Measuring Nutrient Density with Dan Kittredge

Hi friends, this is John. I'm passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce food of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've been fortunate to meet many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems. However, much of this knowledge and information is scattered all over the place. I founded Advancing eco Agriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agriculture systems become the mainstream globally, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared. To achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or topics that you would like for me to discuss, please connect on social media or email me johngenerativeagriculturepodcast.com Be sure to sign up for our email list@regenerativeagriculturepodcast.com Hope you enjoy and thank you for listening. Our community impact spot for this episode is Hourglass Films, who has developed a documentary called Sustainable which features some of the growers we work with at aea. I would encourage you to watch the film and I hope that you find it useful.

This is Matt Wexler, director of the documentary sustainable. In 2013, my wife and I set out to make an inspirational film that spoke to the regenerative agriculture movement. Early on we met Marty Travis of Spence Farm, who would become our main character on a journey through the seasons of of producing food in a way that is not only good for people, but good for the soil. Sustainable has since developed a cult following from those looking to reinvent the food system and I invite you to check it out. You may even find a segment on the amazing host of this podcast. Visit sustainablefoodfilm.com for more information.

We want your feedback. We've been publishing the Regenerative Agriculture podcast for almost two years and over 5,000 people listen to each episode and we really want to hear from you and learn from you. What is it that you would like to hear more of and what suggestions do you have for improvement? There's a link in the show notes or you can also find it@advancingecoag.com podcast that's advancingecoag.com podcast we've put together a form that is really easy for you to fill out and give us your feedback and, yes, no votes on things that you would like for us to improve or change in the future. So I'm looking forward to your feedback very much, and thank you in advance. Hi, friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. I'm here today with Dan Kittredge, who is the director of the Bionutrient Food association, the Real Food Campaign. Dan and I have known each other and been friends for probably a decade or more, right, Dan?

I would say, at least, yeah.

We've had lots of stories and shared adventures, and we both share a passion for one of the aspects of healthy food production, which is the capacity to produce food that is so healthy that it can legitimately be considered food as medicine. So, Dan, I'd love to for the audience to hear more of your story. Tell us a little bit about your background and some of the memorable moments that led you to the work that you're doing today.

Okay. And thank you for having me on, John. It's been very impressive watching you over the past decade and everything you've done. My background is, you know, I grew up on an organic farm in Massachusetts, and my parents worked for and still do work for an organic farming organization called nofa. And through my, you know, childhood, teens and twenties, I, you know, would be managing the farm, sort of just what I always had done. But when I got married and had found no other better way to raise a family, I thought, than a homestead, you know, small farm, that lifestyle, I rapidly came to terms with the fact that I didn't have the skills to make a living farming. That actually what caused farming to be so difficult economically, in many cases, was the fact that the plants weren't healthy. And I got that insight from, you know, watching them be regularly attacked by insects and disease year in, year out. And even though we thought we were doing a better job because we weren't using chemicals, our plants were obviously not healthy because they were suffering from things that plants in nature don't regularly suffer from. And so that sort of set me on this track of. Of learning how to do a better job. Not is organic better? But maybe what is better than organic? And that's where I met you at Akers. And I think it was 2006, maybe 2007. And yeah, through, from. From digging into it and learning some of the principles and practicing them on the farm, it became clear very, very rapidly that it's not hard at all to modulate your practices and dramatically increase plant health, which correlates with yield, which correlates with soil health. And the thing that really struck me was the correlation to nutrient density. And that was a term that was really only just beginning to be contemplated. And I remember going around talking to all the elders, you know, Arden Anderson and Gary Zimmer and Jerry Brunetti and Bruce Taneo, et cetera, et cetera, and saying, okay, you guys are talking about bricks, you're talking about nutrient density. You know, this seems like it's a really big deal that nutrient levels vary in food. Where's the data? And there was no data. You know, it was sort of commonly held and assumed. And you can test it with a refractometer, but then there's no calibration for a refractometer to say what that means. So yeah, it seemed to me like this is a really powerful leverage point because people who are buying food think they're buying food for health, for themselves to be, you know, doing well and their families. And if there's no way to know that the food you're buying is nutritious, and in fact, many times it's relatively empty, it seems like using nutrient density as a organizing point, as a high ground, you know, our thought is, who is opposed to, to food being more nutritious? Is there anybody who has a problem with that? No. We don't need to be fighting food having low nutrient levels. We can be working together towards food having higher nutrient levels. And so, yeah, it's been a process over the past 10 years. We founded the organization the BFA to serve as a educational nonprofit that could work with growers of all scales to help them understand what we call principles of biological systems. You know, I grew up in a, in a community of organic farmers where we had an educational organization and we shared and we came together and learned. And I didn't see anybody in the biological ag space running an organization doing that educational work. It was primarily just consultants. And you know, there was no, there was no real open, deep dive into these principles. And so we've been running the BFA now for 10 years. And it's. Our mission is to increase quality in the food supply. And by quality we mean flavor and aroma, nutrient levels, health giving attribute. We've got local chapters in 15 different states across the U.S. we do an annual conference and we've had this vision of a spectrometer that we can give to consumers so that they can actually, at the point of purchase in the grocery store or the farmer's market, assess this bag of carrots versus that bag of carrots or this milk versus that milk. And actually not just to consumers, but to farmers, so they can see in the field where your plants are at, how they're growing, and for buyers and wholesalers and retailers, so they can make decisions for their supply chain based on the nutritional value. Our thought is if we can organize an open framework of understanding that effectively focuses on nutrient density, there's some amazing transformative effects that can occur.

