Soil Regeneration
Nutriculture is founded on stewardship to create fully fertile, living soil to grow fully nutritious, healthy food. Modern farm soils are severely disturbed, damaged, deficient. Nutriculture begins with soil repair to restore mineral balances & regenerate the microbe communities. Nutriculture is based on The Three Pillars:
Biocarbon, Minerals & Microbes.
Carbon-Smart
Carbon, life's signature element, builds structure, captures charge, creates community. Our planet's biggest Carbon sink is soil, so climate change strategy must sequester CO2 in soil to boost soil health & plant growth. Soil Carbon is a battery to store charge, hold minerals & support microbes to grow healthy plants & nutrient-dense food.
Nutrient-Dense Food
Nutriculture is materials & methods to grow food with a full menu of minerals & micro-nutrients for complete nutrition & optimum human health. Nutriculture arises from alarm at rising degenerative disease epidemics, and medicine's failure to address the nutritional roots of declining human health. The best food is the best medicine.
Grow Food for Nutrient Quality
In earlier centuries, agriculture grew crops for bulk yield. In the 21st Century, serious farmers grow food with high nutrient content, serious consumers seek nutrition, flavor & health. The new focus is on quality and health, measured as optimum nutrient levels. Nutriculture goes beyond organic to a food production system that yields crops & foods with complete nutrition to nourish and regenerate human health.
Nutrient-dense food begins as nutrient-rich soil. Complete, balanced, living soils grow healthy, vigorous plants with full flavor, no diseases, and long shelf life. Nutriculture instructs growers how to achieve and sustain optimum conditions in their soils, a process that at minimum is 3 growing cycles. This begins with a soil analysis, but the key is to populate soil with thriving colonies of microbes to form a Soil Food Web.
Ultimately, "nutrient-dense" is measured as amounts of minerals, sugars, proteins, oils, vitamins and other metabolites in plant tissue. New science offers advanced tools & methods to monitor & document nutrient levels in growing crops and store-bought foods. No national standards for food nutrients currently exists, but the Nutriculture movement is confident we can grow crops with at least as much minerals & vitamins as 1940, when the USDA first began to publish this data.
How to get involved......
We're a grassroots movement. Since everybody must eat, everyone can participate. And since nutrient-dense foods aren't available in food stores, or grown on most farms, to get & eat them is a creative adventure into community-based agriculture.