Pioneers in New Plant Introductions!
PlantHaven®, Inc was founded by Geoff and Maureen Needham in January 1997 in response to a growing demand from plant breeders for good advice and representation in the North American market. We are an independent agency assisting plant breeders worldwide in bringing their new plant varieties to market. Through careful guidance, PlantHaven has nurtured many breeder relationships offering advice and service in market research, performance trials and patent protection.
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Early evidence of declining nutritional quality
In the last hundred years, every new agricultural or food processing innovation—whether the pasteurization of milk or the rise of frozen foods or the invention of chemical fertilizers—has prompted critics to suggest that the change has compromised the nutritional quality of our food. In the last century, the increasingly scientific and chemical-based efforts to raise crop yields prompted a new round of criticism that our more abundant food supply was actually more deficient. As far back as the early 1900s, Rudolf Steiner suggested that “a lot of things have diminished in their nutritive value,” partly due to the early adoption of chemical fertilizers.
In fact, since the middle of the 20th century, researchers looking at British and American data have found that the nutrient content of those nations’ food supplies have steadily declined.
In the middle of the 20th century, R.A. McCance and E.M. Widdowson, two British nutritionists who tracked changes in the nutrient content of the British food supply, suggested that the future of their nation was threatened by food processing, neglect of manuring, and the disappearance of crop rotations.
A reanalysis of this British government data found “marked reductions” of 7 minerals in 20 fruits and 20 vegetables from the 1930s to the 1980s, concluding that “in every sub group of foods investigated there has been a substantial loss in their mineral content.”
These historical analyses invited critics who challenged the reliability of old data and measuring techniques; many aspects of sampling, handling, and assaying for nutrients have changed over the decades and in some cases methods are not well-documented. Another analysis of British data, also criticized for not controlling for moisture content or separating raw from cooked foods, reported even more dramatic findings: spinach’s potassium content dropped by 53 percent, its phosphorus by 70 percent, its iron by 60 percent, and its copper by 96 percent; a person would have had to eat three apples in 1991 to supply the same iron content as one in 1940; and the iron content of meat products declined by an average of 54 percent.
(The work is one of the few studies to look at meat and dairy products. As such, the double-digit declines in the nutrient quality of meat and dairy products are some of the first indications that consumption of less nutrient-dense animal feed grains and forages has a measurable impact on the animals eating them, and perhaps secondarily, on people consuming the meat and milk from such animals.)