Why I built Quartz Mountain Analytics

My interest in gardening organically began during my early 20's 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 what I had been raised with in the city.

The idea of feeding the soil—not just the plant—always felt right to me but doing that was never easy. Natural amendments were difficult to fit accurately into my garden plan. I often had to guess which to use and how much to apply and I could never be certain that, while adding one nutrient I needed, I wasn’t adding others I didn’t. I felt there had to be a better, more precise way to use naturally sourced amendments that would deliver the nutrients I needed without adding more of those that were already there.

I saw amendments supplying nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other nutrients as multi-sided puzzle pieces where all of the pieces had to fit together—and stay within the frame—to solve the problem. Most natural amendments supply more than one nutrient. When you add the fact that some respond differently to temperature, many release their nutrients over different periods of time, and others supply nutrients but change the soil pH, adding an amendment to correct one imbalance may unintentionally contribute to another.

Add differences in soil type, laboratory testing methods, nutrient availability, crop requirements, moisture, temperature, and biological activity, and it became clear that calculating amendment quantities is only part of the picture. In spite of those difficulties, I continued to believe there had to be a better way than simply making educated guesses.

In 2010 and 2011, a few years after retiring from my workday career, I build my first soil nutrient calculator using Microsoft Access. It kept track of the overlapping nutrient contributions made by different materials and helped solve the amendment-allocation puzzle, but the user interface was cumbersome, the setup was time-consuming, and the calculator could not incorporate many of the elements essential to soil-laboratory science and accuracy. At that time, I knew it still needed improving but I did not have access to the tools I needed to make that happen.

Fast-forward to 2025. This time, I had better tools, more insight, and a greater understanding of how laboratory methods and agronomic guidance should be applied. So, I redesigned the process in a way that would preserve the laboratory’s original values, units, methods, and flags; recognize that results produced by different testing methods are not necessarily interchangeable; and use targets appropriate to the crop and method. The calculator now accounts for nutrients beyond nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, tracks overlapping contributions, calculates quantities for your actual growing area, and documents the sources, selections, calculations, and conversions used.

I founded Quartz Mountain Analytics to answer to the same question that has been hounding me for years: Once I have laboratory soil-test results, how do I determine which natural amendments are appropriate, calculate how much of each to apply to my actual growing area, and avoid adding more of a nutrient when the existing level is already sufficient—while staying within boundaries supported by applicable agronomic guidance?

QMA is not a soil-testing laboratory and does not produce the underlying test results. Our purpose is to connect laboratory evidence and published agronomic guidance with a documented, traceable process for calculating natural amendment quantities. Now, in 2026, I’m very happy to share what I’ve learned, and provide you a refined system that produces needed solutions that grew from that original question I was never quite willing to let go of.

Doug Dunn
Founder, Quartz Mountain Analytics