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The two day event also held two breakout sessions with multiple topics. 1. Exploring Agriculture and Human Health Connections 2. Expanding Nutritional Literacy 3. Innovating in Nutritional Dark Matter 4. Early Adoption of Regenerative and Nutrient Dense Foods 5. Agriculture Investment Strategies for Human Health Outcomes 6. Supporting Research and Innovation at the Intersection of Agriculture, Food and Health 7. Policy's Role in Advancing A Healthy Food System

The final session was Policy's Role in Moving From Conversation to Results. The panel included Funder for Regenerative Agriculture, Grace Communications Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Day One Project. Ideas shared included: 1. Breaking down policy siloes in the US that are relevant for both health and agriculture. The Food and Drug Administration manages drug use and approvals, antibiotics for animal production and aquaculture, monitors chemical use on vegetables, food safety parameters (e.g. safety of compost). The US Department of Agriculture monitors for meat, soil, ... Read moreland conservation with the Natural Resources Conservation Science, Agriculture Marketing Services. Pesticide safety and approval lies with EPA, so do manure and antimicrobial cleaners. And these are not areas that overlap or converse with each other. For example, health is not frequently part of conversations at the USDA. Antibiotic use has been a uniting topic as there have been inter-agency panels with the CDC. 2. The ability for recent policies to bring these separate departments and advocacy groups together, such as carbon banking or true cost accounting. 3. Low hanging fruit opportunities for policy. For example, 23 states still have subsidies for fossil fuel based fertilizers as they are tax exempt. This should be the opposite to tax fossil fuel inputs and chemicals that are damaging towards nutritious food and ecosystems. Another example includes EPA regulations that make it easier to spray antibiotics on crops where there is no proof of its utility. 4. The role for multistakeholder groups. The movement needs scientists, lobbying power, a good coalition of people, a good social media campaign, end purchasers, investors to provide risk capital for these folks to work together and be able to create new models that policy can build off of, and the need for a network of environmental justice communities that can work together as the same issues happen all over the place. Read less

The eighth session was Challenges and Opportunities to Building Health Food Pipelines. The session highlighted the expertise of the Bionutrient Food Association and Pipeline Foods. This session focused on the broad challenges and opportunities across the supply chain. Ideas included: 1. Connecting regenerative agriculture and organic agriculture with institutional health care. Some of the worst food in the world is presented at healthcare facilities, but people don’t understand the true scale of the sector. This includes hospitals, senior care facilities, long term care facilities, and commu... Read morenity based food services (e.g. meals on wheels) that have not contributed to the human body with true nutrition towards some of the most vulnerable population. It is a $16b marketplace almost entirely serviced with conventional food, with 40% of this spend on animal protein. 2. The increasing connection between nutrition and the wider medical field because of the pandemic. Antibiotic free, chemical free, higher nutrient density, anti-inflammatory is what is needed. The public policy piece will follow what the medical community wants, as medicine can be a push for some bi-partisan areas. 3. Use of whole animals as something not accessible for the regenerative agriculture community because of a lack of infrastructure and demand to minimize waste. The problem exists for pastured animals to find a place for all of the pieces. Grassfed beef leans towards high end cuts, and the rest of this can still go towards cut for food service, and avoiding the balance of the animal from getting flushed into the commodity channel. There is a demand from offtakers in pet food, nutriceuticals, fashion that can spread out the premium across the entire animal and offtakers, but the processing facilities do not exist yet to have identity preserved and separate channels. 4. Entry points for investors from the need for blended financial models for local and regional supply chain development, to increased conversations across financial entities (e.g. private equity, family offices, philanthropy, banking) for them to work together to derisk investments in the space. Read less

