Today we're speaking with Dan Kittredge. Dan is a leading advocate for the concept of nutrient density and is working on some exciting projects about measuring nutrient density in food products, which I'll let him explain much better than I can.

Dan, do you want to give a general introduction to the work you've been doing? What is nutrient density? How are you working to make it measurable?

I run the Bionutrient Food Association, an educational nonprofit. Since 2010, we've been working to help growers understand how to work more effectively with nature. Plants evolved 400 million years ago to grow in the ground, and they were evolved by microbes to do that. The more we understand the nature of plants and how they grow, the more successfully we can farm.

I'm a farmer, I grew up on a farm. We found that these principles seem applicable across the board, it doesn’t really matter what geography or climate zone or crop or scale. We helped farmers lower production costs and improve soil health and economic viability and improve flavor and aroma and nutrient levels in their foods. We started thinking how we could try to bring this to scale, so starting in 2016, we put together a strategy around this concept, nutrient density, which we'd help to create.

The idea being that if there is a dramatic nutrient variation in food, then we should be able to test it with a handheld sensor. At point of purchase, people could flash a light at their choices of apples or beef or onions or whatever is on the shelf, and choose the best. In so doing, they would incentivize a shift towards biological practices in agriculture generally.

We've been making good progress on proving that variation is massive and that it correlates to soil health. We’ve shown that handheld meters can be built at a consumer price point that actually test nutrient levels .

Do you have a name for the tool that you're developing?

We've called it the Bionutrient Meter. We had to build the meter to show it was possible, because people thought it wasn’t possible to have a ray gun in your hand that could test nutrient levels in food so we had to prove the concept. But going forward, we're an educational nonprofit organization, not a meter company. We want to define what nutrient density is, but not necessarily be manufacturing and selling the meters that are testing it. We hope once we have a definition, other companies will get excited and build meters and sell them. Our job is not to make money selling meters, our job is to have a definition of quality that can be assessed by people throughout the supply chain. Eventually we think it'll be one of the cameras in your phone. It won’t even be a separate meter. It'll just be an app that you can download and then the camera on your phone is good enough to do the thing.

So what specifically is it detecting? Are there certain chemicals, certain molecules that it's looking for?

Well, every element or compound in chemistry, say copper or protein, vibrates in physics. Copper vibrates at a certain frequency and protein vibrates at a certain frequency. That frequency of vibration is light. The science is called spectroscopy and it's how we know what stars, millions of light years away made up of, through reading the light that comes off of them.

So if you can read a light from million light years away and figure out what something is made of, you can read light a millimeter away and see what that is made up of. Every polyphenol or copper or zinc or whatever has a frequency of vibration. And so you just have a little handheld meter that’s calibrated to reading those vibrations.

With something like an apple, say a good apple versus a bad apple, you're looking for higher levels of certain compounds or certain elements or...

The research is to define that scale. For the meter to give you an answer, it has to have a definition of what good and bad are in the first place. That's where we are right now, raising that money to do the research to then make the definition that then people can build meters around.

You're looking to define what makes a good apple in terms of the density of specific...

 Levels and ratios of individual nutrients that correlate with human health outcomes and flavor and plant health and microbiome and all that stuff. It's a complex science project, but it's exciting and doable and not that expensive in the scheme of things. It's a few tens of millions of dollars to do it for most crops.

It’s exciting. If we can say this is zero, this is 20, this is 40, this is 80 out of 100, then we could all have a metric through which to begin to have this conversation. that will revolutionize things.

Yeah, that's exciting. For nutrient density, could you explain what's measurable? What's the link between a definable characteristic and human health outcomes, and then things like flavor, aroma, texture, shelf life. Are all these components of quality correlated with the nutrient density?

We hypothesize that is the case. It seems that our tongues and our noses have evolved to discern these compounds. The things we call flavor are the fancy names for polyphenols or antioxidants or terpenoids, which are understood to be health beneficial. It looks like the thing that makes an apple taste good is a thing that makes it good for you. A bland apple doesn't have as much goodness in it.

That correlates with shelf life, it correlates with flavor, it correlates with pest and disease resistance, that correlates with soil health. When things are healthier, they're better, and when they're less healthy, they're less good, and bad things happen. It's simple.

I've heard you explain in the past the difference between this particular spectroscopy and a Brix reading. Could you just roughly explain the difference between the two and if there's a strong correlation between them?

I would say that the Brix refractometer is the best tool we have right now for testing plant health and nutrient level in foods. People have been doing it for over 100 years, and everybody gets the same response. The higher the Brix reading in the leaf when the plant's growing, the healthier the plant, the better the pest and disease resistance. The better the Brix reading of the food that you're eating, the better the flavor, the better the shelf life. We have lots of people, over a long time, from all over the place, having those real world experiences. But we don't have a lot of published data that saying what nutrients correspond to a particular Brix reading. It doesn't exist, no one's doing the science. So if you want received wisdom from lots of people over many years, the refractometer is great. If you want a peer reviewed published paper measuring this and this and this, a refractometer doesn't do it.

