From Soil to Shaker: What the Vegetable Systems Trial & Research Reveals About Nutrient Density

Can the way we grow food change its nutrient density? It's a simple question, but it has taken nine years of field research, five crops, and a growing network of scientists to begin answering it – and the answer is turning out to be more interesting, and more complicated, than you may originally think.

On September 30, we hosted a live conversation with Dr. Andrew Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Rodale Institute, about the Vegetable Systems Trial (VST). Launched in 2016, the VST is Rodale Institute's longest-running vegetable research project, and one of the few long-term studies designed from the outset to trace a line from soil health, to crop nutrition, to human health.

Here's what we covered, and why it shapes how we think about daily nutrition.

Why We Partner With Rodale Institute

We know that nutrition begins in the soil. It's the reason we partnered with Rodale Institute, a nonprofit with almost 80 years of leadership in organic and regenerative organic agriculture research and a co-founder of Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC).

AG1's partnership works on two fronts. The first is practical: supporting U.S. farmers as they transition toward USDA Organic and Regenerative Organic Certification, with hands-on technical assistance from Rodale Institute's team. Christa Barfield at FarmerJawn in Pennsylvania, Oscar Chavez at Microledon Farms in South Carolina, and Megan Barnwell at Lower Neshanic Community Farm in New Jersey are all doing that work now, across a combined 146+ acres.

The second is research. Regenerative practices are widely discussed and less often measured over meaningful timescales. The VST is one of the places where measurement is actually happening.

What the Vegetable Systems Trial Actually Is

The VST runs at Rodale Institute's Kutztown, Pennsylvania campus. It's a side-by-side comparison of organic and conventionally managed vegetable production, with each system run under both intensive and reduced tillage. Five crops are studied: potatoes, sweet corn, green beans, winter squash, and lettuce.

Its founding hypothesis is straightforward to state and difficult to prove: improving soil health can improve the nutritional quality of crops, which may ultimately contribute to improved human health.

Three questions sit underneath it.

1. How does farm management affect soil health?
2. How do soil health and soil biology affect crop nutrient composition?
3. And can changes in the food system contribute to better human health?

Long-term design is the point. Soil doesn't change on a quarterly cycle, and neither do the crops grown in it. Nine years in, the dataset offers an unusually detailed picture of how vegetable production systems shift soil over time — and the work has since expanded beyond the original field trial into a broader network of collaborators studying soil microbiology, crop nutrition, and plant-microbe interactions.

Finding One: Regenerative Organic Management Builds Soil

This is the most established result, and the most consistent. Across the full trial period, soil organic matter, total carbon, active carbon, and soil protein were all significantly higher in the organic system in the topsoil layer. These results describe soil's capacity to hold carbon, retain nutrients, support biological life, and stay resilient through drought and heavy rain. Put plainly: regenerative organic management builds soil rather than depleting it, and nine years of side-by-side data show it.

Finding Two: Improving Soil Fungi Increases Antioxidant Activity

Better soil is a meaningful outcome on its own but it raises the harder question: does healthier soil necessarily produce more nutritious food? The most striking result so far involves potatoes and soil biology. Potatoes inoculated with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (beneficial fungi that form partnerships with plant roots) showed up to 120% higher antioxidant activity and a nine-fold increase in ergothioneine, alongside a yield increase. Ergothioneine is a naturally occurring antioxidant that has been linked to health outcomes in humans, and has drawn growing interest in human health research because the human body can't produce it and obtains it entirely from food. It's a genuinely exciting signal: because plants don't make ergothioneine – fungi and soil bacteria do – understanding soil health is critical to better understanding what's grown there.

The Field Is The Foundation

So why does Rodale Institute spend nine years and counting paying attention to the soil, and why would a nutrition company care?

Because the gap we're trying to help close doesn't start at the formulation stage. Only about 14% of U.S. adults consume the recommended daily servings of fruits and vegetables.¹ And research suggests the produce that does get eaten may be less nutrient dense than it once was.

Multiple factors contribute to that shift, and declining soil health is one part of the story rather than the whole of it. But it's a part that gets overlooked, and it sits upstream of everything else. AG1 was built on the belief that whole foods are the foundation of good daily nutrition. Investing in research like the VST is how we take that belief seriously beyond the label: understanding the conditions that produce nutrient-dense food, and supporting the farmers and scientists working to protect them.

What's Next

Rodale Institute is expanding the VST's scope to investigate anti-inflammatory and antioxidant compounds in the trial crops. And together, we're publishing Roots to Results, a white paper examining what this body of research means for the future of nutrition. That white paper is expected to be published this fall.

References:

1. Bowman SA. Impact of Fruit and Vegetable Intakes on Food and Nutrient Intakes of Adults: What We Eat in America, NHANES 2017-2018. Dietary Data Brief No. 46. October 2022.