How David Stelzer Is Challenging Industrial Agriculture

The phrase “Healthy Soil, Healthy Families” is more than a slogan for David Stelzer. It is the organizing principle behind a four-decade mission to restore integrity to America’s food supply.

As Founder and CEO of Azure Standard, Stelzer has built one of the largest independent distributors of organic and non-GMO food in the United States. But the story of Azure did not begin as a business strategy. It began as a health crisis.

When Food Becomes Personal

Stelzer grew up on a multi-generational farm in the Pacific Northwest. As a child, he faced serious health challenges that doctors believed would limit his life expectancy. A radical dietary shift — guided by a naturopath — transformed his trajectory. Recovery came slowly but decisively. Even his grandfather, previously sidelined by heart problems, regained vitality.

For the Stelzer family, the conclusion was unavoidable: food matters.

That realization would eventually grow into Azure Standard, a national distribution network with more than 4,000 community drop points and thousands of retail partners — but the company began far more modestly.

From Surplus Grain To National Network

In the 1980s, Stelzer’s father had already made the unconventional decision to farm organically — well before it was fashionable or profitable. For a time, the farm supplied grain to Bob’s Red Mill. But when that contract ended, the family was left with organic grain and no market.

Young and undeterred, Stelzer loaded up flour and began visiting small health food stores across Oregon and Washington. When store owners requested additional products, he didn’t decline. He sourced them.

What emerged wasn’t just a distribution business. It was an early solution to what we now call “food deserts.” Rural families asked him to pick up products from Portland or Seattle when he was passing through. Eventually, he formalized the route. A two-page stapled paper catalog — assembled on a decades-old word processor — marked the birth of Azure Standard.

There was no grand national strategy at the outset. But by the early 2000s, consolidation was reshaping the natural food industry. Smaller regional distributors were being acquired or forced out by large conglomerates. Stelzer recognized that survival required scale.

An attempt to build a cooperative national network with other independent distributors ultimately failed. When shared investment was required, partners hesitated. Stelzer moved forward alone.

Fifteen years later, the vision had materialized: Azure Standard had achieved nationwide coverage.

“Healthy Soil Creates Healthy Families”

Stelzer frequently summarizes his philosophy in a single phrase: Healthy soil creates healthy families.

For him, the statement is not rhetorical. It reflects what he sees as a foundational biological chain.

Nearly all food, whether plant- or animal-based, originates with plants. Through photosynthesis, plants convert sunlight and water into energy. That energy enables them to grow and to form carbohydrates, proteins, and fats — the core building blocks of the human diet.

Yet plants do not function independently. Soil contains complex microbial communities — bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms — that break down organic matter and minerals into forms plants can absorb. In return, plant roots release sugars into the soil to support those microbes. The relationship is symbiotic: soil organisms support plant nutrition, and plants sustain soil life.

When soil ecosystems are robust, Stelzer argues, plants tend to contain a broader spectrum of nutrients. When soil biology is degraded, he believes the nutritional profile of crops may shift.

This perspective shapes Azure Standard’s sourcing philosophy. The company emphasizes organic and regenerative farming practices that prioritize soil health and biological diversity. Stelzer frames the issue less as a marketing distinction and more as a systems-level question: how foundational inputs affect downstream outcomes.

The logic is straightforward. If soil health influences plant health, and plant health influences food quality, then soil becomes a central variable in human nutrition.

Even animal products ultimately trace back to the same system. Livestock depend on plant-based feed, which in turn depends on soil conditions. In that sense, Stelzer views soil not simply as farmland infrastructure, but as the base layer of the broader food economy.

His broader critique of modern agriculture flows from this premise. If production is measured primarily by yield — by volume per acre — other variables such as nutrient density may receive less attention.

“Healthy soil creates healthy families,” in this framework, becomes less a slogan and more a systems argument: that the health of the food supply begins below ground.

The Yield-First System

Stelzer argues that modern agriculture disrupted this natural balance.

He points to the widespread use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers — particularly anhydrous ammonia — as a turning point. While nitrogen increases yield, he argues it can dilute nutrient density and reduce reliance on soil microbial processes. He references the Green Revolution, led by agronomist Norman Borlaug, whose semi-dwarf wheat varieties allowed for heavy nitrogen application without crops collapsing.

The result was unprecedented yield growth and global food security gains. But Stelzer questions whether the long-term nutritional trade-offs have been fully examined.

His critique is not framed as anti-science. Rather, it is about incentives.

“When farming is commoditized and paid by the ton,” he suggests, “there’s no reward for nutrient density — only volume.”