The other thing about refractometer is you have to squish the food to get juice out of it to get the reading, which you're not supposed to do at the grocery store. I thought if we can have a light meter that can measure individual nutrients, that can be calibrated to a big complicated science project that can make everybody feel safe in their scientific comfort zones, and it's in your phone, it's not invasive, that could bring this general understanding to a broader audience. But effectively, if Brix readings and nutrient density don't correlate, I’d be very surprised.

Cause you're roughly, you're roughly gauging the same things, right?

I don't know. The problem with science is that you don't know what you don't know. I mean, if we come up with a definition of nutrient density does not correlate with flavor, then we probably have a bad definition. These things that nature tells us are really simple: does it have a good shelf life? Does it taste good? Does it have pest and disease resistance?

My understanding of the science is that these are actually all the same thing. So that should be a good test to make sure we're getting a real answer.

I know a lot of farmers starting to take Brix readings. It's fairly new for a lot of people. It's starting to catch on, but they don't have a lot of year-over-year readings necessarily. But this would also be something that they could do in the field, to compare, correct? Say there was a standard baseline, for whatever crop they're growing, they could analyze their crop, as it's close enough to being ripe.

Yeah. When I teach courses for farmers – which I still do, that's the foundational work of our organization – I always talk about Brix as a tool you can use in season, in field, to measure plant health. You want a target level of 12 in the leaf of the plant while it's growing to say that this plant is healthy. You’ll never get a high Brix reading in the crop you harvest if you didn't have a high Brix reading in the plant while it was growing. And the reality is that a lot of farmers, if they do take Brix readings of their plants while they're growing, get low readings.

That's one of those uncomfortable things. People think they’re God's greatest gift because they're permaculturist or regenerative or organic or Soil Food Web or whatever it is. I say, ask nature how good of a farmer you are. Don't just say because you found the answer and you then therefore are a good farmer, let nature be the one that tells you. And if your Brix readings are four and five and six, then nature thinks you're doing a mediocre job.

This is how a farmer can tell whether our product works or not. Test a product. If it causes the Brix reading to rise and stay higher, then that was a good thing. If it doesn't really affect it, then maybe you spent money you didn't need to spend. The refractometer is a good way to suss out the truth of things.

Last year you spoke at the Stockman Grass Farmer event at Polyface Farms and you were presented the aggregate data that you collected from different participating farms. You were looking at farms doing no till or full tillage, cover crop, no cover crop, all the different practices. And the only factor you saw that correlated with nutrient density level was the population of soil microbiology, whether you had strong ecosystem microorganisms.

Yeah, we looked at organic, non-organic. We looked at local, not local. We looked at till, no till, cover crop, no cover crop, regenerative, biodynamic, crop varieties, soil types. The only apparent correlating factor to nutrient levels was the level of life in the soil. It doesn't matter what you call yourself, it matters how well you're working with the land to build life. Which makes sense, because it was the microbes that evolved plants. They're in charge. People think they're raising plants. That’s a mistake. They should be focusing on creating a reality where the microbes can flourish because a flourishing diverse microbiome will cause the healthiest plants to exist.

For this project, I'm speaking with a number of other folks as well who have drilled into the specific soil microbes. It makes sense conceptually, but it's cool to see at the granular level that it's microbes that allow the plants to access the nutrients that they need in the forms that they want in order to make themselves healthy. They then want to make their progeny healthy, their seed and the fruit that surrounds it. And then when we consume that, it makes us healthy as well.

Yeah, it's a virtuous circle. Everybody wins. Everybody's happier, except the chemical company salesman. They lose out, the pharmaceutical salesman loses out too, but other than that, a lot of people are healthier and happier.

Are there any specific practices that are common across those forms that have a higher microbial community in their soil?

The common practice is respecting nature, which in different circumstances means different things because nature needs different things in different areas. Microbes need air to breathe, so if your soil is really tight, they're going to asphyxiate. Microbes need water to drink, so if it's really dry, they're going to die of thirst. If microbes need food to eat, so if there's no soil cover or you don't have good high Brix readings in the leaves, they're going to die of starvation. They need basic minerals to build their bodies out of, so if you don't have enzyme cofactors like cobalt and copper and manganese and boron their capacity to flourish is limited. And of course, they themselves must be there. If they're not present, then it doesn't really matter if all the rest of the things are there.