Dan, in that background, you mentioned a couple of pieces which I think are very important for us to elaborate on. Certainly want to describe the work that you're doing with the conference and the instrument that you're developing. But you made two connections that I think are perhaps not well understood. And the first is the connection between the presence of insects and diseases and nutrient density. And the second is the correlation between nutrient density, nutritional integrity, and soil health. And also, of course, how that then ties to sequestering carbon and climate change. So those are two different aspects. But to the first point, I had a conversation with a fruit grower this last week who was of the persuasion that he is not spraying his fruit with any pesticides and he has some codling moth larvae in his apples. And his point was that while the apples are good enough for the codling moth, they're good enough for people to eat as well. What would your response be to that?

Yeah, you and I have talked about this many, too many times over the years, John, and your Plant Health pyramid is one of the easiest ways that people have access to for understanding it. But I use the metaphor of a milk cow and a bale of hay, and oftentimes in a workshop, I'm teaching a course, and I'll say, if there was a bale of hay sitting here in the room when you walked in, you might have considered sitting on it. Yeah, people say, yeah, sure, I said, but you probably would not have considered eating it. They're like, yeah, yeah, that's true. And then I say, and if a milk cow had walked in and seen that bale of hay, she probably would not have considered sitting on it, but she likely would have considered eating it and was like, yeah, that's true. So we have now here an example of a situation where something is food for one species but not food for another. She's like, yeah, okay, that makes sense. Let's say we know that cows have four stomachs to digest complex cellulose and turn it into functional nutrition because of their more evolved digestive tract. If you can understand that concept, which I don't think is very sophisticated, then understand that the Larvae of a Colorado potato beetle does not have a liver, does not have the enzymes in its gut necessary to digest protein, as an example. And so functionally, when your plant is going through the process of building those higher order compounds, the plant secondary metabolite out of the lipids, the fats and oils out of the proteins, et cetera. If your plant is healthily building those high order compounds, it is indigestible to the fungi, to the larvae, to the beetles, to the bacterial and fungal spores. It's just physiologically, those organisms can't digest a plant with the compounds that we experience as flavor and aroma. If you have eaten a tomato that doesn't have much flavor, it doesn't have high levels of those secondary metabolites. If you've eaten a tomato that does have a lot of flavor, it does have high levels of those secondary metabolites. It's those compounds that correlate with flavor and aroma for us that actually make something indigestible for an insect or a disease.

So in brief, if something can be used as a food source by a Colorado potato bean larvae, or by a coddling moth larvae, or by a cabbage looper, then it's not fit for people to eat, really, because it doesn't have those higher order metabolites that contribute health to us.

That's what I say. I say it's in nature's report card. And, you know, if it's insect food, it's insect food. If it's fungus food, it's fungus food. Only when you've got animal pests attacking your crops, does nature telling you that you're producing animal food. Yeah.

And then to the second point that you made, the, the connection between nutritional integrity and soil health, how does nutrient density lead to improving soil health and vice versa, how does soil health lead to improving nutrient density?

