buy it directly from the farmer. I mean, is that happening more and more? Is your direct sale going up or what do you think about that end of it? Because I know that's got to be a pain in the neck for farmers who are doing all this other stuff to then have to take on that side. It's a whole third job for you.
Hugh Kent:Yeah, we're not great marketers like your very marketing. Yeah, well, I mean, my wife and I specifically there are some good farmer marketers out there, but it's a talent and you're right, it's hard. It's hard to find the time to be good at it also. But yes, to answer your question, it's going very well and we are very excited about it because really the people who care about the quality of what we do or the people that eat it, almost everybody else involved in the system of distribution is just there to make money. Quality is not really that much of a concern for them, but you would.
Sara Harper:Think quality would be core to making money and so often it isn't. That's what I find in these interviews, too, like the retail, the processing side, it's about the size of the berry or the size of the it's about all these things, the color or these things that aren't really the taste.
Hugh Kent:Which is kind of shocking when you think about something like a blueberry and it's a delicacy, right? So don't you really want to go and it's a delicacy and it's a wonderful superfood and all of the cognitive benefits that they're recognizing are tied up in them, but especially for the aging brain. Wonderful stuff. But it remains frustrating going through wholesale in our case specifically, because so much of the market is now owned by the Mexican, by the US multinationals that are down to Mexico, and they have almost all of the market now. We really can't compete. They pay a dollar an hour for their labor and that's not something we can do or want to do in this country. They're almost entirely, if not entirely hydroponic and growing in these plastic farms. They put out plastic ground cover, they put out plastic pots and they cover them with plastic hoop houses and they bring them here as organic so on the shelf. Unless you're really sophisticated and you follow this stuff, you're paying a premium for something that's environmentally abusive and abusive on a human level too. But that's the reality of it. So in order to escape that system, we have to go to retail. We like to go to retail. It's just getting the word out is tough, so we keep trying and of course, we find that word of mouth literally is the best. People eat them. And so it's grown quite quickly. We're more and more retail operation now. We ship around the country and we figured out we've been doing it for four years and we figured out how to use the best, most sustainable packaging we can. And we were able to send everything. Second day air, and it arrives in great shape. And people tell us that because of our handling practices, they last for a month in their refrigerator, which is pretty astonishing, but most of them say that they would last a month, but we ate them all in a couple of days.
Sara Harper:Yeah, sure. What portion are you selling? Direct to consumers. And is that growing? Do you sell out of that portion? Or if people want to sign up, I know what your website? So there's a mailing list. Like you sign up and it could be notified basically because you sell in season and so they're not just sitting around waiting for you to come by anytime.
Hugh Kent:Thanks for signing up. We'll start on March 15. We'll open up for sale starting on March 15 in just another week or so. So people are on the mailing list, they'll get notification that the website is live. And then we have we have rolling weeks. So the the I think we won't have much berries the first week. That will sell out very quickly and then we'll have more. Hopefully they'll continue to keep selling out as we go through the season. Whatever we don't sell goes to short store shelves somewhere. It's really fun. It's fun and it's the way we can actually make this work financially. So it's just great to get the feedback from people because I'm like a lot of people my age, when I taste good produce, I slap my forehead and I say, I haven't had anything like this since I was a kid. And that's what's happened to our food system. My mother grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. It's the family farm back to the 1006 hundreds. And we used to eat that produce a lot. And I find myself when I find good food now, I say, I haven't had that since I had it on my grandfather's farm. Dave Chapman's. Tomatoes. I don't know if you've had long wind farm tomatoes that are a good example. Tomato boy, when you have this stuff and you realize you haven't tasted something like that in decades, it really makes you stop and think.
Sara Harper:Yeah, well, that's the other thing that I've heard people talk about too, that the idea of a cheap food policy can make some you can kind of wrap your mind around it if you want to think about, well, people need to be able to afford food. But when you think about the consequence of not getting what we need from food is disease, then we're going to pay for it on one end or the other. And so prioritizing health from the beginning or this restorative, restorative ability that these nutrients that are absorbable, because that's the key thing. We wouldn't need a whole supplement industry. We're designed to get it from food. We get it in better form from food, but we don't know which foods have it anymore.
Hugh Kent:Right? Yeah, that's a great point because it's expensive to be alive, but you can spend your money on health care or you can spend it on good food. I really think if you look at those graphs and you see how much we spend on food and how much we spend on health care, now you can see why saving money on one is costing us more on the other end. And there's another element to it which is a little less personal, which is just that a lot of these costs of cheap food are externalities that we foist off on other people and on the planet. So sure, we can have cheap corn, we can have cheaper supposedly organic hydroponic berries. But what's the cost of that? What happens to all that stuff that you're dripping through a hydroponic system and it's just going through a plastic weedman into the ground and now you're polluting the ground, you're putting plastic residues in the ground. You get plastic residues in the food. The synthetic estrogens that are involved in that, you have an unfathomable amount of plastics that are used in these systems that are thrown out after three to five years. They go in a dumpster, they go in a landfill somewhere and they start over again with them. So there's all kinds of externalities in different growing systems that are either negative or positive. And so much of these cheap food externalities are just hidden costs in the form of pollution, water pollution, land pollution and human pollution. And a lot of the externalities in truly organic systems are beneficial ones. They're not just good for the soil, but they also retain high habitat value for what lives around your farm. There's more than just the crop plants on a healthy organic farm supposed to be part of the whole thing. You need to have a farm plan where you take care of your woodlands, wetlands and wildlife as well as your crop areas. And these are ecologically and psychologically valuable lands to have around human communities. And people like seeing these well tended and well cared for green spaces and that are healthy and they help a lot. So those are all costs that we don't factor in when we go to the store and we say, oh wow, that's $0.50 more for that. A lot of these things are hidden.
