I think my Pihole blocked the paywall so I copied the article:

Wheat, apples and carrots are half as nutritious as they were in the 1960s, a new study has suggested.

Due to declining soil quality the nutrients in fruit and vegetables have also drastically declined.

The study, by researchers at Deep Science Ventures (DSV), found twice the number of fruit and vegetables need to be eaten today to get the same level of minerals such as potassium, magnesium or copper than 60 years ago.

Researchers found food such as cereals and bread, as well as carrots, apples and peas had lost 20 to 50 per cent of several key nutrients.

But reduced nutrients in crops combined with the rise of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, could push around 5 million UK working-age adults below safe levels of essential vitamins and minerals, experts warn.

Due to declining soil quality the nutrients in fruit and vegetables have also drastically declined, researchers warn (Getty)

"For sixty years we've measured food security in calories and tonnes per hectare, and on those measures we've done remarkably well. But we've been quietly hollowing out what's inside our food,” Will Summers, senior associate, climate at DSV said.

“As weight-loss drugs mean people eat less, the nutritional quality of every bite starts to matter much more. The good news is that we already have the tools to fix this, in breeding, soil health, markets and policy. What's been missing is the recognition that this problem is worth measuring and solving at its source."

The study argues that decades of breeding and farming to increase yield have reduced many nutrients in crops.

Cereal yields per hectare are up 215 per cent since the 1960s, and undernutrition in the developing world has fallen from 35 per cent to 12 per cent.

But study authors warn more than 2 billion people still have at least one clinical micronutrient deficiency. This is well documented in countries including the UK and US, where diets can be high in calories but still low in nutrients such as selenium and folate.

Good sources of selenium include wholegrains and Brazil nuts, but with the nutrient density of wheat declining, women would now need to eat four slices of wholemeal bread to get just a third of their recommended daily selenium intake, the report suggests.

Researchers found that fewer than a third of bread-wheat varieties released since the 1960s meet the recommended zinc target, for example.

But the health impacts are serious. Selenium deficiency weakens the immune system and raises the risk of heart disease. A zinc deficiency can impact the skin, hair and immune system.

An Iron deficiency causes fatigue and poor concentration. Low potassium intake can raise stroke risk by up to 21 per cent, and strokes already cost the UK around £26 billion a year.

Sian Ferguson, Trust Executive at The Mark Leonard Trust said: "Healthy soil is the foundation of healthy food. This report shows that rebuilding soil health is one of the few measures that can improve nutrient density, yields and climate resilience all at once, and farmers can do it profitably today.”

That's a bingo

I think even if you took profit out of this we'd still have this problem (might be more inclined to fix it though). We need to feed a lot of people. to do that efficiently high yield is needed causing the areas where we farm to become over farmed and the vegetables bred to be larger rather than nutrition focused.

Apparently normal plowing (the thing we've been doing for millenia) can damage the soil and reduce the nutrients going to the crops.

Interesting. I would have assumed that it was all the science providing bigger vegetables, but that more volume wasn’t scaling linearly with more nutrition.

I think you forgot potash, which provides.... let me check my notes.... potassium. And micronutients like zinc, boron, copper and mag as well as many others are applied via seed-placed fert as well as foliar application.

Nobody here knows shit all about how crops are fertilized, obviously.

Agreed. I did see that farms that apply for or keep an organic tag must rotate the crops to keep the tag. Right now only about 15% of our (U.S.) crops purchased are organic but I would imagine with education and policies/regulations.

It may be harder for specific crops like corn, but they supposedly have already seen nutrients rise greatly in situations where they have rotated the crops by such policies.

Hopefully it's a problem that can be solved pretty quickly.

As with anything lobbying will promote misinformation and strawmen that will slow down fixes .. because the health of others doesn't matter more than having an extra profit.

Yeild, plus….shelf life, ability to withstand shipping, size, and looks.

Not flavor… unless sugary. Things like grapes, apples, or carrots have gotten crazy sweet.

"not flavor"

This one hit;s hard. I was getting seeds at a food bank to grow peppers. I went on to say, oh you need to starve them of water (increasing potency) and the twat told me "I guess you're not hungry enough" sigh the whole point of hot peppers is to flavor that potato I was going to eat.

I learned something new today...

Crop rotation is a required practice, in the United States, for farms seeking organic certification.[24] The “Crop Rotation Practice Standard” for the National Organic Program under the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, section §205.205, states that

Farmers are required to implement a crop rotation that maintains or builds soil organic matter, works to control pests, manages and conserves nutrients, and protects against erosion. Producers of perennial crops that aren’t rotated may utilize other practices, such as cover crops, to maintain soil health.[13]

(From Wikipedia article on Crop Rotation)

I had never realized that. I generally don't pick organic because I believe that, for the most part, the majority of "organic" farming is mostly marketing geared at anti-science people, and fully organic farming is not scalable enough to replace modern ag.

But that's definitely a tick in the "pro" column.

The article talks about zinc and selenium, which are metallic elements that are not regenerated in soil on seasonal timescales. We'd need millions of years for the crust to renew and dredge up more rocky sources from the mantle. It is a mass balance problem - each bit of zinc in the wheat you eat used to be out in the field, but now it is in your body until you excrete it as waste .. then it probably ends up in the ocean or a landfill depending on where your water treatment plant is. Very little waste is recovered for fertilizer.

The solution here is going to be more fertilizers, not less, with micronutrients sourced from mines with richer deposits than the soil holds. The only other solution is moving food production to virgin land, which means destroying even more nature and will ruin that soil as well in time.

See also phosphorous, which the world is rapidly running out of. Phosphorous is regenerated through sedimentation in the ocean crust, and subsequent tectonic activity moving that crust to the surface. There's less than a century of phosphate rock reserves left. Fertilizers won't even be an option in this case, and it is a slow-motion emergency.

This isn't really true. The need to move land is caused by western farming practices. Food forests can operate on the same land indefinitely as they did for native americans for millenia because they are a mix of plants that keep the soil well regulated. They also produce more food per acre than monocultures. They're just more labor intensive to harvest. You can't use machines you have to pick things by hand.

Our ecosystem has a limit to what it can support. Some people call it a 'carrying capacity', but I prefer to call it 'Shareholder Returns'.

Anything that says "regenerative farming". I grow some of what we eat and don't use much fertilizer just get good local compost dirt and try to rotate crops.

plus no pesky labor laws on mars

RFK Jr recommends higher perchlorate levels in your potatoes to improve your constitution.

This is it. Supplimenting nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash means we can grow far more macronutrients to feed far more people than before. Letting fields follow, growing no food for years, lets the soil recover all the micronutrients mentioned in the article, but at the cost of reduced calories (Proteins, Carbohydrates, and Fats) produced per agricultural acre. And those are the things that feed hungry people. Doing more grazing and better fertilizers can help around the edges, as would simply fortifying foods directly. Thats how we cured rickets, after all.

No, it means they can make even more money off the deforested land.

That dude is pretty cozy with industry, I don't really trust him. He's been dodgy for a long time.

You might be able to use pandoc to convert the report to text format or something easier to share and share through pastebin or similar service

As a (ovo-lacto-)vegetarian who is also on a GLP-1 medication....I'm making sure I take a compounded one with added B vitamins. B is hard enough to get on a meatless diet...and I really feel like certain foods are just passing through me barely digested...particularly greens.

I should probably add a multi vitamin into my daily regimen.