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. Milk is generally priced on butterfat and protein. A beef carcase is graded on weight, conformation and fat class. These are the facts the system holds about food. Protein and fat are among them, but as trade specifications. The minerals and vitamins a load carries are not recorded at the point of trade.

It is not missing because someone weighed it up and decided against. Food composition is well studied, and the laboratory methods exist. What has never existed, for bulk commodities, is an agreed way to record those values against the load being sold, carry them through the chain, and verify a claim about them. 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 comparisons of the UK's food tables report falling mineral content since the mid-twentieth century, although how much of that is real, and how much reflects crop varieties, higher yields and changes in analytical methods, is still debated. Diet-related ill health costs the country an estimated £268 billion a year (Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, 2024). 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 measurable property of a specific consignment, and therefore capable of being verified and rewarded. Whether a difference is down to how the food was produced is a question we answer with evidence, not assume.

That means treating farming practice, soil, crop and animal production, food composition, diet and human health as one connected model rather than six separate subjects — because only a connected model can show which links between soil and health are well evidenced and which are not.

Why we take no side

Regenerative, organic, conventional. Organic is a legal standard; regenerative has no agreed definition. Either way, a label bundles many practices together. We record the label, and model the practices, measurements and outcomes beneath it.

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 labels being argued over are facts we record, not explanations we rely on.

How you would know if we were wrong

Records in our catalogue carry a grade for the design of the study behind them, so you can see what kind of study stands behind a finding 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.