Decentralization As A Competitive Advantage

Azure’s operating model reflects Stelzer’s worldview.

Instead of relying exclusively on centralized retail chains, Azure built a decentralized drop-point system. Families gather monthly at churches, parking lots, and rural hubs to receive bulk deliveries. The model lowers costs, strengthens community, and creates direct relationships between consumers and the food supply chain.

In an era where supply chain fragility has become a national concern, this distributed model appears prescient.

Azure also enforces strict product standards. Stelzer emphasizes that even processed items must contain recognizable, whole-food ingredients. When suppliers fail to meet quality expectations, Azure has gone so far as to build its own production facilities.

The company’s mission — “to inspire healthy and abundant living” — extends beyond commerce. It is an attempt to reintroduce transparency and trust into a system Stelzer believes has drifted toward centralization and opacity.

A Cultural Shift, Not Just A Market Trend

The organic food sector is no longer fringe. It is a multi-billion-dollar industry. But Stelzer maintains that the conversation should extend beyond labels.

For him, regenerative agriculture is about stewardship — about recognizing farmers as guardians of public health rather than mere commodity producers.

His forthcoming book, scheduled for release in Autumn 2025, will chronicle the rise of Azure Standard and outline his broader vision for rebuilding the American food system from the ground up.

Whether one agrees with every claim or not, Stelzer represents a growing cohort of entrepreneurs reframing food as infrastructure — not just product.

And in a time when trust in institutions is eroding, infrastructure built on soil, community, and transparency may prove to be a durable foundation.

The question Stelzer poses is simple but profound: if the health of a nation begins in its soil, what kind of ground are we cultivating?

Interview Transcript with David Stelzer:

Alan Olsen
Welcome to American Dreams. My guest today is David Stetzler and David welcome to today’s show. Well, thank you. Appreciate you having me So David, can you share for the listeners a little bit about your background of how Azure Standard came about?

David Stelzer
Yeah, sure, I’m, you know, been on organic farmer. My dad actually started farming organically back in 1973 so a little bit before it was cool and he got into farming organically because of health issues within the family. Myself, particularly I was not, you know, very weak, sickly. Doctors did not expect me to live, and they got involved with a nature path, or found a nature path, and he recommended a major diet change. That diet change worked. I mean, not instantly. I mean, it took a little while before I recovered, a year or so, actually, after strictly adhering to the to the new diet. And so it really got dad. And then I recovered. And as a side bar, my granddad recovered as well. He had been struggling with heart issues for years. He had retired 10 years earlier. He was back out, working 18 hours a day again on the farm, and, you know, purely from a diet change. So diet was, you know, we realized, he realized, particularly, I mean, I was pretty young then, how terribly important it was. So then he got to figuring out what we were actually using in the chemicals on the farm, and got convicted that we shouldn’t be using those things that clean food. You know, we we don’t need these kinds of additives to our food. If we’re, if the, if the farmer is the guardian of the nation’s health, then we definitely don’t need that. So hence we, he started farming organically. Originally, in the early days, he had a contract with Bob Moore, founder of Bob’s Red Mill. He worked with him, and so our grain all went to Bob’s Red Mill products in the in the mid late 80s, Bob decided he didn’t want organic grain anymore, based on his contract with Fred Meyers, I believe. And so we didn’t have a market. Suddenly, I was young and stupid, so I figured that there was somebody was buying this grain, and I needed to go find them. So I started, you know, went to little health food stores and food co ops and stuff. And, hey, you want some grain, some flour. I got some ground in the flour here at a mill that’s up in Yakima. Anyway, pretty soon, couple things happened. One is, you know this, some of the stores started asking for other things. And instead of saying No, I said, I’ll find them for you. And then we found that there was kind of food deserts, especially in like Eastern Washington and places like that, where we had originally started as far as healthy food, because I kept, because I was driving these little routes around, you know, just Oregon and Washington, really. Now I had people asking me, Hey, when you’re in Portland or Seattle or wherever, you know, can you stop and pick me up some, some of this product or that product. And so I started, you know, so I started doing it pretty regularly, and I finally clicked in my in my head that, hey, there’s a demand for this. You know, there this is a service that needs to happen if I’m driving, and I may as well get paid for it. And, you know, do it as a regular thing. So I put together this little paper catalog. It was just like two pages folded together and stapled, put it together on a word processor. That’s like, 21 years old, and that was when we came up with the name and stuff, Azure Standard. That’s when it was born. So there’s there it is in a nutshell on that, yeah, so, so

Alan Olsen
in, you know, Azure Standard, was there always a vision that you would be scaling this nationwide, or was it just, it initially a local type of the. Organic distribution system.

