The Vitagri Ontology

Commitment 01

Nutritional quality is a property of a consignment, not a description of a category

“Nutritious” is currently an adjective attached to food types. Broccoli is nutritious; crisps are not. In Vitagri's model, nutrient density is a value held by a specific batch, of a specific commodity, from a specific place, at a specific time, carrying a method, an uncertainty and a date of measurement. Two loads of the same variety from adjacent fields may differ.

This single move is what makes everything downstream possible. Adjectives cannot be verified, traded, audited or improved. Values can.

Commitment 02

Soil to health is one object, not six disciplines

Farming practice, soil biology, crop and animal production, nutrient density, diet, human health. Almost every institution treats these as six fields with six literatures, six conferences and six funding streams. Vitagri treats them as one chain, and Pulse Brain is built on that commitment: a study of mycorrhizal colonisation and a cohort study of dietary fibre and bowel disease sit in the same governed catalogue and are weighed together.

The commitment is not ecumenical good manners. If the chain is not modelled as one object, nothing at the health end can ever be attributed to anything at the soil end — and attribution is the whole proposition.

Commitment 03

Evidence is an entity with a class and a strength

A citation is not evidence. In Vitagri's model every record carries an evidence tier, a study design, extracted claims, an effect size where one exists, a retraction state and a date of last check. A claim is a separate entity again, holding a verdict against the catalogue.

This is what allows Vitagri to say how strongly it knows something rather than merely that it read it somewhere — and, more valuably, to say where it does not know. An organisation whose product is verification must be able to represent its own uncertainty as data, not as a caveat in prose.

Commitment 04

Properties belong to classes, and classes are not interchangeable

Nitrogen isotope ratios speak to arable systems. Odd-chain fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid speak to ruminants. Reading a ruminant marker against a wheat sample is not a wrong answer that better data would correct; it is a category error, and a model that tolerates category errors cannot be trusted with anything at all.

Vitagri's marker discipline is often described as caution. It is not caution. It is the ontology holding under pressure, and it is a design property — the reason the outputs can be relied on, rather than a limitation on what they cover.

Commitment 05

Farming systems are not classes in this model

Regenerative, organic, conventional, agroecological. These are labels applied to bundles of practices after the fact, and they are contested precisely because they are not things — no two people who use them are pointing at the same object. Vitagri models practices, measurements and outcomes. It does not model the labels.

This is the structural reason Vitagri cannot take a side in the argument: the categories being argued over do not exist in its ontology. Independence stops being a value the company asserts and might one day trade away under commercial pressure, and becomes a property of the data model.

Corollary

The model extends, it does not overwrite

Schema changes are additive. New classes and fields are added; existing ones are not redefined. A record graded under one definition and later read under another is worth nothing, and a catalogue that can be silently rewritten backwards is not an evidence base — it is an opinion with a database behind it. The same principle governs the Growing Health Report: it is a dated synthesis, superseded by later work rather than quietly edited.