Well, nutrient density functionally is higher levels of more nutrients per unit volume. So more copper, more zinc, more potassium or calcium. You know, it's, there's levels in those ratios. So it's, we want to have balanced ratios, but generally overall, it's higher levels of those elements. And then it's also higher levels of the polyphenols and antioxidants and things like that. And so the way nature works to build nutrients into a plant is through photosynthesis. The plant makes sugar in the leaves and injects it into the soil to stimulate the soil life, which then digests the soil and functionally are able to harvest nutrients from the soil and bring them back up into the plant. The more sugar the plant is able to make, the more it's able to inject into the soil, the more carbon is taken from the atmosphere and put into the soil, the more sugars that's put in the soil, the more microbes are fed, the greater the activity of the. In the rhizosphere, the more nutrients that are able then to flow into the plant. And so it's this beautiful symbiotic relationship where as the plant flourishes, then the soil life flourishes, and then the crop becomes more nutritious, and then whoever eats that becomes more nutritious. So it's a really simple and elegant and beautiful process, which I'm sure you've covered in previous podcasts.

Yeah, it is something that I've spoken about quite a bit. And I think the really important piece that has been missed historically is the contribution of plants. And the way that I describe it is that if you did not have plants photosynthesizing and contributing the carbon that they sequester to the soil profile, the only thing that you really have that would be considered soil is decomposed rock particles. It's really plants that contribute organic matter. So my contention is that it is healthy plants which create healthy soil and that they're the engine that drives the system, not the other way around.

Yeah, absolutely, I would concur. And plants can functionally wear out the soil, but it's really. It's. It's not the plants, it's. It's the management that's a recurring theme.

There's this theme in livestock grazing, regenerative grazing versus set stock grazing, where they talk about, it's not the cow, it's the how. And what you're saying is essentially the same thing. It's not the crop, it's how the crop is managed. So you can manage crops which deplete organic matter and deplete biological activity, or you can manage them in such a way that they enhance it.

And depending on how those crops are managed, they are either good for you or not. So, you know, take milk as an example, as a crop. Depending on what the cow eats, that milk either has healthy omega 6 omega 3 ratios in it or unhealthy omega 6 omega 3 ratios in it, depending on, you know, how the, I don't know, cabbage was fertilized. It either has, you know, good levels of complete proteins and, you know, brassicosins in it, or it's full of nitrates. And, you know, there's this concept that, you know, oh, it's better to have, you know, the Mediterranean diet or the keto diet, or the I'm lactose intolerant or I'm this, I'm that, right. People seem to think that all carrots are basically the same, all milk is basically the same, all wheat is basically the same, and it's really, really not. And that's, I think, the piece that we have been trying to bring forth with the BFA is that the effect of that crop on your body has a lot to do with how it was produced. And so saying that, you know, I can't digest milk or I can't digest wheat, maybe you can't digest what's normally available in the supply chain, but if it was produced well, you might be surprised at how your body responds. And can we help people select the better tomatoes, the better wheat, wherever it is that they buy food? Because if we can help people do that, then we can apply an economic lever to the supply chain which incentivizes farmers to focus on quality and not on volume. Because right now, all of the economic incentives are on volume, effectively. And, you know, farmers need to make a living, and so they're going to follow the money. So this is the whole idea with the spectrometer, is to effectively, you know, establish a new framework for discernment.

Dan, you've mentioned several points that tie together. I want to dig into a little bit more deeply. Just now you made a very strong point that crops are not all produced the same. They have very different quality, very different levels of nutrient density. And earlier in our conversation, you made a point that the data doesn't really exist and isn't really out there. So the question I would have for you is why do we desire to have higher or more balanced nutritional density, and do we really know what that is and what's the backstory? How can we say those things without having the historical data first question is.

Why does it matter? Why do we care? Well, because you are what you eat. And, you know, we have evolved these really sophisticated nutrient monitoring devices inside of our own bodies called noses and tongues. And that's our animal instinct to tell us whether something is good for us or not. When people talk about their food not having much flavor and salt, sugar, fat, you know, all of the things that are added when food is processed to trick the nose and the tongue into thinking that something is desirable when it's just the synthetic flavorings or the corn oil or whatever it is in it, the salt, you know, our bodies require dozens of different elements billions of times a day just for basic maintenance. Copper Zinc, calcium, potassium, sulfur, phosphorus, chromium, molybdenum. You know, how many elements can you name and how many elements are actually in your food? When you don't have the basic nutrients that your body needs to function in your food, and you are building your body out of your food, then your body stops functioning. We are experiencing chronic illness at epidemic levels across the planet to a large degree now in ways that didn't exist a couple generations ago. And there's a really nice connection there between the way the food is grown, what's in the food and what's in your body and how well your body functions. So, you know, I've been saying for a while now, you know, it doesn't matter whether people believe us or not, at some point they're going to stop functioning. And nature is in charge here and there's biochemistry, there's enzyme systems, there's all kinds of really sophisticated dynamics which we probably don't have time to go into here in this conversation. But effectively, when you don't have in your food what your body needs to function, your body stops functioning. So that's why it's important is because you need it. I mean, I say to people it doesn't really matter about the carbon thing. That's all nice in the atmosphere. What really matters is your health to most people and the health of your children. And so that's one piece there. And then the second question I think you asked was if the data doesn't exist, how can we be making these statements about variation?