David Stelzer
You know, I really wasn’t thinking about it from a national level in the very, very beginning, when it got a little bit further along. So this would have been Oh, somewhere is around oh five, or somewhere in there, it occurred to me that it would be a lot easier if we had national coverage. Now. I mean, we weren’t very big at that point. We were doing, I think we had just started delivering a little bit into California. We were doing Oregon, Washington, little bits of Idaho. I think we did a little bit in the north west part of Montana, then over by Kalispell and stuff. But that was that was it. And so I realized at that point, when we started, there were like 90 natural, organic and natural food distributors around the country, lots of small, little local natural food distributors. That’s how it was done all over but there was a couple big guys that came in were coming in right about that time, and there they still are. But all the little distributors were going out of business like crazy, you know, and we took over, you know, not, I mean, we got a lot of the customers of several of those here in the Northwest, but they were either getting bought or destroyed, like one after The other by the two, two mammoth conglomerates that are still in in place today. And so I actually called I had this vision, and it’s like and I had no money, no resource, no way I could do it. So I called up, and actually even got a conference call together for like, five natural food distributors that still were hanging in there, and kind of were the little bit bigger ones. There was one in Arizona, one in Arkansas, one in New Hampshire, and one in, I believe it was either southern Pennsylvania or Ohio. And, you know, and I had kind of laid out on a map, if each of us took, kind of a territory, and we did national advertising to that, to this marketplace about healthy food, that, you know, hey, we would all survive. And we could split up the country in these five regions, and, you know, I would take, you know, the Northwest Northern California, and a little bit of, you know, going east into the, maybe even in the into the Dakotas, because that’s kind of unpopulated. Nobody wants that. And then, you know, then Arkansas, he would take, you know, that, you know, and so on. And everyone thought it was a good idea, more or less when we first started, because, you know, we could, all, you know, have a national website, natural food cooperate, the natural food Co Op thing and, and, you know, and then wherever the customer was, they would go to the website of the appropriate vent, you know, vendor and all that. But when it actually came time to start shelling out a little money to make that happen, we were all on our own. Nobody else was willing to do a dime and so and it, of course, being all on my own, I didn’t have, I didn’t have resources. Still very fast. So it became another, you know, another 10 year journey, well, probably more like a 15 year journey to slowly cover the country. And in the meantime, all of those companies either got acquired or went out of business that you know is working with back then. Not as you know, not a single one. It still exists. It’s uh, so it’s, it’s, it’s just it. So we kind of did it by necessity, in many ways, to cover the whole the whole country.

Alan Olsen
How many points of distribution do you have now? Roughly the drop points,

David Stelzer
a little over 4000 about 4200 plus another 1000 or so stores throughout the country, mostly on the West Coast. With the stores,

Alan Olsen
let’s move into is something that you often will say, healthy soil creates Healthy Families. What? Why do you say that?

David Stelzer
Well, it’s definitely been my experience. All all life starts in the soil and with. Plants, there is nothing. All of the energy, everything we get in our bodies, has to begin in the soil. And there’s this little miraculous thing that is called photosynthesis. And you know, grade school science class, but you know, and it’s like, oh, yeah, whatever. But really, that’s the miracle of life. All. The only thing that can convert water and sunlight into energy is photosynthesis, energy that any life can use. I mean, they do have now the photo cell in a solar panel. But photosynthesis is what produces all life. And basically, you know, in a super tight nutshell, it converts water and sunlight to sugar. And I’m saying that loosely, these not like you’d think of white sugar, but but sugars and the body and the plants use that the plants use that sugar to build building blocks of all the other nutrients. It’s the energy source of a plant, and it builds cellulose, and it builds protein, and it builds fats and everything else out of this beautiful process called photosynthesis, and it brings up other minerals out of the soil to combine with those you know process through the plant, which, if you Really think about it is really a miraculous thing, the way plants are able to process sunlight into sugar, sugar into proteins and fats and and even essential oils for that matter. So all we get our nutrients, as do all animals and insects and everything else from plants, including micro microbiology, which plants actually need microbiology to to break down the other nutrients in the soil to make them bio available. The only nutrient that they can create is sugar. All the rest of them, they’re completely dependent on bacteria, primarily and some fungi that’s in the soil to produce those nutrients for them, and in exchange, they exude sugar into the soil to feed those bacteria and microbes so that they have the energy to be able To transition inorganic minerals and broken down plant matter and everything else that’s in the soil that can be used. I mean, that’s what compost is. It’s just broken down plant material and animal material, you know, manures and plants and whatever, to create compost that then is bio available and usable to the plant. So how healthy that plant is is how healthy our nutrients are that go into our bodies, the Yeah, and that’s the building block of our energy, our muscles, our bones, everything, including our the fats that are in our brain all come from those plants. So let’s not, let’s not downplay, you know, first hand or second hand, if you’re a meat eater, that’s fine. It’s still from plants. It’s only second hand. It came through a cow or a chicken or whatever first but it still ultimately came from the plants that come from the soil. All it all comes from the soil. That’s why I feel that that’s so key to health in the in the way that the plants, the health, the health of the plant, dictates how healthy the food is and how well balanced our nutrients are and how utilizable they are to our body.