The seventh session was Supporting Entrepreneurs in Building Nourishment Economies. The panel consisted of The Croatan Institute, 1st Course Capital and Food Systems 6, and Nourish^N. Topics covered included: 1. Success stories from the panel. For example, Noursih^N was able to work on a water funding mechanism in Quito, Ecuador where funds were gathered from large water consumers in the city to support upstream water friendly farming practices. They also had a project in Zambia they want to replicate elsewhere working with Camaco and farmers across the country to gather soil data and determin... Read moree carbon offsets. The resulting work has been able to support elephant conservation goals (a rare instance of major biodiversity outcomes from agricultural work) and supporting rural regenerative food and farming practices. 2. 1st Course Capital discussed their investing parameters and ideology focused on regenerative agriculture and early stage companies. VC makes sense in this space for capital efficiency and scaling of startups, but it's critical to have the right type of capital for the right type of innovation and startup. There is a growing space and work that can support this space around integrated capital, intelligent matching, and blended finance. 3. The importance of community and knowledge sharing for the work that entrepreneurs are doing. Not all entrepreneurs are motivated by financial returns and there are benefits of coming together in a community that are important for investors to understand. 4. The need to understand the various types of support that entrepreneurs need. This includes back office support, regulatory knowledge for the food industry, service providers that understand unique startup challenges, community and resiliency to support burning out, and other areas of expertise or network engagements. 5. The need for more messaging around soil health's connection to nutrition as the market needs more companies to push this engagement. This evolution will need different language and metrics, recognition of the interconnection, increased focus on quality of foods, and the overlay of wellness over sustainability trends. This space makes sense for entrepreneurs as they are recognizing the market demand of both and bringing them together. Read less

The sixth session was The Wyse Guys: Two Brother's Journeys to Regenerative Agriculture Outcomes. It was a conversation facilitated by RFSI between the two Wyse brothers and their journey across farming, soil science, and investing. The brothers both had varied but similar journeys across the food system moving from scientific research on regenerative agriculture practices and ecological principles to academia to investing. One brother continues research through the Forever Green Initiative to develop the next generation of perennial and biodiverse crops for the Upper Midwest. The other brothe... Read morer runs a venture capital firm investing in early to mid stage enabling technology companies for the regenerative agriculture space, including precision agriculture technologies, robotics, and genomics. Some key ideas mentioned: 1. The importance of the economics of climate change and agriculture by monetizing the ecosystem services of improved practices. For example, the low carbon fuel standard and carbon crediting system in California works with farmland in an effort to improve the economics of regenerative agriculture. 2. The increasing global demand for plant protein that can have lower demands on the land and people than current livestock sources. Read less

The fifth session was How Investments in Farmland Can Drive Nutritional Outcomes. The panel conversation was led by RFSI and consisted of Mint Creek Farm, Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT, and the Rodale Institute. The session focused on: 1. What has happened to soils in the past century as the connection has been lost between growing food and soil health. Farmers have increasingly paid less attention to soil heath as they have been told that the most important metric is yield and biology has been replaced with chemistry. This has also included the fact that the idea has been lost that soil is te... Read moreeming with life. For example, a teaspoon of healthy soil has more microorganisms than there are people in the planet. 2. How this degradation of soils has impacted human health from a medical professional on the panel. The medical professional shared their observations over multiple decades of observing human health from increased inflammation related diseases to increased obesity. These medical issues are highly connected to the amount of chemical inputs in agriculture that damage the microbiota of gut, reducing the body's immune system while also causing inflammation. Obesity can also be tied to the consumption or overconsumption of empty nutrient meals lacking the substance needed for the body to feel satisfied. 3. The difficulty that farmers face as they try to manage better agricultural systems. This includes the burden of farmers having to educate consumers on why regenerative practices or humane treatment is important, the difficulty of running a small business, lack of financial resources, lack of partners with the capacity and expertise to work with farmers that want to have better practices. 4. The importance of technical and financial assistance to transition land towards regenerative practices. The panel, including a farm owner, shared their experiences with consultancy and digital education efforts funded by state (e.g. Pennsylvania) or national governments for farmland transition programs that current land grant universities are not serving. Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT also discussed their work offering mortgages and lines of credit from 600 investors towards transitioning farmland across the US. 5. The Rodale Institute shared their increasing consultancy work assisting farmers supported by public funding. This includes a 2022 4-day summit for the medical community to have first hand experience with on farm soil health practices and their relevance to practicing medicine. Read less