Let me just expand on that for a moment, Dan. Occasionally I see these posts that are something to the effect of oranges today contain only 6% of the vitamin A that oranges did in our grandfather's generation or something like that. And there have been different nutrients and different statistics quoted. So what I would love to hear more about is where did those statements come from? And then how can that be contrasted with your point that the data doesn't really exist?

Well, there's a couple actually really important points points there. One of them is that all oranges today are not uniform and all oranges in our grandparents time were not uniform. So to say that oranges today have this in them and oranges 50 years ago had something else in them is simplifying it to a degree that basically makes your statement ignorant. There's a really important point which, you know, I think if we can get this one point conveyed to people broadly will dramatically change things and that is that there is variation in food. We did this project Last year, having, you know, struggled with the fact that we couldn't find the data sets that showed the variation in crops. We took 650 carrots from around the country, from grocery stores, from farmers markets, from farms. Some were organic, some were not. And different cultivars, different fertility programs, different management practices, different climate details. And we took all those carrots and we, you know, we set up a lab and we ran them through the lab and we tested for 25 different elements and then also for polyphenols and antioxidants. And the variation we found in the carrots depended on the element. You know, in potassium, maybe it was 800%, and in copper it was only 400%, or in sulfur it was 1,500%. So what that means is there may be an 8 to 1 variation within an element or 4 to 1 variation within an element, depending on the best carrot or the worst carrot. But the issue really is not like all carrots now are equal. The issue is which is the best carrot I have to choose from. When we looked at things like antioxidants and polyphenols, it was, you know, 75 to 1 or 200 to 1 the variation levels in crops. And so, wow, we're not talking about.

10 or 20 or even 50% variability. Those are some really significant numbers. Numbers.

400 to 1800% in the elements and 75 to 200,000, 75,000 to 200,000% variation in the secondary metabolites. That's what we found. And that was just two crops. And we only looked at, you know, 27 different metrics. But the point is that you can't say all oranges today have this much vitamin C and all oranges 50 years ago had that much vitamin C. It's just. It's ignorant to make a statement that all oranges are the same. And that's the biggest issue we've got, is people think that all carrots are the same, all milk is the same, and it's just not how it was produced. What the genetics were, et cetera, is of massive import in the functional nutrition in the crop. So I'm not sure if I answered your question specifically.

Yeah, thanks for that review. And I think it would also be of interest to our listeners. I know you and I have had conversations about the historical data and the. The lack of thoroughness and detail and integrity in the historical data from 40, 50, 60 years ago. Can you describe what the USDA data sets actually look like and how they've been developed?

