Agriculture has become remarkably good at producing more food from the same amount of land. But has something been lost along the way?
A new report from Deep Science Ventures (DSV) argues that decades of breeding and farming crops primarily for yield have quietly reduced the concentration of essential nutrients in some of the foods we eat.
Its Hollow Harvests report claims declines of roughly 20-50% for multiple nutrients have been recorded in cereals and vegetables, raising concerns that continuing the trend could exacerbate micronutrient deficiencies.
It comes despite huge progress in food production. Cereal yields per hectare have increased 215% since the 1960s, according to the report, while undernutrition in the developing world has fallen from 35% to 12%.
Yet DSV said more than two billion people still have at least one clinical micronutrient deficiency.
“For sixty years we’ve measured food security in calories and tonnes per hectare, and on those measures we’ve done remarkably well,” said Will Summers, senior associate, climate at DSV.
“But we’ve been quietly hollowing out what’s inside our food.”
Are higher yields coming at the expense of nutrition?
Evidence highlighted by the report suggests the phenomenon stretches across a range of crops.
A 2026 study cited by DSV found fewer than a third of bread-wheat varieties released since the 1960s met the recommended target for zinc. Similar declines have been identified among some fruits and vegetables.
The significance is simple, DSV argued: if a carrot contains 50% less potassium, a consumer theoretically has to eat twice as much to obtain the same amount of the nutrient.
Until now, rising food consumption may have helped mask the problem. Global calorie supply has increased 38% since 1961, meaning people can potentially maintain their absolute intake of certain nutrients even when the nutritional density of individual foods falls.
DSV believes that buffer is becoming increasingly fragile.
Higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations could reduce wheat protein by as much as 12.7% and zinc by 36.5% under mid-century scenarios, the report claimed, while soil degradation threatens the ability of plants to access micronutrients.
Why GLP-1s could change the equation
Then there are GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.
More than 100 million people in higher-income countries could be using the treatments by 2030, DSV said. With the drugs potentially reducing food intake by 16-39%, their rapid adoption raises an intriguing question for the food industry: what happens to nutrition when consumers deliberately eat much less?
DSV’s modelling considered the effects of GLP-1 adoption alongside further reductions in crop nutrient density.
Its UK scenario found that 15% adoption of GLP-1 drugs combined with a 15% decline in crop nutrient density could push around five million working-age adults below key micronutrient adequacy thresholds, with selenium, potassium and iron particularly exposed.
That could turn nutrition per calorie into a much more important metric for food businesses, argued Dr Amy Godfrey, head of research at The First Thirty.
“GLP-1 drugs are changing how much people eat, and that changes what the food industry will compete on,” she said.
“As portion sizes shrink, nutrition per calorie becomes the value that matters. Nutrient-dense crops, and the science and tools that deliver them, are a real opportunity for investors and food businesses that move early.”
Are nutrient-poor crops really the biggest problem?
There is a challenge to the report’s thesis.
Many consumers are already failing to eat enough fruit, vegetables and fibre. Would public health therefore gain more from persuading people to eat more nutritionally valuable foods than from trying to increase the micronutrient content of individual crops?
And could focusing attention on declining crop nutrient density actually distract from this more fundamental dietary challenge?
Asked this by AgNavigator, a DSV spokesperson stressed that the two should not be viewed as alternatives.
“I would argue it isn’t an either/or, we should be targeting both,” the spokesperson said.
“Raising crop nutrient density is meaningless if people don’t then eat those foods, but on the flip side, if crop nutrient density declines then the benefits that people receive when they do make the right dietary choices becomes much lower than it can and should be.”
That distinction is important. DSV is not arguing that nutritionally enhanced crops replace healthier diets. Instead, it wants nutrient density to become another lever alongside efforts to increase consumption of fruit, vegetables and other nutrient-rich foods.
Its modelling used existing UK diets to estimate what 5%, 15% and 25% declines in selected nutrients across cereals and vegetables could mean for consumers.
“In the 15% and 25% scenarios, we could see millions of UK adults drop into nutritional deficiency, with certain nutrients like potassium and selenium exhibiting the highest sensitivity,” the spokesperson said.
Conversely, DSV believes deliberately increasing levels of nutrients where plant foods contribute significantly to dietary sufficiency could produce benefits of a similar scale.
Can agriculture put the nutrients back?
The report’s more optimistic conclusion is that declining nutrient density is not inevitable.
DSV points to breeding, soil health, micronutrient management and improved nutrient uptake and partitioning within plants as potential ways of boosting nutritional quality without necessarily sacrificing yield.
Healthy soil is an especially attractive intervention because of the possibility of delivering multiple benefits simultaneously, argued Sian Ferguson, trust executive at The Mark Leonard Trust.
“Healthy soil is the foundation of healthy food,” she said.
“This report shows that rebuilding soil health is one of the few measures that can improve nutrient density, yields and climate resilience all at once, and farmers can do it profitably today.”
The challenge, Ferguson added, is helping farmers through the first few years of that transition, where support from investors, funders and governments could be particularly valuable.
The report is calling for nutrient density to be measured alongside yield in food-security reporting and says the UK’s food-composition datasets need updating, noting that information covering fruit and vegetables was last comprehensively revised in 1991.
The report also wants nutritional quality incorporated explicitly into crop breeding, agricultural policy and farm-support frameworks, while encouraging food companies to take advantage of the GLP-1 phenomenon by competing increasingly on nutrition per calorie.
Summers believes that shift need not come at the expense of productivity.
“The good news is that we already have the tools to fix this, in breeding, soil health, markets and policy,” he said.
“What’s been missing is the recognition that this problem is worth measuring and solving at its source.”
