The People Behind the Evidence

The science connecting farming practice, soil health and the nutritional quality of food is real, serious and growing. So who is actually doing the work? We used Pulse, Vitagri’s research catalogue, to map the field — and to show how the map is drawn.

For most of the last …

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If we change how we farm, does the food's nutritional value also change?

It sounds like it should have an obvious answer. It doesn’t. Or rather, it didn’t — until now.

The Growing Health white paper is live.

Today, we are publishing Growing Health: From Soil to Human Health, a recording of the webinar, launching the UK’s most rigorous independent review of the evidence linking farming practices to the nutritional quality of food.

A nineteen-person volunteer team. A PRISMA-informed systematic review. More than 3,000 peer-reviewed studies screened. A hundred and fifty-eight cited directly. Evidence graded across four tiers and examined across five food categories: dairy, fruits and vegetables, meat and poultry, eggs, and cereals and grains.

And to launch it, we held a webinar. We brought in five expert panellists. We went through the evidence category by category, honestly and in full — including the studies that challenge our conclusions.

You can watch the full webinar above.

What the evidence actually says

The headline finding is this: up to 200 times variation in nutrient density exists within the same food categories. The driver is not the farming system label. It is soil biology and management practice.

Some of the specific findings:

• Dairy — Tier 1 strong. Organic milk contains 56% more omega-3 fatty acids than conventional milk, across a meta-analysis of more than 170 studies. The driver is access to diverse, herb-rich pasture — not the organic certification. A well-managed conventional pasture herd can produce the same result. A poorly managed organic farm without diverse pasture cannot.

• Fruits and vegetables — Tier 1 strong. Organically managed produce contains 18–69% higher concentrations of individual antioxidant compounds across a 343-study meta-analysis. The driver is nitrogen management — lower synthetic inputs cause mild biological stress in the plant, which responds by producing more phytochemical defence compounds. These are also the compounds most strongly associated with cancer risk reduction in epidemiological research.

• Meat and poultry — Tier 1 strong. Pasture-fed meat contains 47% more omega-3 fatty acids across a 67-study meta-analysis. The mechanism is direct: a diverse pasture diet transfers plant-derived phytochemicals — terpenes, phenolic acids, flavonoids — into the animal’s tissue. Grain-fed animals cannot produce this profile because the phytochemicals are absent from their diet.

• Eggs — Tier 3 emerging. Pasture-raised hens produce eggs with 2–3× more omega-3 and approximately double the vitamin E of caged birds. The signal is real. The research base is thin. This is a gap that warrants serious investment.

• Cereals and grains — Tier 2–3, complex. Regenerative no-till practices show higher micronutrient densities. But decades of yield-focused plant breeding have independently reduced mineral concentrations in modern varieties. Two real effects, pulling in opposite directions. Understanding their interaction is one of the key questions our ADOPT trials are designed to address.

What the industry is doing about it

Essentially nothing.

UK mandatory food labelling covers seven nutrients. None of those seven nutrients is influenced by how food is grown. The nutritional point of difference that farming creates is completely invisible to the market.

Retailers are already making ‘nutrient dense’ claims — M&S launched a dedicated Nutrient Dense range in December 2025. But none of those claims is connected to the farming system that produced the food. There is no chain of custody for nutrition. No verified standard. No measurement infrastructure.

That is the gap Vitagri exists to close.

Who we brought together for the webinar

Five experts contributed at specific moments in the programme, each matched to the evidence where their expertise runs deepest.

Dan Kittredge, founder of the Bionutrient Institute in the USA, has spent nearly a decade building the most comprehensive empirical dataset in the world linking farming practices to measured nutrient density — 10,000 samples, more than 25 crops, peer-reviewed publications, and machine-learning predictive models. He joins us to explain the science behind the bidirectional predictive model Vitagri is building with the BI.

Dr Lucy Williamson, Health Transformation Specialist, brings the gut microbiome dimension that the food system almost entirely ignores. The polyphenols that vary most between farming systems are not directly absorbed by the body — they are converted by gut bacteria into active metabolites. The health benefit depends on gut health. She joined us twice: once on what phytochemical variation means clinically, and once on bioavailability and the soil-to-gut chain.

Dr Hannah Fraser, medical doctor and organic milling grain farmer in Yorkshire, conducted her own Nuffield Farming Scholarship on this exact question — visiting six countries to understand how farming practices translate into nutritional differences. Her report, Displacing Empty Calories with Nutrient-Dense Food, published in 2025, identified four evidence-based pathways: soil health, variety selection, biofortification, and animal feed management.

Dr Tom Pearson, regenerative arable farmer integrating livestock in Cambridgeshire and a medical doctor with over twenty years of clinical experience focused on public health and nutrition, lives on both sides of the broken loop between farming and food-related ill-health. He joined us twice: once on the system failure, and once on what pasture management looks like on his own farm.

James Thompson, Environmental Scientist at FWAG and formerly Head of Trading and Supply Chain in retail, led the evidence review and scientific conclusions of the Growing Health white paper. He also joined us twice — first to address the complexity in the cereals evidence, then to explain what the commercial food system actually needs from a verified nutrient-density standard before it will act.

David Rose, our Co-Founder and Chairman, chaired the session and led the Q&A.

The commercial and moral case

British farming faces an existential commercial challenge. No state aid. Open international trade. On price alone, UK farming will frequently lose to lower-cost international competition.

A verified nutritional point of difference — a credible, farm-linked quality claim — could be enough to persuade the food industry to back British food. No other sector is building this infrastructure. We are.

And the moral case is equally clear. We now know that farming practices can improve the nutritional quality of food. The evidence is there. If we know this is possible, what is the moral case for continuing to farm, process, and retail food without measuring or incentivising it?

Diet-related chronic disease costs the UK economy £268 billion per year. That is not abstract. That is the cost of a system that measures the wrong things and rewards the wrong outcomes.

Three things you can do today

1. Watch the webinar — the full launch event is embedded above. The panel conversations are where it gets most interesting.

2. Download the white paper — it is free and open access at vitagri.org. Read the evidence. Challenge it. Share it.

3. Try Vitagri Pulse — our free AI tool puts the white paper’s evidence base in your hands in plain language. Ask it one question relevant to your role: farmer, buyer, health professional, or policymaker. Vitagri - Pulse

Growing Health: From Soil to Human Health was funded by the Frank Parkinson Agricultural Trust and produced in partnership with the Bionutrient Institute, USA. Vitagri Org Ltd is a public good, not-for-profit organisation. SEIS advance assurance confirmed.

Growing Health Together.

Rob Ward, CEO · Vitagri Org Ltd · vitagri.org · rob.ward@vitagri.org

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Here’s the uncomfortable truth at the heart of it: no credible framework exists in the UK to measure, verify, and reward nutrient-dense food production. The food system has learned to measure everything except what matters most. Diet-related chronic disease now costs the UK an estimated £268 billion a year — almost equivale…

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