Yeah, so. So if you if you get a bag of carrots now and you look on the back of it, it'll say, you know, this one 6 inch carrot will give you 110% of your daily recommended vitamin A for that statement we made in the label. The point I just made is you can't make that statement because you didn't test the carrot to see where it stands. You're just, you're basing it on an average. And that's what the USDA has done over time is they've developed averages. And so my understanding is that this is not on an annual basis, but every few years, depending on what the crop is, they'll go around to grocery stores in 10 or 12 different parts of the country, they'll buy carrots, say, off the shelf, they'll send them to a lab, and then once they've taken those carrots off the shelf and assessed them and they've gotten their data back, they take the outliers, the 10% that were the best and the 10% that were the worst, and they get rid of all that data, they throw it away, and then they find the average of the, of the stuff in the middle. And then they say, okay, according to the usda, this is what a carrot contains. So when people make statements about what was in oranges 50 years ago and what's in oranges today, they're making statements based on that process that the USDA went through. So was the science done well in the 1940s, 1950s? I think it was done pretty well. I can't speak to that to a great degree. The whole point is it's assuming what's in the grocery stores, which is the stuff that's produced generally in the larger farms, in many cases not well. And so that average, that USDA average of what's in a carrot or what's in an orange, what we found when we looked at our full data was that was probably around the 15th or 20th percentile of what was possible. What the USDA calls average is in the 20th percentile. There's some stuff that's worse than that, but there's a whole bunch of space that's better than that, what this carrot could consist of. So I feel like we're getting a little bit heady with statistics and data and science. And, you know, this is the kind of thing that sometimes is better conveyed with some kind of a graphic. But the basic point is how you grow something has a massive effect on what's in it. We did this about eight years ago. We Had a project with. We had the Biodynamic association on one side and Cornell on the other. And we took. Got some seeds from Johnny's, some carrot seeds of different types, red cord, chantenase, and boleros. And we sent those seeds. We bought £1 of Bolero seed and split it up and sent, you know, an ounce to 16 different farms around the country and said, you guys, please just grow these seeds in your soil and then send the carrots back to us. And they did. And we found, again, that, you know, massive variation in the carrots. They were the same seeds from the same bag grown in different soil, and the nutrient variation was massive.

I think you've made the point very clearly that there is significant nutrient variation based on management, based on how a crop is grown. The next question that leads from this is, of course, growers, particularly the audience for this podcast, people who really care about producing healthy plants that are resistant to diseases and insects, desire to be able to monitor that in the field and to actually know what is the nutritional profile of the crops that they're producing. Do they have the capacity to resist diseases and insects? And how can they produce healthy food for people? How do we measure that?

Yeah, well, this gets to the actual work we're doing. You know, we've been talking for a few minutes now about the theory and the. And the principle, but, you know, most farmers like to actually get the job done. So you and I both grew up on farms and are, you know, have that farmer spirit. I think for me, when I started to put all these pieces together 10 years ago, you know, and having watched my parents write some of the first organic standards in the country in the 1980s, and watched how certification systems worked and labeling systems worked, it seemed to me that. That that structure was flawed to begin with. The way organic works, as an example, is you either are organic or you're not organic. It's a binary. It's a black and white. And what we just got done discussing was that crop nutrient levels, nutrient density in crops is anything but binary. It is a continuum. You're either on the 10th percentile or the 30th percentile or the 50th percentile. And so you can't really have a certification label that provides that information. What we really want to do is we want to give people the ability to see for themselves in real time. Like, I want to see between these three bags of carrots that are on the shelf, the Bunny Love, the Kale organic and the Bolthouse farms, which ones are Better. I'm at a farmer's market. I want to choose which farm to buy from based on the nutritional value of the crops that they've got on the, on the stand. And the way that you would be able to do that is through a process called spectroscopy. When I'm explaining spectroscopy to people, I say, so we know that, you know, Alpha Centauri is a star that's, you know, whatever, six light years away. And we humans have never sent any, any probes, any, you know, starships or whatever past the edge of the solar system, which is a light maybe 12 hours away. But the scientists, the astrophysicists are like really confident that Alpha Centauri is made up of 51% hydrogen, 48% helium, 1% other gases. In these levels and ratios like even though it's five light years away or six light years away, we know exactly what it's made up of. And we did not figure that out by going there and sampling it. We figured that out by reading the light that came off of it. And this is what spectroscopy is basically, is that every element in chemistry vibrates at a certain frequency, basically makes a certain kind of light. Every compound in chemistry, you know, protein or lipids, vibrates in physics, and effectively puts out a certain kind of light. And so our basic idea is to build a spectrometer that a consumer can hold in their hand, which they can take to the grocery store or to the farmer's market and flash a light at the crop and by reading the light that bounces back, discern functionally how good that crop is. And that was an idea that we had, you know, six or eight years ago, but technically it wasn't possible. With the sort of rapid improvement in smartphones over the last 10 years, it now is possible to really build that miniaturized, consumer priced spectrometer in scale. It just wasn't something that we could have done eight years ago, but it is something we can do now. And so it's one thing to give the consumer the ability to test and use that as our sort of our truth mechanism. Because in my experience from looking at the data, there's a bunch of organic that's not very good, and there's a bunch of stuff at farmers markets that's also not very good. You can't say buy local and it's going to be more nutritious. You can't say buy organic and it's going to be more nutritious. It has everything to do with the farmer and how that farmer produced. And so, so it's one thing to have a tool for the, for the consumer, but what we really want to accomplish as part of this process is a tool for the grower as well. I mean, you and I have talked about this a lot. If the grower had the ability, with some basic background information to, you know, like, what your soil type, what's your fertility program, which, which what your cultivar, what's your climate data? If the grower had the ability to flash a light at the leaf of the plant while it's growing the tomato, the oat, the corn, whatever it is, and get assessments of what's going on in that plant, then they could change their fertility program in real time. And instead of the farmers basically being concerned about, oh, when I bring my crops to market, what are they going to say? The farmer can basically, in field, modulate fertility during the growing season so that they can be ensured that when they bring their crops to market, they're going to BE in the 10th percentile. So, yeah, from a very practical standpoint, this is something that we can be doing now.

