140: Dan Kittredge Regenpreneur Story - Organizing Around the Quality of our Food

Seeds of Tao: Impact entrepreneurs seeding regenerative paths beyond sustainability

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Description:

In this captivating episode, we sit down with Dan Kittredge, the visionary founder of the Bionutrient Foundation, to explore his inspiring journey in regenerative agriculture and the pursuit of food quality. Dan's day, a blend of soil advocacy and paper-writing, reflects his passion for quality food. His infectious enthusiasm emanates from a deep desire to make a positive global impact. Discover how his upbringing on an organic farmstead shaped his unique perspective, offering competence and a lifelong connection to nature to his children. For those aspiring to embrace the farmstead lifestyle, Dan's invaluable advice provides a roadmap to success. He emphasizes balance and shares ways to get involved. Tune in for a journey that inspires change, one nutrient-dense bite at a time. 🌱🌍

You can read the full show notes on our site.

Guest Bio: Dan Kittredge

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.”

Dan grew up on Many Hands Organic Farm in central Massachusetts. After a global career in food and seed activism where he worked with farmers across India, Russia, and Central America, Dan returned to the U.S. and launched the BFA in 2010 to ignite a movement around food quality.

His resonating message has filled hundreds of workshops and speaking engagements with farmers and eaters alike hungry for answers. To expand upon these concepts is the BFA flagship event, the annual Soil & Nutrition Conference, now in its tenth year that has hosted speakers such as John Kempf, Ray Archuleta, Kathleen DiChiara, David Montgomery, Fred Kirschenmann, Judith Schwartz, Graham Sait, Bernard Pollack, Glen Rein, Dorn Cox, Elaine Ingham, Joel Salatin, Stephan van Vliet, Fred Provenza and many more luminaries in the food and ag sectors.

A born leader in this field, Dan has solidified himself as an expert in the world of “nutrient density” and biological or regenerative agriculture. Through this mission, the Bionutrient Institute was launched, with partner organizations, Our-sci LLC, FarmOS, and Next 7, to demonstrate and share the connections between nutrient density and soil, plant, and human health.

BFA’s significant growth since 2018 now means three labs in the U.S. and one in Europe are conducting surveys of the food supply, measuring the variation of nutritional compounds found in food, and connecting it to management practices.

In 2021, the Institute unveiled a second-generation prototype of a hand-held consumer spectrometer called the Bionutrient Meter, calibrated by the sampling done at the labs. The meter is designed to test nutritional quality at the point of purchase, bringing transparency to the marketplace and providing growers with the needed tools to increase nutrition in their crops and leverage economic incentives to drive complete system regeneration.

The most recent lab in Boston is designed to further the mission of our understanding of nutrient density and to engineer an advanced version of the Bionutrient Meter with the data used for calibration all being open source, demonstrating the BFA’s commitment to small landholders and the greater global Commons.

To learn more about this work, visit: Bionutrient.org and BionutrientInstitute.org