Thanks to Andrew Brooks, the Spirited Chef for this reminder; Did you know that it is now being discovered that your gut health is tied to your Emotional well-being? It's true. A healthier gut produces more contentment and a sense of well being. Some might call that happiness. How is this so? Well, aside from our gut manufacturing most of our immune factors, it is also a center for some hormone production. Imbalances of the gut mean less positive hormone production, and more feelings of distress. Also, if you are never sick (especially when most others are), you just feel better on a regular basis. Your body is functioning as it should.

https://open.substack.com/pub/madagriculture/p/mapping-the-new-dietary-guidelines?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

Plants don’t just absorb nutrients — they farm and feed on soil microbes. Research led by Professor James F. White Jr. at Rutgers University has shown that many plants engage in a process called the rhizophagy cycle — a natural mechanism where roots attract beneficial microbes, internalise them, and extract nutrients directly from them before releasing them back into the soil to repeat the cycle.  This microbe‑root interaction helps plants: • draw nutrients from living microbes • stimulate root hair growth • cycle nutrients more efficiently • build deeper, healthier root networks Understanding rhizophagy shifts how we think about plant nutrition — from passive uptake to active microbial cultivation.

You can wear the hat, but that doesn’t make you a cowboy. Right now, agriculture is crawling with people who look the part, talk the part, and sell the part, but the only thing they’re actually producing is invoices. Whole careers built on extracting money from farmers and ranchers while calling it “innovation”, “insight”, “support”, “research”, “advisory”, “programmes”. And it’s always the same outcome: The people who feed the country carry the risk. Everyone else gets paid to commentate. That’s what we fight at Grow. If you spend even a little time around Grow, you’ll notice it’s intentional: we don’t endlessly platform gatekeepers and insiders, we don’t hide behind titles or institutions, we don’t make six-figure ranch decisions from a distance, and we don’t apologise for being pioneers and pushing boundaries. Not because research is useless, and not because the messy middle doesn’t matter. But because the system, as it’s currently built, too often fails the producer. A five-year replicated study on a tidy six-by-twelve plot can be interesting, sure. But you don’t run a real operation on tidy plots. You run it inside real constraints: weather, cashflow, labour, input volatility, market pressure, and the brutal reality that you only get one season to get it right. The real researchers are the producers. They’re the ones implementing in the real world. They’re the ones learning in public. They’re the ones paying for mistakes with their own money. They’re the ones adapting fast enough to stay in the game. So instead of asking, “What does the institution say?” Grow asks, “What does the operator know?” We want to hear from the producer who’s actually doing it: What worked when the year went sideways? What didn’t work, and what did it cost? What do you wish you’d done sooner? What are you changing next season, and why? Because if agriculture is going to rebuild trust, rebuild margins, and rebuild resilience, it won’t be led by people selling theories to farmers.

Over the last year, the same questions have kept surfacing from two directions at once: the people buying food, and the people producing it. Different worlds. Same pressure. Consumers want clarity and better health. Farmers want fair payment for outcomes they already deliver. Right now, the system turns both into a guessing game. 🤠 For consumers: how do I buy food I can trust? People are already doing the work of “verification” with their thumbs. Scanning labels. Comparing products. Changing habits. Yuka alone claims 77 million users scanning products. That is not a niche behaviour, it is a demand signal. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?hl=en_CA&id=io.yuka.android The problem is the signal is disconnected from the farm gate. Consumers can spot the issue, but they cannot reliably trace quality back to the source, and they cannot reward the producers who are actually doing it right. 🤠 For consumers: how do I use AI for my health without giving away my sovereignty? People are feeding medical history into AI tools and getting pattern recognition they never got in a 7 minute appointment. So the question is not “will AI touch health.” It already has.The question is: can it be done with privacy, consent, and control, so the consumer owns the benefit and the data, not the platform. 🐮 For farmers: how do I build competitive advantage that actually pays? Nutrient density, soil function, verified practices, quality assurance. More of this is becoming measurable and auditable. But measurement alone does not pay the bills. Farmers do not have clean access to the buyers who will pay for verified quality.Buyers do not have clean access to producers who can consistently deliver verified outcomes at scale. So we keep talking about “premium” while trading on stories. 🐮For farmers: is there a real business model for on-farm data? Soil health. Nutrient density. carbon outcomes. biodiversity. water.