Choosing the right things to measure in agriculture

How do you “shift the focus from feeding people to nourishing them”? According to a recent short article in Nature, there are ten things to do, and one of the, fixing metrics,

Take, for example, maize (corn). The trend is to convert much of what is (over-)produced into starch and sugar. In conventional agricultural analysis, the improvements in yield per hectare per year in intensive maize-production systems are usually presented as the main indicator of success. More maize for fewer dollars up-front is also considered an important contribution to food security.

The shortcomings of such a narrow focus is something we’ve talked about here before.

Calories are, of course, part of nutrition, but by no means the most important part over the long run. We have tables of recommended daily allowances for macronutrients like Calories (or their proxies) and for micronutrients. We could calculate nutrients per Calorie for different kinds of produce. We could even try to express productivity as the percentage of the RDA for all nutrients that would be provided by some area of land. We could do lots of things more sensible — and more difficult — than Calories per hectare.

Indeed we could.

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