Foods Show Apparent Decline in Nutrients

Recent studies have pointed to apparent decline in nutrition during the course of food production. Assessing the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutrient content data for 43 garden crops revealed that 6 nutrients (e.g. protein, Ca, P) showed statistically significant nutritional decline between 1950 and 1999 \cite{Davis_2004}. The observed declines ranged from 6% to 38%. Furthermore, a systemic review on databases from Australia indicated a 30-50% decline in iron content of vegetables \cite{Eberl_2021}. A separate study assessed archived wheat grain samples collected from 1950 to 2016 and discovered an imbalance in carbohydrate/protein content after the 1960’s \cite{Mariem_2020}. Notably, uptrend increases in CO2 and temperature were  observed in the same time period, suggesting climate change may have impacted both yield and the nutritional content. In 2018, Zhu et al. Pointed to altered food nutritional content as a result of rising COlevels \cite{Zhu_2018}. Importantly, the health of estimated 138 million to 1.4 billion people may have been impacted by the apparent nutrient declines. 
Notably, in this study, the nutritional analysis indicated that WisDM Green-pinpointed combinations were able to achieve improved yield without compromising the nutritional contents. Red spinach grown in 6-BAP/HA/SWE/Starch and 6-BAP/EDTA-Fe demonstrated an increase in iron content when compared to the control plant. In this study, only the %Yield parameter was optimized. Future studies may incorporate multi-parametric optimization to include nutrient content to drive both yield and nutrition to the most desired and balanced levels. Therefore, aside from food security, maintaining nutritious food sources is also a critical challenge that must be addressed.
Food Security in Global and Singapore Contexts
Climate change and socioeconomic considerations have contributed to food security problems globally \cite{Fujimori_2019,Nelson_2018,Cottrell_2019,zhai2020,Mal_2017,Prosekov_2018}. The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has further amplified the issue across the world \cite{O_Hara_2021}. In a global context during this difficult time, 663 million people cannot consume enough food to stay nourished and 1.9 billion people are at least moderately food insecure \cite{Prosekov_2018,2020,2019}. Food security is a complex challenge that requires multiprong approach that includes limiting food waste, increasing food production and adjusting agriculture techniques to achieve high yield in changing climate environment without expanding land dedicated to agriculture. WisDM Green can potentially be deployed to optimize compound combinations regionally and specifically to enhance the production yield of crops in food insecure areas. Singapore also faces food security challenges. Specifically, with limited farming land, Singapore imports 90% of its food products, and 13% of its vegetable supply is locally grown \cite{eat}. WisDM Green may serve as a potential strategy to address local, regional, and global challenges in increasing agricultural yield through rational and optimal yield enhancement design. As a highly versatile, dynamic platform, it may optimize combinations based on the availability of compounds regionally and further improve crop yield with optimal combinations in places with limited arable land.
Limitations of WisDM Green
The WisDM Green workflow represented the first step towards designing and optimizing compound combinations to effectively and sustainably enhance the yield of plants. However, to fully resolve the underlying conflicts between fertilizer-driven yield and sustainability, the WisDM workflow must overcome and address several constraints and limitations. This study was conducted under well-controlled, indoor experimental conditions and has yet to explore multi-compound optimization in outdoor settings, which may require re-optimization, specifically of the compounds’ concentration ratios. Therefore, WisDM Green implementation in an outdoor setting may reduce its ability to increase %Yield.