Sara Harper:So give people your website so they want to sign up and get your berries. They can.
Hugh Kent:Sure, it's easy. It's king. K-I-N-G grove. Grove.com.
Sara Harper:Yeah.
Hugh Kent:Well, that is everything's pretty self explanatory when you go from there, if you dig a little bit.
Sara Harper:And for people that maybe are in the store looking around when they look for things, does hydroponic have to be labeled hydroponic?
Hugh Kent:No.
Sara Harper:Okay.
Hugh Kent:Now, it's an interesting discussion I had with a well known natural food retailer a few years ago when we were talking about this, and he said, you know, Hugh, I can't hire somebody to hang out in the produce section and say these USDA organic certified blueberries are different than these USDA certified organic blueberries. And here's why this one's a little more expensive, but here's why it's worth it. And yeah, you sort of realize that's a problem. They can't do that. That sort of becomes the farmer's job. Again, we have to go out there and explain what's going on here. Luckily, we have advocates like you that are helping us, and maybe the word is starting to get out. But as far as hydroponics go, and blueberries are not the only crop that are affected this way. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, greens, and more every day. If anybody takes away anything from what I have to say today, it's that in the United States, according to the USDA, hydroponics are considered organic and only in the United States. Nowhere else in the world can you get away with this. Not in the EU, not in Australia, not in South America. You cannot label hydroponics as organic, only in the US. So you have to be wary of that. Well, how do you know? And the Real Organic Projects was started by farmers five years ago. We were one of the initial pilot farms there's. Now over 1100. It's growing quickly. There's a label. You have to look for the label. It's a real organic project. Anybody who's interested in this stuff, I encourage them to go to that website and there's extraordinary amount of information there. But that's what you have to do if you don't know the farmer. And to go back to your point on that, which I think is wonderful, Sarah, I think that's it. If you really want good food, you need to find your farmers and get to know them, ask questions about their growing practices. It's hard to do, especially hard to do for most of the people who don't live near farms. So now you're having to spend your time on the Internet. But that's the only surefire way. I would say that as far as organics and hydroponics go, another one is the Real Organic Project label. They do not allow that kind of thing. So if you see that label on there, it's an add on label. So the USDA organic certified, plus the real organic project label. So you can't be real Organic project certified if you're not first USDA certified. You have to have that under your belt, and then they scrutinize you and they say, okay, but USDA allows you to get away with this stuff. Are you doing that? No, we're not. And they say, okay, you can use our label. That's another way to do it. And hopefully that will be increasingly recognizable on the store shelves.
Sara Harper:Well, also, our little way of contributing to this is on our public website, globalfoodfarm.com. We also have a page that's called Finding Better Food, and I'm happy to add you to that page because Jill has worked with you. Jill knows you. We don't just throw people up there, but I just remember we have that page, and I'm like, yeah, you'd be a perfect addition to that. It's farmers in our network or that Jill knows that are on the regenerative journey and that are doing it in different ways, but they are willing to share what those ways are, and people can then decide for themselves if that's what they want to be. There one thing, whether it's a grass fed beef from Alberta, Canada, from our friend Craig Cameron, who we just interviewed last week, or whole grain wheatberries from North Dakota from our farmer Deanna and Lozinski there, they're all selling online direct to consumers. Now, it's a tiny fraction of what, but it's a beginning and it's a way. So that is Globalfoodform combetterfood, and we'll be happy to add you there too. So a link to your website so that we can help people find in an aggregate way who are people that are doing these amazing things, because what you're doing is amazing. It's a mission, it's a living. It's wonderful for many reasons, but it's truly, I think, a personal mission that we're all benefiting from. So thank you.
Hugh Kent:Thank you. Yeah, I'm great to hear you're doing that, because it's one thing to educate people, it's another thing to share with them your work in vetting farms and farming systems and shortcut that process for them because it's a really busy world. There's a lot of noise out there. And to have people you trust acting as your proxy to go out and find good food and good farms, that's great.
Sara Harper:Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time, Hugh, and I'll let you get back to the harvest.
Hugh Kent:Yes, great. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Sara Harper:You've been listening to Tasting Terroir, a podcast made possible by a magical collaboration between the following companies and supporters, all working together to help farmers, chefs, food companies, and consumers to build healthier soil for a healthier world. Risotera. Owned by Dr. Jill Clapperton, risotera is an international food security consulting company providing expert guidance for creating healthy soils that yield tasty, nutrient dense foods. Check us out@risottera.com. That's RH Izoterra.com and the Global Food and Farm online community, an ad free global social network and soil health streaming service that provides information and connections that help you apply the science and practice of improving soil health. Join us at Globalfood and Farm and from listeners like you to support us through our Patreon account@patreon.com tastingterwire. Patrons receive access to our full length interviews and selected additional materials. Patrons will also have the opportunity to submit questions that we will answer on the podcast. Tune in next week to hear more interviews and insights with myself, Sarah Harper and Dr. Joe Clapperton, as well as the regenerative farmers, chefs and emerging food. Companies in the Global Food and Farm. Online community and beyond. If you like our work, please give us a five star rating and share the podcast with your friends. Thanks so much for listening and for helping us get the word out about this new resource to taste the health of your food. Until next week, stay curious, keep improving, and don't stop believing that better is possible when knowledge is available.