11 Soil & Nutrition Conference: Dan Kittredge | Bionutrient Food Association
Between 14 May and 27 August 2024, the Bionutrient Food Association (BFA) is facilitating a 16-week conference about “The state of nutrient density.” During those four months, researchers, farmers, and field pioneers will share their insights into their work involving soil health and the quality of the produce we consume.
During the first week of the conference, Dan Kittredge, farmer and founder of BFA, shared the story of 14 years of work in the field. What surprised me the most, while being simultaneously quite intuitive, is that nothing else correlated to nutritional value than soil healht. No certification, seed variety, or geographical location. It all boils down to the health of the soil in which the food was grown.
Bionutrient Food Association: pioneering the connection for 14 years
The mission of BFA has always been to increase quality in the food supply chain. It can be reflected in flavor, aroma, and health attributes. The BFA team has been working on this mission in 3 phases.
1) Educational work: 2010-16
Facilitation of workshops with farm and agronomic specialists across the disciplines. Helping growers to work with nature to achieve biologically balanced systems that function well and offer quality outputs. Their focus was and still is to improve soil health without being dogmatic. Sharing knowledge and experiences with grassroots organizations (Check out their publically available resources)
2) Creating a framework for nutrient density: 2017-21
One of the insights the BFA gained after years of training across the states and globally is that no matter where they traveled, working with nature and increasing soil health lead to better pest resistance, flavor, shelf life, nutrition, increased farm viability, decreased production costs, and increased biodiversity. The question remained: how can this knowledge be brought to scale?
One of the ideas was to use nutrient density as a movement to shift the agriculture paradigm. From this process, 3 hypotheses arrived.
“1. What is nutrient variation in food?
2. If nutrient variation is present in food, what is causing it?
3. Can a hand-size tool be built to help access nutrient variation? ”
To find answers to those questions, BFA has started the journey:
2017: Building the first Bionutrient Meter (read more here)
2018: Building a lab in Michigan to test nutrient variation in crops (in the first year, 10 different elements in carrots and spinach are found across the USA, from grocery stores, farms, farmer markets, etc.).
2019: Building the second lab in California (6 crops and soil samples of 10 cm topsoil, to relate the soil metrics with nutrients in the crops; additionally, farmers were asked a long questionnaire about fertility program, variety of seeds, practices such as cover crops, minimum tillage, etc.). The collected information allowed them to build a dataset.
List of crops assessed by the Bionutrient Institute Lab, source: The Bionutrient Food Institute
Results of the nutrient variation research
Since 2018, the BFA branch of the Bionutrient Institute (BI) has facilitated surveys testing food and soil across the U.S. Their first study examined carrots and spinach, demonstrating significant nutrient variation in those products (access the report).
The screenshots below come from Dan’s presentation and focus on the carrots results from the 2020 report.
In 2020, BI examined 3851 samples in 3 labs. They performed soil tests on organic carbon, respiration, pH, minerals, and food tests on antioxidants, polyphenols, minerals, and brix in 20 crops and proteins in grains. The green dots represent farmers’ samples and the orange citizen science.
Q1: Is there a nutrient variation?
The first chart shows the sulfur and phosphorus present in carrots. The top-down scale shows the number of samples, and the left-right scale shows the amount of the compound. Colors represent the distribution of samples across the range.
The carrot with the highest score had 4 times more sulfur than the one with the lowest score.
The phosphorus variation ranges up to 8 folds.
The second graph shows the differences in antioxidants (left) and polyphenols (right). It had 40 x and 20 x variations, respectively.
Dan has confirmed that this result has been recorded across almost all samples. Those results greatly impact human health, as antioxidants and polyphenols have anti-inflammatory effects. Inflammation causes damage to our cells and tissues and, if chronic, can lead to deadly disease.
These results answer the first question of what is nutrient variation.
It is clear that variation is dramatic within the current supply chain. A high nutritional score is possible, but the vast majority of available food lies within a low level of available nutrients.
Nutrient variation in tested food, source: The Bionutrient Food Institute e: BFA
Q2: What is causing this nutrient variation?
Now that question one has been answered, BFA/BI has moved to explore the reasons behind these major diverse results. The graphs below provide some very surprising answers.
The graph above explores on the left the nutrient variation across carrot varieties and climate regions on the right. As you can see in all of the variates and regions, scores of BQ1 (average of nutrient reserach in 100 grams of fresh produce) span across the range. This means that neither the seeds nor soil type/climate zone correlates with nutrient variation.
Sample source (to the left) and practice (right) have also been explored as potential reasons for nutritional variation.
The belief that many of us (including me) sourced from farms, gardens, or farmer's markets did not have better scores than food from the store.
The same story applies to certified organic, organic, regenerative, biodynamic, and local labels, as well as practices such as tillage or cover crops.
“The only connection to nutrient density was the soil’s level of life.”
Shocking? It probably should not; it only confirms how context-specific achieves soil life. Even while using practices that should lead to better soil scores, they can not guarantee food with better health.
Following a certain certification does not necessarily mean a higher level of soil health.
Building Bionutrient Meter
The final question that remained to be answered:
Q3: Can a tool be built to assess the nutrient variation?
The answer is yes! A Bionutrient Meter has been built using the principle of spectroscopy.
“The Bionutrient Meter has lights (LEDs - light emitting diodes) that emit light at very specific wavelengths, which then bounce off objects like carrots, or carrot pulp, or spinach, or soil. Some of it is absorbed by the object and turned into other forms of energy, like heat. A light sensor in the device reads how much light bounces back for each wavelength very quickly and multiple times throughout a given measurement.”
With this 3D-printed tool, you can assess the nutrient variation of 10 crops (read more). What is the future of this breakthrough? It could be installed in phones or wearable devices, allowing consumers to test the quality of their food each time they go shopping.
If you are wondering how you can test the quality of your food without a Bionutrient Meter, you can use a simple reflectometer and compare it to a Brix chart.
This tool can potentially disrupt the food system, creating economic incentives for nutritional value.
The beef study
After answering their 3 hypothesizes, BFA moved to the third phase of their operations
3) Defining nutrient density: 2022-present
The first crop that BFA aims to define nutrient density is beef. Their hypothesis is that the more biodiverse the ecosystem in which cows operate, the higher the nutritional quality of milk and meat.
They have collected samples across 3 types of operations:
Plant-species diverse pasture-raised
Monoculture pasture raised
Feedlot-finished on concentrates
As you can see on slide 2, they have collected in-depth data on meat compounds, species in manure, type of pasture, soil, and their effect on human health (thanks to a USDA grant and Utah State University). They are researching the effect on urine, stool, and blood inflammation markers.
This study is currently being analyzed. The goal is to combine the biochemistry of meat with the microbiome of the animals, environmental conditions, and the soil state that the animals were grazing with human health outcomes. A special Bionutrient Standard Definition Board consists of microbiologists focusing on the microbiome in animals, biochemists analyzing the data of which meat was the most nutritionally balanced, agronomists analyzing the forage and soil data, nutritionists defining the human data on what meat leads to best human health results. Based on the composition of this data, they will be able to define nutrient density. Once they define biomarkers that show the strongest correlation between outcomes, they can reduce the molecules that must be tested to define nutrient density.
The preliminary results show a significant difference across the meat samples in the omega 3:6 ratio.
It is very important to pay attention to these metrics, as because of the omnipresence of seed oils we consume high amounts of omega 6, leading to inflammation that can result in chronic disease.
The diversity of the pasture is directly influencing the omega 3:6 ratio.