[laughs]

Yes.

They're brilliant, amazing instruments.

Um, um, I was just in East London over the weekend and went to three shops within a, I don't know, what, two hundred-yard radius, or maybe it was a, we'll call it a half a kilometer radius, um, and bought ten or fifteen crops off the shelf from each one.

Um, came back, uh, took the refractometer and the garlic press and, you know, within thirty seconds had a reading on each one, uploaded it into the app, and now I'll, I'll be showing the map in, you know, at the end of the next hour, um, where anybody can access.

It's a free, open, you know, open to the public app where if people take home their shopping and use the refractometer while you're chopping up your potatoes or your onions or your tomatoes or whatever it is for whatever you're cooking, quickly squish it, get a reading, upload onto the app, date of purchase, point of purchase, brand if there was one, and reading.

Right now, we the people can, with citizen science, begin to identify patterns that exist in the supply chain because food is not uniform, and Brix is not a perfect nutrient density definition.

Cool.

Okay.

Um, so yeah, you can take a soil test in, in April or in October, and that will at one moment tell you, you know, which nutrients are there and which microbes are there, et cetera.

But the plant grew from April to September or, you know, whatever it is, June to October.

Um, and the time when the plant was alive, from when it got planted to when the crop was harvested, it was experiencing life.

Mm.

So if you eat things that have low flavor, they don't have the full complexity of nutrients that your body needs to function.

If your body's what your children's body's being built out of, and when we... you follow that track, that's where we are right now, f- three, four generations post-industrial, you know, post the Green Revolution.

We've been building our bodies out of insufficient substance, and then we have children, and their bodies are built even less well, and even less well, and we have these epidemic levels of chronic disease-

Dan started the conversation with his search to unlock the secrets to nutrient density.

So we did look at across multiple continents, across many years, hundreds of farms, almost 10,000 crop samples, overlaying the management practices and the soils and the nutrient levels.

We asked these questions.

How dramatic is nutrient variation? Does it connect to genetics of the crop variety? Does it connect to soil type? Does it connect to certification label? Does it connect to point of purchase? Does it connect to scale? Does it connect to individual practice? And the answers to all those were no.

Just because something was at the farmer's market does not mean it's more nutritious.

Just because something was from a local farmer or was from this soil or that soil or this genetic or that genetic or organic versus not organic, we found really no meaningful connection between any of those things.

The only thing that we found that connected to the levels of nutrients in the food was the level of life in the soil.

app that we

So how did you get involved in this? What did you want to be when you were a little boy?

When I was a little boy, I was regularly, you know, asked what I wanted to be and never had an answer.

I think in my high school yearbook, I said I wanted to be a Renaissance man.

I got into all this because I, through college, university, into my 20s, I had had no, I basically managed my parents' farm.

I had grown up working on the farm and My mother kind of needed my help, and so I never really bothered to...

I didn't want to get a job.

I didn't want to go have a career or anything like that.

in such

Sorry

... couple days with the, with the media team there in the UK, and we're talking about having them help to really launch this campaign globally.

Then I meet with somebody from, it's called Rabobank, which is the world's largest agricultural lender.

Their headquarters in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, and they're looking at how can farmers make a living.

They're really...

There's a real struggle with a lot of farmers basically not being able to pay the bills, and I met with some of their people last fall.

In Europe, they're really starting to make real toxic chemicals illegal.

Yeah