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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

• Participation of capitalism in leading the market transformation -Should the government lead the project for public good? -Will the competitive bidding process bring a positive impact as expected?

• Incentive programs that provide founding opportunities and help vendors start online business needs further discussion. • Sustainable farming and ways to shorten supply chain of fresh produce in China need further exploration.

• A need to create a coalition for market owner and researchers in related fields. -It is of great significance for non-profit organizations to unite researchers and stakeholders to work collaboratively to address challenges and manage wet market for public good.

Equitable livelihood (i.e., women empowerment) -WET markets can advance equitable livelihood and this underrated benefit should be discussed more and considered as a goal in future projects.

Communication with real estate developers -Increased transparency of communication can facilitate WET market transformation.