Dan, from the work that you are doing on this now, you said that it is now possible. It wasn't possible eight years ago. From your perspective, how far away are we from having a tool like that in the hands of consumers and in the hands of growers?

Well, our first prototype tool is available now. People can order them and get them shipped to them. There's a bit of a backorder a couple of months, but they're available. The data collection we're doing this year for the lab is such that by this winter we will have calibrations for six crops. Cherry tomatoes, grapes, carrots, lettuce, spinach, and kale. Those are the six crops we're testing this year. And so as far as a, like a generation one proof of concept functioning tool that a consumer can use in the grocery store, it looks like we're going to have it this winter. It's a generation one tool. It's not slick, it's not mass producible. It's nowhere near as sophisticated as we'd like it to be. And so I just want to be clear about that. Like, we do have something that will be functional in the next couple of months, but what you and I have talked about is something that's much more systemic. When I, you know, first started making this pitch to people about this concept, one of the people I talked to was a regional buyer for Whole Foods for the North Atlantic region. Everything from sort of Washington, D.C. up the east coast was in his purview and he was the buyer for fruits and vegetables and perishables, basically. And I said, you know, you guys have a reputation for having superior quality whole foods. Why don't you work with us on this so your consumers can see that you do have a better quality? And they said, no, no, we're not going to do that. Because they knew enough to know that they really weren't that much better than the competition. But what he did say to me, it always has stuck out to me was, when you're two years out from being able to do this, please come tell us because we will give our growers two years to meet standard. And I would say where we stand right now, we can safely say two years from now we're going to have a mass produced consumer tool available in, you know, thousands or tens of thousands per month with more sophisticated tools in the hands of farmers to be doing this sort of monitoring and management. I think two years is where we're at right now. So I'm really excited. This has been something I've been working on for more than a decade. And we're, we're really close to this to a very significant, I think it's a paradigm shift really, in the way food is understood.

It is really significant. And I think for those of you listening the conversation that Dan and I have had, it's my understanding that the tool that will be available for professional use for growers and agronomists, etc. Will have. Obviously it's a completely new tool. New libraries, new calibrations have to be developed for it. But once those calibration libraries are developed, there are limits, of course, but from an agronomic perspective, we will be able to measure everything we would have the desire to measure. Full mineral profile, amino acid profile, proteins, peptides, carbohydrate profile, lipids, hormones. The list kind of just goes on and on without end. This could be a really incredible management tool.

And anybody who engages in the process of learning and sharing is going to obviously have a leg up because they're going to be able to modulate their practices, add different foliar sprays or whatever it is that seems to be recommended. If you can assess in real time what is going on and make decisions, management decisions accordingly. The implications for the health of your plants, your cost of production, your yields, your economic viability are extremely positive.

This leads to the next step, which is that farmers would also be able to identify the level of quality of the crops that they are producing and possibly Market them as such, I think, is something that we all need to be thinking about and be prepared for. So, Dan, to the comment of the quote that you referenced for the Whole Foods buyer of needing to give farmers two years to meet standard, you suggested just now that we're about two years away. From your perspective, what is it that growers and farmers need to do to be prepared?

