You cannot reward what you do not record.

The thing that isn't there

A load of grain is received against protein, moisture, specific weight and falling number. A carcase is graded on weight, conformation and fat class. These are the facts the system holds about food, and nutritional quality is not among them.

It is not missing because someone weighed it up and decided against. It is missing because there has never been an agreed definition, an accepted method, or any way to verify a claim about it. So there is no field on the form. And where there is no field, there can be no price — which means there is no reason for anyone in the chain to change what they do, however much they might want to.

Meanwhile the compositional record shows the mineral and vitamin content of UK staple foods has fallen measurably since the mid-twentieth century, and diet-related ill health costs the country an estimated £268 billion a year. There is no shortage of opinion about why. There is a shortage of measurement.

What we are building

Vitagri is not campaigning for a better price for good food. It is building the thing a price could attach to: nutritional quality as a real, measurable property of a specific consignment, attributable to how it was produced, and therefore capable of being verified and rewarded.

That means treating soil, farming practice, food composition, diet and human health as one chain rather than six separate subjects — because nothing at the health end can ever be attributed to anything at the soil end unless it is modelled that way.

Why we take no side

Regenerative, organic, conventional — these are labels applied to bundles of practices, and they are argued over because no two people using them are describing the same thing. Vitagri does not model the labels. We model practices, measurements and outcomes.

Independence is not a value we display and might quietly drop when a large customer leans on us. It is a property of how the system is built.

So the reason we stay out of the argument is not diplomacy. The categories being argued over do not exist in the way we hold information.

How you would know if we were wrong

Every record we hold carries a grade for the strength of its evidence, so you can see how much weight a finding will bear without reading the paper. Weaker work is labelled, not hidden. Where the science is contested we show the contest, and where it is thin we say where new work would be worth commissioning.

Our predictive modelling programme is research, not a service, and we describe it that way. Certification is a later-stage ambition and we do not present it as a present capability. We would rather be trusted on a smaller claim than doubted on a larger one.

Where this came from

Vitagri was co-founded by Rob Ward and David Rose, out of an observation from inside the industry: the food system measures almost everything about a crop except the thing that matters most to the person who eats it.

The first step was to establish what the evidence actually supported, which became the Growing Health Report, funded by the Frank Parkinson Agricultural Trust. The second was to build the catalogue that keeps that evidence current. The third is the measurement itself, which is what we are building now.

What we are asking

If you already suspect that the food you grow, sell, buy or advise on is better than anything on the label can prove, you and Vitagri are working on the same problem. Start with the evidence and decide for yourself.