What’s your connection with Groundswell Outreach and regenerative farming? 

At the Bionutrient Food Association we’ve been working with growers for 15 years, helping them to understand how nature evolved things to work without human intervention and how to create a well functioning ecosystem. 

Our mission is to increase quality in the food supply – quality of flavour, aroma, nutritive value and health attributes, rather than aesthetics, which is generally how the rest of the food chain works. Along with having crops that are more nutritious, this means growers are increasing yields, decreasing cost of production, improving pest and disease resistance, improving economic viability, sequestering carbon, improving ecosystem function – all from working with nature instead of against it.

For the past 7-8 years we’ve been conducting research into nutritional variation in food, and what affects those levels of nutrients, in other words ‘nutrient density’. 

Our concept is that there’s a scale of nutrient density from 1-100, and we’ve built a hand-held spectrometer to show this can be done – you can flash a light at a crop and get a real-time measurement of nutrient levels. Our work and the work of others will provide growers and consumers with a tool to take into the field, market or the supermarket and assess what’s in front of them – they can then make better decisions about what they’re growing or buying. 

Our intention  is for this to incentivise  the supply chain to prioritise nutrition instead of volume – which will then have knock on effects: improving the ecosystem function, reducing the need for agrochemicals, and possibly even pharmaceuticals.

Why does GO Falkland matter to you and your mission? 

I’ll be sharing our mission with people at GO Falkland, hosting sessions on how nature has evolved things to work, and our vision for nutrient density and the science behind it. It’s really important to share this, not just with the farming community but with everyone. 

If we have the power to abuse the planet, we have the power to love the planet too, and that’s important. People are looking outside the box for solutions and they’re ready to change. It’s a grand vision and strategy, a social movement around collective benefit, with empiricism and transparency at the heart of it. It’s a long-form, deeper conversation and we’re finding that people are prepared to engage with it. 

What key messages do you hope people will take away with them? 

I hope one of the takeaways is that we have everything we need to succeed – we don’t need to be afraid of climate change. I hope people will feel like the answers are at our fingertips and there’s a level of excitement – that people feel empowered and not helpless. We have solutions we can act upon to create a much better world, it’s totally plausible.

You can read more about the work of the Bionutrient Food Association at bionutrient.org or bionutrientinstitute.org and you can see a recording of Dan’s talk at Groundswell in Hertfordshire in 2018 here.