The fourth session was Nutrient Density from Farm to Body and What We Still Don't Know. The session was led by Danone North America on the regenerative agriculture programs with their family farms. Panelists included Peak Origin, Bionutrient Food Association, Brightseed, and TeakOrigin. Ideas covered included: 1. The bad history and current state of nutrition and agriculture. Nutritional guidelines in the US have not been updated in decades. 70% of US healthcare goes to chronic diseases that can mostly be attributed to poor nutrition. Only 12% of Americans are without high blood pressure, high... Read more cholesterol, or pre-diabetes and diabetes. Obesity is the most common medical disqualifier for military service. A study comparing diets of the same foods but grown differently showed significant inflammation differences between those eating the same foods from responsibly grown practices than those eating conventionally grown foods. 2. Bionutrient Food Association has been working on figuring out the variation of nutrient density within food items to define the spectrum variation and averages, correlating that with growing practices, and building the instruments needed to figure out nutritional information in real time. We have the ability now to develop the data at scale around plant compounds, growing practices, and human health outcomes. 3. A common way to understand the connection between regenerative growing practices and nutrition needs to be established in order to avoid confusion and further barriers to scaling. There is no way to certify or market food that is nutritious and grown regeneratively. All existing ones are binary modes of assessing, but it is a continuum where personal spectrometry products or more targeted nutrition science can allow people to have a holistic understanding of the food in front of them and how it connects to the idea of food as medicine. 4. There are opportunities to educate consumers around food and nutrition, and the existing food in low cost grocery stores that can serve nutrition needs and access to better tasting foods. Investors should be aware that food fits impact categories that investors are trending towards as one of the literal greenest investment categories. 5. There is a huge opportunity to come together on these topics to ensure that there is global nutritional density and equity, but it will require a level of collaboration and framing that doesn’t exist. Better collaboration is needed across both spaces and the spaces together as there are many existing organisations tackling regenerative agriculture, nutrition wisdom, food equity and access, and other overlapping categories. This will also be important in elevating local knowledge and issues that need to be addressed for food equity and access. Read less

The third session was Bringing Back Nutritional Wisdom. The panel consisted of American Heart Association, Health Research Institute Labs, Link Market, and BeingBrigid Nutrition. Ideas covered included: 1. Increased focuses and research on nutrition from the NIH to US government agencies to the Periodic Table of Foods Initiative to catalog nutrients and their connection to growing practices. The importance of public policy bodies to learn more from existing work and build this into altered or new policies. 2. How much is left to learn about food and nutritional dark matter, and the role dietit... Read moreians are playing to spread more knowledge about this place and build the connection to responsible agricultural practices. Conventional medicine focuses more on a diagnosis as opposed to thriving, having the right nutrients, reducing inflammation, maximizing metabolic health, and failing individuals. Historic and traditional medical practices made the connection between food and nutritional quality with health, but there has been a lack of science for this that has steered conventional medicine away from nutritional wisdom. Medical schools teach as little as a single session around nutrition that future doctors can bring into their future practices. The health care community needs to catch up through community shared knowledge, nutrition education for the medical community, strategic partnerships between nutrition and medical entities, partnerships between responsible food service and medical institutions. 3. Link Market’s free grocery delivery services to seniors and a publicly funded brick and mortar grocery story in public housing in St. Louis. They only sell food that meets guidelines laid out by the American Heart Association. They have worked deeply on finding the balance between sourcing affordable food and that food coming from responsible sources that have grown food in more nutritious ways. They have also been part of Food Rx work for medical professionals to recommend healthier food through prescriptions that can be filled by grocery store kiosks on site. 4. Difficulties around food access and nutrition from food swamps, people being failed by profit and drug and surgery centered medical systems, marketing of the cheapest and most affordable foods that destroy physical and mental health, lack of nutrition education available to people (e.g. understanding the difference between feeling full and having nutritious foods), the lack of affordability for healthier and responsibly grown food. 5. How to educate more people around nutritional wisdom. This could be specific to individual health and dietary needs, people learning more about their bodies and being their own health advocates, guiding them through the change of mindset and confidence in what they are doing, increasing comfort around cooking healthier foods, bring in people that are good communicators. This also includes educating farmers to understand that they have the ability to do something better and deliver high quality nutrition, or other supply chain actors to recognize this and fund farmers for that work. Read less

