Value to Our Customers

I think of customer value as the ability to delight our customers with everything we do.

The value proposition for great vegetables goes far beyond price.

Value embraces nutrition, flavor, convenience, purity and how our customers feel about their market experience, and more.

Let's explore some of the attributes of value...

Chemical Agriculture 106 - Minerals and Micro Nutrients

Chemical agriculture focuses on N, P & K to the exclusion of all others. As a result, we are mining our soils of essential minerals and micro-nutrients. We pretty much ignore these small but essential nutrients. If we had hundreds or even thousands of years the weathering of the soil would eventually restore these elements, but the removal rate is many times faster than natural processes can restore them.

The Petersen's have addressed this need by adding minerals to our soils. We started by adding 600 lbs per acre of lime (calcium carbonate) to the whole farm for the first several years. I knew that we needed calcium because of the weeds we were seeing (ones that grew well in a calcium deficient environment and because of some of the calcium deficient diseases, like blossom end rot in the tomatoes and peppers.)

In addition we added kelp a broad spectrum of minerals from the sea and we used fish emulsion which is also a broad mineral supplement.

The 3.5 million pounds of compost also has significant minerals. Why would that be?