Episode #73: John Fagan

Regenerative Agriculture Podcast

AEA Marketing

Earth Sciences, Science, Natural Sciences

4.7 • 546 Ratings

🗓️ 7 July 2021

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Fagan is the Chairman & Chief Scientist at the Health Research Institute, also known as HRI Labs, in Fairfield, Iowa. HRI provides testing services that focus on the nutritional value and biofunctionality of food sources. HRI's research and collaboration efforts continue to help grow the global regenerative agriculture movement in myriad ways.

Throughout their discussion, Fagan and John discuss:

The scope of Fagan's work at the Health Research Institute.
How chromatography, mass spectrometry, and other analytical tools allow Fagan to identify plant and animal compounds.
Fagan's research in comparing conventional vs organic production methods and his key takeaways.
The diversity and variability of plant compounds and their potential for innovation in the world of agriculture.
Fagan's tentatively named "Farmer Led Innovation Network" and how it is combining cutting-edge science and data collection.
How evidence of glyphosate presents across different crop types, agricultural products, and soil profiles.
The evolution of glyphosate detection and what science can tell us about glyphosate levels in our food.

Check out the glyphosate research mentioned by Fagan here: https://johnkempf.com/perspective-on-glyphosate-challenges/

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi friends, this is John and this is the regenerative agriculture podcast,
0:04.0	where we talk about the agronomic sciences and the cultural management practices that are needed to regenerate soil health and plant health and ultimately public health.
0:12.0	I'm really looking forward to this conversation today. My guest for this episode is John Fagan from HRI Labs in Iowa.
0:21.6	John is a detective, a very good detective in the laboratory,
0:27.6	finding things that people sometimes might prefer not be found,
0:31.6	sometimes finding things that people didn't know could be found,
0:35.6	both compounds that we might consider to be a positive, and some that we don't know about, both compounds that we might consider to be a
0:37.7	positive and some that we don't know about and some that we might prefer to avoid. So I'm really
0:42.6	looking forward to this conversation. John, thank you for joining me here today. Oh, it's a pleasure
0:47.3	to be with you, John. And I've enjoyed our earlier conversations and I'm really looking forward to this one.
0:55.0	Yeah, I am as well. John, can you offer a little bit of context and history?
1:00.0	Tell us about the scope of the work that you're doing, the projects that you're working on,
1:04.0	and some of the things that you're fascinated by.
1:06.0	Yes. We're excited about understanding everything that could be present in a food.
1:13.8	We all know about the, what, like, 25 or 30 nutrients that the USDA reports on for different foods.
1:22.6	But there's a whole lot more than that.
1:25.0	Plants, for instance, are these amazing chemists that deal with everything
1:30.8	in their environment through chemistry. Literally any plant is going to have thousands of compounds present.
1:39.5	Think of it this way. For us, for mammals or for organisms that can move around, if we're having a
1:47.6	problem with the environment, we just move. But what if you're a tree? No moving. Yeah, no moving.
1:57.0	And you have made, you sort of placed your bet on this particular point in the universe
2:03.2	as being where you're going to be for the next 150 years. And what you can do to adapt is to
	...

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