The second session was around Making the Case for Integrating Soil Health and Human Health. The session consisted of presentations from Brightseed, North Start Transition, and Axten Farms. Brightseed shared their work connecting soil and human health. Plant rich diets lead to health as diets deficient in plants are 3x more deadly when measuring global deaths attributed to diet. This is why many small molecule drugs (63%) come from natural sources. Plants have proteins, starches, lipids, and other compounds. Only 100,000 compounds are known in the academic space, but there are millions or ten o... Read moref millions in existence so Brightseed works to map compounds. They have started with 700,000 identified through artificial intelligence systems that index commercial placts, create a database of plant compounds, and connect to a digital model of human health. Their process found a plant compound in black pepper that can improve metabolic health, with impending clinical trials around the research. Metabolic health is the top reason after age for COVID complications, which includes fatty livers and little to no treatment options. North Star Transition shared the investment case for deploying capital in this space. There is a movement for integrated corporate reporting with sustainability but there is still a gap for corporations to acknowledge the soil health connection to human health. The reason there is no change at the systemic level is because the issues are treated in siloes. For example, the health service in the UK really only works with food when discussing obesity and also lacks information and focus around the nexus of soil and human health.They have been working on regional change within the country of Wales in order to explore what systemic scale can look like across a region of 3 million people. They brought together 35 organizations across sectors in order to break down the silos of conversations. They have crafted four ambitions for Wales: i) land use that leads to revitalized connections between the land, air and water that optimizes positive impact for nature, community and carbon; ii) the Welshe food system is optimised for the wellbeing of citizens, community and nature; ii) the hidden voices of nature and future generations are present for all decisions in government and business; and iv) integrating community and nature in the delivery of scaled-up prevention to improve wellbeing outcomes. Axten Farms shared their work managing a family farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. They have farmed in a water limited area for over a hundred years. They faced a series of weather events that made them vulnerable and saw that perennial crops had greater resiliency. So they began adopting practices to build resiliency, such as cover crops, reduced synthetic inputs, stripper headers and stubble retention, diverse cash crops with companions, compost and carbon based inputs, compost extract and biostimulants, and synergistic crops. The idea of how big of a difference soil management practices could make really stuck with the farm as they learned about the practices of others, such as Gabe Brown. They built a seed cleaning facility that cleans all grain grown on the farm to food grade and the seed market, as well as regeneratively grown flour, that they directly market and control the end to end process. An important part of this work has been around community and socioeconomics as they have seen the loss of fellow farmers so they aimed to build a process that could employ and retain more people in rural communities. They have also conducted grain nutrient testing to highlight the major difference their practices have made on nutritional quality, and that has also translated to more flavorful products. Read less

The first session was Digging into Agriculture's Ties to Human Health Outcomes, highlighting the expertise of the Bionutrient Food Association, the Croatan Institute, and Basil's Harvest. The session mainly covered the findings of an upcoming report from the Bionutrient Food Association and the Croatan Institute around the nexus of soil and human health. Human bodies and agricultural ecologies mirror each other. The session highlighted the four levels of nutritional interventions that exist in the space: 1. Replacement, including healthier options and whole foods; 2. Free from chemical and dru... Read moreg inputs; 3. Differentiated nutrient density, including how we begin to select food that has nutrient levels that are differentiated and detailed; 4. Microbiome centric, meaning a more harmonious relationship between microbes in the environment and microbes in our bodies. Moving forward this work will require a focus on: 1. Prioritizing more nutritious food; 2. Harvest and processing to ensure that harvest and transport time is optimized to maximize nutrition, and midstream practices are changed to stop separating whole foods from their core nutritional components (e.g. as happens with wheat); 3. Purchase, access and preparation as systemic racism and inequities have created a major lack of food access, high cost around regeneratively grown food, and increasing difficulty around having the time, energy and resources to properly prepare food to make the nutrients most available; 4. Digestion and absorption, meaning ensuring that human guts and bodies are in healthy places (free from chemicals, stress and chronic illnesses) in order to best absorb nutrients. 5. General human health to ensure access to more nutrients, reduce chronic health issues, and improve the health of the gut microbiome. Dialogues throughout the session briefly mentioned some other key ideas: 1. The idea of nutritional dark matter and the lack of information/science that we have around nutrition. 2. Compost application can greatly improve the health of soil systems as mirrored with human gut microbiomes that can have improved health with increasing research around fecal transplants. 3. Society needs a new vocabulary around this nexus as regenerative agriculture, nutrient density and other individual terms do not cover the suite of how interdependent these relationships and work are. 4. There is a need for a stable and profitable market to pay farmers and investors that are valuing these contributions. Read less