Alan Olsen
Do I love the way that that, you know, the Azure standards been able to create the community drop points for the organic farmers, and in the way this model has helped to bring the local communities together, I’m going to roll back though when we do a comparison of organic compared to our modern food system, what worries you about our modern food system today?

David Stelzer
Well, there’s two primary things. One is, and this is what pretty much everybody talks about, but I would say this is the lesser of the two concerns is the poisons. There are a plethora of poisons that are being put on our food. You know, obviously the one that people are talking about the most is the glyphosate after. You know, it was proved in court, and they settled hundreds of settlements and all this stuff that it causes, well, lymphoma, you know, but it causes a lot more than that. It also causes issues in our joints and a bunch of some other things as well. But it’s not the only one. We also use. There are other names now, but basically the old name was two, 4d and in Vietnam, they called it Agent Orange. They’re using it on our food system all the time, every day, still to this day, not to mention all the bug killers, you know, insecticides that are being used, some of them are basically forms of nerve gasses and things like that. Those are getting in our food and, you know, poisoning the population from the inside out. And so we can talk a little bit about that. But the more important thing is that almost all conventional farmers in ag are using some form of ammonia as fertilizer. So it’s anhydrous ammonia, Aqua ammonia. Fill in the blank. There’s a bunch of different forms. It’s marketed different ways. It’s basically all the same thing. And even if you get weed and feed on your yard at some form of that you’ve got, well, you got get both. You get a herbicide and which is a 240 derivative, plus you get, you know, an ammonia product. So what happens with ammonia? It’s a synthesizer of nitrogen. Now, nitrogen is the growth regulator of a plant. It regulates how big the plant gets. The more nitrogen you have available to the plant, the bigger the plant gets. Well, the way farming is gone. You get paid by the ton for your farm commodities. So the bigger the plant is, the more tons get produced. There’s no incentive to the farmer to get paid for anything except how many tons he produces, because we’ve commoditized farming. That is concerning. We should not be commoditized, seeing farming, but, and that’s where Azure breaks from modern agriculture. We are not commoditizing farming, but in order to get more tons, you use more ammonia, or if you’re a conventional farmer, in organic that’s not allowed, because what happens is that ammonia, it can be utilized by the plant without the microbes breaking it down. So the microbes still have to produce all the rest of the nutrients in the soil to for the plant to to be balanced, you know, to get minerals and vitamins and everything that’s in the plant. So there’s only a few nutrients that the plant can even produce out of ammonia. And I want to just, I’ll just tell a little story about about proteins. So an and before I do that, maybe just think about it in this sense, you have the growth regulator being synthesized so the plant gets bigger. All the rest of the nutrients are not the microbes aren’t any healthier. It doesn’t help the microbes one iota. In fact, it’s harmful on the microbes to some degree, probably a greater degree than we think. So there’s less microbial action, but you have but it’s spread out over a much bigger plant, so all the rest of the nutrients become diluted in that plant. So you have a lot more tons, and there’s a few things that can be produced. So basic, simple sugars can be produced by the plant with and certain single chain proteins can be produced using, and I’ll use wheat as an example, because wheat is very, you know, hey, wheat is something that we as a species, we’ve been eating for, you know, literally 1000s of years. It’s the backbone of civilization. You know, we didn’t have civilization before we had wheat. Wheat was, you know, it was the founding plant of agriculture. It was the, maybe not the first domesticated plant, but the first domesticated plant of any volume that could actually create cities and civilizations. Now, you know, and so our microbiome is very well adjusted. To eating wheat. And suddenly we now have a situation where a lot of people are having trouble eating wheat. Oh, celiac disease, this and that. Well, if you break it down and you look in back in the 50s, there was this guy named [Norman] Borlaug or something like that. And he created what was he became, got a Noble Peace Prize for the Green Revolution. Hear that term, the Green Revolution. What he did is he created hybridized varieties of wheat that grow well with anhydrous ammonia. Before that, if you put anhydrous ammonia on wheat, and they were using it on other things, like corn before that, to get more mass. But in wheat, you couldn’t, because the wheat would grow too tall, and then it would tip over, and then you got nothing. So he hybridized. He created wheat varieties as a wheat breeder that were that grew short, but would still have as big a head on them. So now they were short, they didn’t have all the leverage in the wind, and they wouldn’t tip over. You know, they still will a little bit, but for the most part, they don’t tip over. And you can put a whole bunch of anhydrous ammonia on the wheat before the before that wheat became popular in the 60s, there was no such thing as celiac disease. No one ever heard of it. Nor did anyone hear of anyone being allergic to wheat. I mean, people were allergic to other things, but no one was allergic to wheat. You know, there was things like milk and soy. There were still some allergies in some of those spaces, but not wheat. It wasn’t even on the allergen list. No one even wanted it. But what happens is, turns out, when a wheat, when the wheat is developing, it gets all this anhydrous ammonia, so it’s creating all this mass, but the only amino acid that it can produce is L glutamine. So you get but wheat is relatively high in protein, and in order for them to keep the protein up, since the anhydrous can only produce the L glutamine, you have to produce a lot more of the L glutamine to get the protein conna content up to the 12 to 14% that wheat typically runs. That’s why wheat was foundational in civilization. Because, you know, not only does it have a lot of energy and carbs in it, but it has a lot of protein comparatively to other plants. I mean, it’s only eight or 9% less than you know, like peasants, even less on peas and soybeans that are considered to be the high protein plant based foods, wheats not too far below that and but now you’re getting all this protein that’s only basically one amino acid with just a tiny bit of amino acid chain from the other if you use the ancient grains that are not being pushed with anhydrous ammonia, the old ones that were raised prior to the Green Revolution. There is somewhere around 12 to 14 amino acids. In the amino acid chain, in the modern wheat, there’s about three, and about 90% of it is one amino acid. So when we’re eating, you know, wheat is still kind of the staff of life, and a lot of folks lives, we still eat a lot of wheat. But you’re, you know, we eat a bunch of wheat, use that as a protein. Our bodies need about 23 amino acids to make healthy muscles, and it’s getting this huge influx of one amino acid. And so it’s scrambling, trying to find the other amino acids. And I’m simplifying this, but this is kind of the way that it works. It’s trying to find these other amino acids to be able to and it’s getting this huge surplus of this one amino acid. And eventually it says, I had enough. I can’t handle this. Don’t allow any more of this into the body. And it creates an autoimmune response against wheats because they’re high in L glutamine. Does that kind of make sense? How this and it happens with all of it. It happens with the sugars. It happens with the proteins, the and the fats, all three of those, which are the essential nutrients for humans.

