Work continues in the Nutrition Farming for Hawaii (NFH) Research and Demonstration Garden.  Here are some more impressive examples of increased nutrient content from our first year as compared to USDA Food Nutrient Database published values.

Below are two crops, red curly lettuce and green onions.  Most values show good gains over the USDA values.  You will notice the NFH crops’ phosphorus is not as high.  Phosphorus is a particular problem in Hawaii soils.  We put on quite a bit of soft rock phosphate, an organically-approved type of phosphorus, which takes some time to become fully available to the crops.  I’m not too worried about it because phosphorus is rarely a missing element in human nutrition.  We will continue to tweak the soil to get it just right.  We are just about ready to do a retest of the soil.

What is most impressive on these reports are the gains in elements that are often deficient in human nutrition, such as calcium, iron, and zinc.