FOUNDER’S STATEMENT

Why I built Quartz Mountain Analytics

Since my early twenties I’ve always been drawn to gardening. My interest began after I left the Army in 1971 and moved onto a couple of acres on the California central coast where I attended college and looked after a few goats, a Jersey cow, a pig, and some chickens and was exposed to a more holistic view of life than I had been raised with. Over the years, I’ve continued to garden, but it was when I moved onto a larger property in the 1980s that my love of natural gardening really had room to grow and I reconnected with those holistic roots.

The idea of feeding the soil—not just the plant—always felt right to me, but doing that was never easy. Natural amendments each bring their own combination of nutrients and other effects. Correcting one problem can easily create another if those overlapping contributions are not considered together.

As I tried to solve that problem for my own garden, using Microsoft Access I built my first soil nutrient calculator. It tracked the overlapping nutrient contributions made by different materials and helped solve the amendment allocation puzzle.

That early calculator eventually led to the idea behind Quartz Mountain Analytics: take the evidence already present in a laboratory soil test, preserve what the laboratory actually reported, and translate it into a clear, practical, naturally focused amendment plan for the place where the soil will actually be used.

I do not believe every soil-test result calls for another product. Sometimes the correct answer is to add nothing. Sometimes it is to retest or obtain better information before making a correction. When an amendment is supported, the goal is to choose it carefully, account for everything it contributes, and provide an amount that makes sense for the actual bed, garden, orchard, or field.

QMA is the result of that long-running effort to understand how the pieces fit together and make the process more useful for the person doing the work.

— Doug Dunn, Founder
Quartz Mountain Analytics