"Are you going to write this as a story of a man who is virtually unknown in his own hometown?" asked the Blaine plant scientist who quietly asserts that someday he will win the Nobel prize for ending hunger in the world.

Dan Carlson, a Blaine resident since 1970, has been trying to convince a skeptical scientific community, and indeed his own community, that he has truly found the answer to feeding the hungry masses in third world nations. His creation is called Sonic Bloom, and it produces some pretty incredible results.

Through a combination of high-pitched sound and the foliar application of an organic mixture containing 55 trace minerals and amino acids, Sonic Bloom achieves the kind of results that has agronomists shaking their heads and scientists refusing to believe their eyes.

For example, Carlson has verified reports of tomato plants producing more than 500 tomatoes per plant, soybeans with up to 300 pods per plant, cauliflower growing five times normal size, bell peppers with 45-60 peppers on a plant when the state average is four or five.

People in 40 states and seven nations proclaim the glories of Sonic Bloom, attesting to results such as a 300-700 percent increase in production. In California, Carlson said they have brought in what is considered "the largest rice harvest in the world." He states that they are producing about 92 hundred pound sacks of rice per acre, when the average is around 35-40 hundred pound sacks.

The Japanese are so interested in this crop that the C.Itoh Corporation, the fifth largest company in Japan just under Mitsubishi, has authorized the importation of this rice into Japan.

On a video promoting Carlson’s product, farmers testify that "alfalfa is growing like weeds, " corn is producing multiple ears per plant, fruit trees are yielding record crops. In Florida, fruit growers report that trees afflicted by a disease called Young Tree Decline recover when treated with Sonic Bloom.

The announcer’s voice proclaims, "Sonic Bloom is sound nutrition," and the announcer promises "enhanced growth and vitality, increased yields, lower production costs, reduced use of fertilizers and herbicides, increased nutritional content, shortened maturity time, improved use of marginal soils in semi-arid climates."

Carlson claims that while accomplishing all of these things, Sonic Bloom does not deplete the soil or add poisons to the environment. "You don’t need those brown bottle poisons," he said, referring to the herbicides, fungicides and fertilizers which he said are part of the "petrochemical conspiracy."

Carlson said he has attracted the attention of a certain element. Like the man who has invented a better mousetrap, the rats are trying to buy him out with multimillion dollar offers.

He won’t say who has made the offers, but he does state, "I’m stepping on some real big toes out here, the seed companies, the fertilizer people. But we’ve had our go-arounds with those people. There’s no use bringing all that up."

He said it is his goal to get farmers to try his method and he can guarantee that he will give them back $3 for every dollar. His advertising states that Sonic Bloom is "the most remarkable breakthrough in agriculture in many years, and at $50 an acre per season, it may be the most economical technique you will use this year."

Yet farmers are hesitant to jump on the band wagon, Carlson said, because for one thing, they have been fooled so often that they’re suspicious. For another, they feel foolish applying the product because it "sounds like a police car is following the tractor."

Carlson’s kit, which costs $30 for the home package, includes a cassette with the specific pattern of harmonics that enhances growth. The cost of the farm size kit depends on the acreage covered, and there is a lease charge for the sound producing unit.

Harmonics are not unheard of in the plant world, Carlson explained. A man named Chris Bird wrote a best selling book called The Secret Life of Plants that devoted a chapter to the theory of harmonics.

According to the theory, certain combination of sounds make a plant more receptive to nutrients. What amazes Carlson is that they known for some time that sonics opened plants’ orifices, but nobody thought to feed the leaves when the orifices were open. Not until Sonic Bloom, that is.

Carlson said that once a farm tries his product, he’s his best advertisement. "But what I need from a farmer is data. I’ve got all this skepticism, and the whole academic community will not accept that sound does anything for plants."

Carlson, who has a B.S. degree in plant breeding from the University of Minnesota, speaks with all the zeal of a missionary, and in a way he is.

"I consider myself the caretaker of a gift," he said. Carlson, now in his forties, decided to devote his life to solving the problem of world hunger after witnessing an incident that had a profound effect on him. At the age of 19, while stationed with the Army in Korea from 1961-63, he saw a woman cripple for hunger.

"I watched a woman hold her child’s legs under the wheels of a truck. When the truck backed up, her child’s legs were crushed. But she did this so she could beg more successfully because she and her children were starving to death."

Carlson wanted to lash out at the woman, but he realized that she had sacrificed one child to save the rest of her children.