It’s about being sensitive to nature, understanding the limiting factors and making sure that those pieces are present so that nature can do what she's really good at, which is live. I don't particularly care about the names of all the microbes. I haven't studied it. I don't think we need to understand it if we understand how to create a reality where nature is able to flourish and then stop messing around too much.

Begin with the end in mind, right? Instead of saying, everyone needs to plant cover crops, everybody needs to do X amount of tillage or use these biological products or get more boron or whatever down in your soil. Is there consensus around the environmental factors, whether you're growing here in Tennessee or out in California, what that picture is supposed to look like in your area to know what it's supposed to look like, and then figure out how to get there?

I would say it's an internecine warfare. You got the permaculturists with their thoughts, the regenerative people with their position, the agroecologists are over here and the Soil Food Webbers there and the Albrechters over there. it's like religion. How many different types of Christianity are there? And I'm pretty sure Christ wouldn't have approved. he was like, guys, it's about love. Fighting each other's thing is not part of it.

A Western rational agreed upon answer, I don't think exists. From an indigenous perspective, you can talk about being in communion with your plants and nature. Every piece of land has unique needs, so to presume that you could write down one answer misses the point. Every bit of nature has its own history and its own balances and imbalances, strengths and weaknesses, propensities.

We can say air and water are critical, food is important, minerals are necessary and life is foundational. You don't usually see monocultures, you don't usually see bare soil. The more we move into the model of nature, the more likely we are to be doing a better job. But is it possible with AI and sensors and stuff to a deeper collective feedback loop to figure stuff out? Probably. Could we use AI intelligently and collaboratively like we were mycelial web, share and learn collectively, globally? I bet we could figure a lot out with real answers like numbers and stuff if we wanted to go that way. That's not the data mining strategy that big companies like John Deere have, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.

I'm uncomfortably impressed with how intelligent AI seems to be. This is one of those circumstances where if we did have a large enough dataset that was collected well and shared, probably a really good guidance could be given to people from a function like that.

As you're going around and speaking with farmers, other than higher level things, what guidance do you offer them or who would you point people towards? Are there other people who you would say, get X and so to come in and consult for you?

When I teach a course, I walk people through a series of steps how to create a dynamic where you do have good air on the soil and good water and good food and good minerals and good life. There are for minerals, there are tests for compaction and hydration. There are tests for biology if you want to engage that empirical framework.

I tell people, if I leave you with one thing, it's to inoculate your seed. Ensure that you have a full spectrum of as many species of bacteria and fungi as possible on that seed before it germinates because establishing healthy gut flora is critical for healthy plants. I don't necessarily tell them how to inoculate. I'll give them one strategy about how they can go and harvest something from their local bioregion, but there's products you can buy and there's all kinds of techniques. I'm not dogmatic or attached to any specific product, I try to stay away from that. I say, this is why you want to have a diverse spectrum of species on the seed, it's like the colostrum, and healthy gut flora makes a healthy organism.

Then again, if you don't have cobalt in the environment, then you don't have B12, then the microbes can't exist. You can add all the microbes you want, but they'll die because the B12 they need to live isn't there. We have to understand the pieces of the puzzle and work as systematically as you can.

Nature is very forgiving and the reality is that what most of us are used to a very low level of vigor in our plants. You do a little something better and things look better, and they do something else and look even better. Even that is nowhere close to what's possible, but because we're all used to such a low level of function, there's a lot of things you can do to make things better. And it's exciting when we start doing it.

We're in this space of encouraging people to use worm compost, make their own or source it. Have you had much experience or seen results from doing that in the field, how that contributes?

The way I manage my farm is to have many worms in my field. I go out at night in the summertime with a flashlight and wait till I'm out there in the field and turn the flashlight on. If I see a whole bunch of earthworms that were in the middle of having sex start screwing into their holes, I know I'm good. 20 or 30 earthworms per square yard equals 20 tons of earthworm castings per acre per year, 40,000 pounds. That's basically one pound per square foot of worm castings per acre. I mean, per year, one pound per square foot per year. You couldn't afford that. There's no way you could buy that. When you manage the land well, the earthworms are there and they're doing amazing work.

Earthworm castings are amazing. People say, do you use fertilizer? I say, no, I just had to use compost. No, do you use animal manure? No, I don't use any fertilizer. But if I'm getting 20 tons of earthworm castings per acre per year, that might be why my shit's doing well. My thought is if you can create the dynamic from a systems perspective, then nature does it for you and you don't need to bring it in and add it.

If you don't have that to begin with, if you look around and you don't see the worms, would that be something you would consider adding to your operations?

