From jgruv@wam.umd.edu Wed Dec 22 17:02:12 1999 Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 13:51:57 -0500 (EST) From: Joel Brooks Gruver To: "sanet-mg@ces.ncsu.edu" Subject: Re: Mineral Content of Foods Hello to all... The issue of differences in nutritional quality between organically and conventionally managed crops is a distraction... the real issue is "what are the factors that impact the nutritional quality of food plants". The Soil Quality issue Volume 7 (1&2) of the American Journal of Alternative Agriculture included an article by Sharon Hornick titled "Factors effecting Nutritional Quality of Plants". This article is a good foundation for starting to think about the impact of inherent soil properties (e.g. texture, clay mineralogy), variable soil properties (e.g. organic matter content) and crop/soil management practices (e.g. fertilization, tillage...) on crop nutritional quality. A more recent article in the same journal Volume 12 (2) titled "Suppression of VAM fungi and micronutrient uptake by low-level P fertilization in long-term wheat rotations" by Clapperton, M. J., Janzen, H.H. and A.M. Johnston provides a clear example of how modification of soil ecology associated from P fertilization can reduce the micronutrient content of wheat. Another interesting article is "Enrichment of some B-vitamins in plants with applications of organic fertilizers" by A. Mozofar in Plant and Soil Volume 167 pages 305-311. The biotic and abiotic factors that impact crop nutritional quality are at work in both organic and conventional systems... rather than distracting ourselves with largely meaningless monolithic comparisons... lets focus on the mechanisms/factors that either promote or impede a plant's expression of its genetic potential for nutritional quality. Joel Gruver Center for Agriculture, Food and Environment Tufts University To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg". If you receive the digest format, use the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest". To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "subscribe sanet-mg-digest". All messages to sanet-mg are archived at: http://www.sare.org/san/htdocs/hypermail