Main findings included: 1. The directionality of food system towards quantity instead of quality has been deleterious to human and environmental health. The way it is possible to breed for a cardboard tomato shows the potential to breed for more nutritional and regenerative food products. 2. Growing more nutritious foods influences human health and shows the connection between how we manage landscapes and how manage epidemiological health. There is an opportunity to not only improve health outcomes and food equity, but also store carbon and support other ecological services through regenerativ... Read moree growing practices that produce more nutritious foods. 3. Soil ecologies and agriculture systems if continually perturbed can go from a stable to an unstable state and the same happens with the human gut leading to immunity and inflammatory issues. 4. There are some relatively easy principles and a framing of nourishment, healing, or nutrition wisdom that can interrogate the complexity of these individual issues and allow people to understand the connection between soil health and human health. 5. Breaking down the siloes between food, agriculture, health, insurance, policy, finance and other sectors are key to having a systemic approach that acknowledges the connection between responsible growing practices, increased nutritional quality, better tasting food, and more accessible better foods. 6. There is a great deal of interest to continue to figure out the dark matter of nutrition to understand all of the unknown compounds within foods, the variation of nutritional quality in different foods and their connection to different growing practices, and how to better educate not only consumers but also policy makers and the medical community around the importance of nutritious food that come from responsible growing practices. 7. Food is a human right, not only enough quantities of food, but also nutritious food that nourishes the body and regenerates soil systems. 8. The growth of the idea of food as medicine and the immediate opportunity to expand this on a societal level lies with businesses and innovation to make changes as the medical community and public policy moves more slowly. Read less

The way we do agriculture, the way we manage our soils, the way we process our food, and the way we get our food from farm to table all influence the levels of nutrients we find in our food. Conversely, there are also many things that influence our body’s ability to use what nutrients are available. Better understanding this complex relationship between agriculture, food, and health is of increasing importance as we face both environmental and health crises ranging from climate change to chronic illness and exorbitant costs due to a primarily reactive healthcare system. Regenerative food sys... Read moretems – ones that value nutrient density from soil to stomach – are seen as a solution to these challenges and present enormous opportunities for further learning, development, and investment. RFSI’s Rooted in Health event dove in to the under-explored connection between regenerative agriculture and nutrition, the pathways to improving human health through agriculture that already exist, the work yet to be done, and the investment levers that can be pulled to advance human health and nutrition. Addressing an issue as complex as this requires a systems-based, multi-stakeholder approach. This event is for investors and practitioners across the agriculture, food, and health spectrum and is designed to provide: 1. A foundation of understanding of the connections and complexities that exist between agriculture, food, and health; 2. A roadmap for work to be done by various stakeholders involved; 3. An exploration of the investment and funding opportunities that exist along the path from soil to stomach; 4. A vision for what comes next and how you fit in. The event frequently highlighted the importance of working on these two areas in tandem with each other as they are complementary and tackled this topic as something that covers across all five Action Tracks. This includes building the connection between food and health, supporting sustainable farming practices that promote carbon, water and other ecosystem services, supporting rural economies and nutrition access, and creating climate smart agricultural systems. Building the connection between soil and human health is a two way street in ensuring that nutrient dense food makes its way from the field to the person, but also that consumers are primed to accept and assimilate nutrients from regeneratively grown food. It will also require breaking down siloes between different industries and sectors to ensure that people are recognizing the holistic and interconnected dynamics of agricultural practices and nutrition. Read less