Well, our plan is to really significantly engage this infield data collection process this year, this coming 20. So with the BFA as part of our broader collaboration, we're part of this group that's called OpenTeam, which is a big open farm data management platform, basically where you can input your soil type and your fertility program and your. Your management practices and your weather data and all that kind of stuff. The more we're able to share what's going on in our farms, the faster we're going to be able to learn together what works and what doesn't work. There's a deeper conversation here about science and how it's been done and, you know, what can be understood and what can't be understood. I've been struggling with this broader question for a long time, as I've said, and it was sort of really flabbergasting to me that no one had actually built out the data sets to show what the variation was in food quality. And it was probably three or four years ago now when I was down at the headquarters of the ARS Ag Culture Research Service, which is a part of the USDA in Beltsville, Maryland, and I was talking to these national program leaders, and I said, you know, basically, you know, we think there's a connection between soil health and plant health and human health. And they said, stop right there before you go any further. We do, too, A, and B, it's too complicated and we're never going to figure it out. Now, what did you want to talk about? And I was like, you're the usda. You grant that there's a connection between soil health and plant health and human health, and you have given up on trying to figure out how it works. Yeah, that's where they're at. And that's because, effectively, biological systems have so many different factors. How many different species of microbes are there in your soil? What are the epigenetics of the seed that you're planting? You know, you can't control all the factors. And the way that agronomic research has been done for decades now has been a single factor analysis. Randomized, replicated trials will just change one thing. In these 12 little plots and then, and repeat and see what we can find. Is it calcium or is it potassium or whatever?

It's impossible to just, it's impossible to just change one thing in agricultural systems.

Well, that's the whole point, is that it's a constantly moving ecosystem of dynamics. And the only really real way to tease out what's going on is to have a framework where every farm can functionally be a research farm, where, you know, if we have hundreds or thousands of farms that are, that are collecting common data about their environmental conditions, about their management practices, and then they're sending in their crops to a lab to be assessed, all of a sudden we've got this, what's called a metadata set, where we've got hundreds or thousands of farms each submitting hundreds or thousands of data points, and then you can look for patterns. And so, you know, what I would suggest is that farmers get engaged in this process. The sooner you're engaged, the sooner you have your data, you're beginning to collect it as part of this broader collaborative, the sooner we're going to be able to feed recommendations back to you and say, looks like this is a limiting factor in your farm. Looks like this issue can be addressed in this fashion. So that's what we're doing.

Dan, where can growers go to learn more about the work that you're doing at the BFA and your various efforts?

Well, our basic website is bionutrient.org we have tens of hours, hundreds of hours of recordings from our conferences on YouTube. If you just look under bionutrient, we've got a channel there. The research work, the data collection and the collaboration and the, the lab and everything else is under the URL realfoodcampaign.org and yeah, our annual conference is soilandnutrition.org and that's coming up in November on the 14th to the 17th.

I know you've had a really exceptional conference in the past. I'm sure you'll have a great lineup of speakers again.

We do have a great lineup of speakers. Not many of them are famous, but they, they all have really deep insights. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a wonderful curation process every year bringing together. And it's not just agronomy, you know, we have one track that is, you know, that is agronomy. All the way through the conference, we've got one track that is nutrition. Another track, I think we're calling it Biochemistry and Consciousness. Sort of looking at the, that how the vibration of the compounds in your body functionally affects your ability to tune into your higher nature. Another track on systemic solutions. So whether it's economics or the environment or our politics, what are ways that we can actually systemically engage in building the solutions we're looking for? So, yeah, it's a really nice community, and just the average level of knowledge and insight of attendees is. I find it remarkably high. So it's a great way to be energized and inspired. If you want to be surrounded by some really inspiring people, it's a good place to go.

The impetus for this conversation between Dan and I here on the podcast came as a result, for all those of you regular podcast listeners, you know that a few episodes ago, I interviewed Vern Peterson Alive at the Healthy Soil Summit in California. And Vern really encouraged me to begin developing standards for what defines quality in fruit. And I've been having this ongoing conversation with Dan for over a decade. And Vern's comment really reminded me of the need to prioritize and focus on defining quality and quantity, quality standards, what they really mean for human health, what they could mean for growers. And so, in our work at advancing eco agriculture, we are beginning to work much more closely with Dan and the Bionutrient Food association, the Real Food Campaign, to both to develop these tools that Dan is working on and to define what quality really means and then also define how to get there. So I'm very excited and very much looking forward to that, Dan. It's going to be a lot of fun.

It feels like it's coming together now.

Yeah. And I also owe a big thank you to Vern Peterson for that encouragement and that push to get the ball rolling. So thank you, Vern. Dan, thank you very much for being here and for having this conversation. I've really enjoyed it and look forward to having more conversations and discussions in the future.

Likewise. John, thank you very much.

Thanks, everyone. Happy growing. Have an awesome day. The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess. We test, we analyze. We provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge, and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing. Someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow. Visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you. Thank you for listening and we look forward to working with you.