D2_Agraria_Journal_21_OPT

AGRARIA JOURNAL 2021 11 if you ate one leaf of the highest antioxidant level spinach on January 1 of a year, you would have to eat one leaf of the lowest antioxidant level spinach every day for the entire year to get the same level as you received on January 1st of the most nutritious one! Most impressively perhaps we were able to build a calibration on those six crops for our first-generation Bionutrient Meter. The calibration is not perfect, but we have proved that we can build a handheld spectrometer at a consumer price point that can be used in real time and non-invasively to give readings about nutrient density in food. In 2020 we increased the number of crops to 20 and broadened our base of labs from the primary lab in Ann Arbor to the first satellite lab at Chico State in California and our first European lab, in partnership with Valorex, in the Normandy region of France. We added oats and wheat to our assessments, and we increased the number of farms we are getting management data from to more than 125. We will now have more meaningful data about environmental conditions. This will allow us to build correlations from management to quality in a way that should give significant insight to growers about what limiting factors they can change to increase overall function in the biological system of the operations. This work has been accomplished solely through charitable donations so all information, raw data, hardware engineering, software code, etc. remains open source and in the commons in perpetuity. We want to make sure that free access to the best information is available to all globally regardless of resources. We hope to have a comprehensive definition of nutrient density with cutting edge spectrometers and a deep understanding of how to do more well within the next five years. The level of support for our work is really the primary variable. Dan Kittredge has been an organic farmer for more than 30 years and is the founder and executive director of the Bionutrient Food Association. "The results we found in this short year of assessment were nothing short of astounding." AMY HARPER The staff garden on the front campus of Agraria contains native perennials as well as annual crops. Staff members Naomi Bongorno and Kat Christen tended the garden on a staff work day in May. AMY HARPER Corn, bean, and squash, known as the Three Sisters, have been at the center of indigenous agriculture and food traditions for centuries. The three complementary crops grow in Agraria's staff garden.