We definitely need inoculation. The real question is why aren’t there any worms? When I started my farm, the soil was very tight. It was light in color. You could jump on a shovel and it would bounce out. I came through with a tiller, maybe five passes with a tractor tiller. And I got down about three inches. I saw a couple little tiny worms, but in the whole field, just a couple. But I put my minerals down and I made my beds and put my drip tape down and I put my inoculant in my seed and I mulched.

And two months later, that soil was like chocolate cake. It had totally changed its texture. We had tons of worms. It wasn't that the worms weren't present in the ecosystem. It was that the soil was managed in such a fashion as for them not to be able to function. And so I needed to create the environment where the soil could function well and then the earthworms would be part of that process. So like I said, I always recommend that people inoculate their seed.

And what do you inoculate that with?

Wormcast is probably a great choice, a lot better than just a simple mycorrhizal. John Kempf quoted this thing last year to me. I haven't seen or heard anybody else say it, but it's interesting, that more than 90% of the microbes that exist in the soil only reproduce in the presence of a living root. That makes sense because all the different plants each have their own microbiome so it makes sense that there's certain families of microbes that are in a compost pile, there's certain families of microbes that are in a worm's gut, but that if you want to get a full spectrum of microbes, you'd have to harvest it from the roots of many, many different plants.

I am not enough of a specialist to speak with any great confidence, honestly. I'm kind of a hack. I know enough about enough things to get things done, but when it comes to the specific science, I don't have that knowledge.

That’s what I'm trying to do with this project, starting to put all this science together. There are people looking at the bacterial profile of worm castings and what they do in the field, what they're providing for the plants. I talked with Dr. James White about rhizophagy and what I love about it is everything does make sense, just at a very surface level, biomimicry, everything just makes sense. But then you can isolate certain areas and drill into it.

Yeah, I mean, I would definitely choose worm juice over any number of things. Are there better things? I don't know, but as a baseline, is it a good, really good thing to start with? Sure, 100%. Is it the be all and end all? Probably not, I don't know, I guess we'll all see. Maybe we'll have an answer at some point, maybe we won't, I'm not sure if it's good to have answers or not, but I think general principles are good.

Yeah, and it's a lot of fun for us also to, you know, obviously our customers are trying to implement the stuff in the field, and to check back in with them or others that are doing it as well with other products and find out what their results have been and really all it all points in the same direction. It's just a matter of how far you can take it.

And what your starting point is.

Yeah.

If your starting point is here, then that will be massively beneficial. If your starting point is over here, then maybe it won't be so good because you've already got tons and tons of worms pooping in your field every year anyways, then worm juice is probably not your limiting factor. But if you're operating on a chemical operation or whatever, heavy tillage or things like that, then worm juice might be a totally massively beneficial thing.

I know Nicole Masters has seen wonderful benefits out in like Montana with worm castings spread not that many pounds per acre just to help re-enliven land on scale. She's told me about that. That makes sense. But where is it most beneficial? I don't think there's a question about it being beneficial. It's where it's most beneficial.

What's the next horizon for you? Is it trying to just keep padding out the data for spectrometry, spectroscopy?

Yeah, the big hurdle is to define nutrient density, to get that one to 100 scale for every crop. Beef is different from potatoes, is different from wheat, is different from apples. Each crop costs a million, million and a half dollars, so raising the money and doing the research is a big project. Telling a story about it, raising awareness, having people understand, building buzz, momentum, all that's important.

It's a deeper conversation. I would say that the term nutrient density is starting to gain some like attraction, people are starting to use it and people are starting to think it's a good thing. And then when that happens, then you have people for whom it means different things that are using the same word. Can we have some uniform, scientific, agreed-upon definition or will it go like all over the map like regenerative? There's some big corporates that are taking the word and running with it because they can make more money. And there's people who are looking at it more deeply and honestly, but they don't have any money.

So the primary thing is to get the definitions created, if it's possible, if the science pans out, get meters built that'll correlate with some meaningful changes and incentives for farmers to work more with nature, which would cause our food to be better, which would cause us to be healthier. So that's really what we're trying to accomplish.

I'd really love to see it reach that incentive level. For a lot of the people we're working with, it correlates with a healthier plant that can resist pests and diseases better. So if you can drop your synthetic fertilizer or pesticides, it's paying itself off that way. It would also be great to see them getting more of a return on their crops being more nutrient dense than others in the field

Usually the way these things work is when somebody thinks that something is better, they get to charge more for it. I mean, ideally, if it's true that working with nature costs less, then you should be getting your profitability by simply having a better cost of production. But people will probably take whatever they can get as far as a price.

And if we can get this differentiation to occur, if people can say these carrots are 80 out of 100, these carrots are 20 out of 100, I guess the 80s will move and the 20s won't. That'll probably involve some economic driving. So we'll see.

Well, thanks again for your time. Good luck with everything.

Thank you very much. Good luck with all your work.