Alan Olsen
I love the way you’ve outlined everything about the nutrients and the amino acids and the processes through the body. Where can listeners go to find out more about the Azure standard?

David Stelzer
Well, obviously Azure standard.com, we have, that’s the website, and then we have a you. You know, and then there’s, there is a lot of fun information on there as well about some of the things we’ve been talking about under the Azure life section. But it’s a, you know, it’s a great way to be able to, you know, purchase organic food our, you know, our mission is really to inspire healthy and abundant living. You know, that’s what we want to do. But, you know, we, we do sell food and organic health products, and that’s kind of what, you know, what makes Azure, Azure tick, and it also gives, you know, everyone around the country, an option for healthier foods, because that’s what we do here at Azure, is we vet these farms, we vet the processes. We make sure, you know, not that it’s a perfect world. We can’t be perfect on it. You know, we’d have to go back to the Garden of Eden to do that, but we get the best that is available. And, you know, and we, we have, you know, there you won’t find anything. Even in the, in the processed foods that we do sell, you won’t find anything that you can’t read, and that’s not a real food. This is, you know, our standards are very, very strong, and that’s what, you know, that’s what I feel like our real mission is, is to be able to make to vet, and sometimes we even have to produce it. We’ve even built factories to to manufacture certain products because nobody was doing it clean enough.

Alan Olsen
So David, it’s been a pleasure having you with us here in American dreams, unfortunately, we’re out of time, but we appreciate the time that you’ve given us today to talk about the Azure Standard

David Stelzer
Well, thank you very much. It’s been my pleasure.