From that moment on, Carlson had a new purpose in life. "I probably would have been a professional soldier, but that really changed my life around. I decided there was more to do," he said.

He attended the University, working his way up from general college through agriculture and horticulture courses and finally got to design his own curriculum at the school. He said he wasn’t a particularly brilliant student, but his enthusiasm made up for his academic shortcomings.

As a man possessed with a singular purpose, Carlson swiftly found what he considered the magic formula that would help devastated countries produce food from barren, arid land.

But almost from the beginning he met with resistance from the traditional science world. Said Carlson, "When I got my degree, they said either I was too far advanced for the scientific community, or I was some sort of kook. So they handed me my degree and said, "We’re not going to give you any assistance, so go out and do what you can do."

What he did was attract the attention of people all over the world, and he’s now making a mark in the starving nations he set out to help. Through the Save the Children foundation, seeds treated with his Sonic Bloom substance and teamed with a solar-powered sonic player are being used to grow food in eastern Africa – the Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia; and they can thrive, with a couple of inches of rain and temperatures of 145 degrees.

When he used his product on a Purple Passion house plant which normally grows to about 18 inches, the plant grew to 600 feet and earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Eventually the plant zoomed to 1300 feet, and when he called Guinness to update the record, he was told not to bother because no one would ever equal the 600 foot mark.

Carlson isn’t so sure, though. When his sons ‘rough-housing accidentally bumped the plant into the ceiling fan, ripping off the ends, Carlson sold the pieces at a flea market. A few months later, he got calls from some of his customers saying that their plants had grown to over a hundred feet.

"I tried to drag the University professors out here to look at this Purple Passion plant, but they said it was of no agricultural value," Carlson said. "They suggested we grow food stuffs like tomatoes and bell peppers so we started here in Blaine." When Carlson told him of their amazing test results, their response was that it was just backyard gardening and not important.

He said he even has had a similar response from local science teachers. "I have tried every year to get the teachers at Blaine excited, but they say there is no way it can work."

Carlson said that in a way he can understand their reaction. He said that the American theory is that genetically, plants can be altered only by gene splicing, cloning, or hybridization. The Russian theory, however, states that "good nutrition allows genetic alteration." He said that it is unfortunate that his process inadvertently supports the Russian theory, "not by any choice of mine, but by the plant’s reaction." That’s hard for them to swallow, he said. "If I’m right, then all colleges have got to change suits in midstream."

While the scientific community may by ignoring Carlson’s Sonic Bloom, the rest of the world isn’t. With his wife Patty’s help, Carlson’s company, Scientific Enterprises, Inc., receives and answers about 30 pieces of mail a day, and Carlson answers at least as many phone calls about his product.

Those are just the people who can find, Carlson said, chuckling as he related an incident that happened after some publicity brought a flood of responses last month.

"Last month 48 people called the phone company and asked for my listing, and they were all told that there’s no Blaine in Minnesota." He said the 48 people found his number by calling the magazine which carried his story.

"I may be a man unknown in my own home town," he said, laughing. "But the problem is, the hometown isn’t known."

Carlson manages to keep a sense of humor. "You have to be careful how you handle this stuff," he said with a twinkle in his eye as he stroked his dark, thick beard. "Would you believe I shaved just this morning?"

Patty Carlson is responsible for handling the correspondence and bookkeeping for his company, and while Carlson is being wined and dined by the world, she packages their product in the basement of their modest Blaine home.

"I go all over the world and eat in fancy restaurants while she stays home and works, "Carlson teased.

"That’s why I’m skinny and you’re not," she banters back.

Even the Carlsons’ three children are involved in some aspect of the business. His daughter, Justine, is a senior at Blaine High School, and Jason, 14 is a student at Roosevelt Junior High. Their oldest son, Dan, 19, graduated from Blaine last year.

Carlson has mixed feelings about the applause he is receiving from abroad. On the one hand, he’s pleased that his product is so popular in other nations.

"I’m happy, but I’m sad in a way that the Japanese went to seven or eight states with me. They said, ‘Hey, this kid has made the breakthrough of the century in agriculture,’ and they put their money into it."

Carlson said he was confident that one day his product will be recognized by his peers as the miracle it is. It may take another 20 years, he said, but it will happen.

"I am a man ahead of his time," he said. "There is no way I can describe the frustration."

-- Blaine-Spring Lake Park Life, December 12, 1986