The Bionutrient Food Association (BFA) was incorporated in late 2010, and formally established as a tax exempt charitable organization in February 2012. The BFA is an outgrowth of the Real Food Campaign, which was a project of the non-profit Remineralize the Earth. The Real Food Campaign was established as a project of Remineralize the Earth in August of 2008.
Currently, the BFA is positioned at a key nexus point in the food movement, organizing around quality in the food supply, but in the beginning, our organizational efforts focused primarily on identifying limiting factors in farming systems and conducting "how to" courses for growers seeking to improve the health of their soil and crops for greater yields, more nutrient-rich produce, and better marketability.
Isn’t organic enough?
Years ago, this is the question Dan Kittredge, Executive Director of BFA, found himself asking. Son of respected figures in the organic movement, and a lifelong farmer, Dan began wondering why, if organic was really the best method of farming, his crops suffered from perennial pest and disease issues. Committed to the principles and ethos of organics, but struggling to learn how to be a better farmer and to more comfortably provide for his family, Dan’s own explorations and research led him to the work of such luminaries as Dr. William Albrecht, Carey Reams, Bruce Tainio, Rudolf Steiner, Bill Mollison, Elaine Ingham, and others. Through the integration and application of principles learned from these and others, he began to see results in his crops that spoke to a more coherent way of working with the land.
Feeling the need to share the results he saw and practices that caused them, the BFA was born out of an attempt to support other growers struggling to work with their land more well. Central to the organizational development has been a two-day intensive course, "Principles of Biological Systems". Walking growers through the year, this course teaches the importance of engaging the biological system as a whole to improve soil and crop quality, and the resultant diminishing of pest and disease pressure, while improving yield and marketability. Believing firmly that "If it's true, it will work; and if it works, it will spread," word has indeed spread through the grassroots of the food movement, and to date, several thousands of farmers, homesteaders and backyard growers across the country have taken courses with BFA.
Building on this momentum and in response to the obvious thirst to dig deeper into the relationship between soil health, plant health, and human health, the BFA hosted the first annual Soil & Nutrition Conference in 2012. Bringing together the collective and pioneering knowledge of the food movement, this conference has become a central link in the conversation between agriculture and human health, coalescing the food movement and all interested in the vital relationship between soil and nutrition. With the growing recognition of the critical role soil health plays in human and planetary health, the transformative nature of the organization's mission is now being embraced not just by farmers and growers, but also environmentalists, chefs, health practitioners, and eaters who understand the food in the markets is not what it should be.
With a mission of “increasing quality in the food supply” the BFA is now a national organization at the forefront of the conversation to transform agriculture by recognizing the critical role soil health plays in a healthy crops not only increasing their nutritive value, flavor and aroma, but also simultaneously sequestering carbon, obviating the need for fertilizers and agrochemicals, and healing those who eat them.