If this is actually a problem, I'd much rather someone figure out which minerals need to go into the fertilizer mix (plus some downstream monitoring) than to assume that putting poop on the vegetables makes them wholesome.
However, there's a lot of non-falsifiable marketing woo out there, and it needs to be held accountable for that deficiency. If we don't, the woo wins every time, because it can't be held accountable for its problems, and we lose our ability to collectively learn and improve.
Using shit will get you an outcome you can count on. Trying to formulate things otherwise is sure to get whatever you are testing for, but likely to miss something important that we won't understand for years to come. That's happened more times than I'd care to count.
An idiom about never taking down a fence one knows not the provenance or reason for comes to mind.
Not that I'm saying I entirely agree with the viewpoint myself, but the rate of catastrophic unintended consequences we facilitate (I.e biodiversity crisis, creation of superbugs, introduction of invasive species) through artificial selection pressures tends to elicit pause at the suggestion we just "toss some minerals in and be done with it".
Interesting. Could you please expand on that? Personally, I find the desire to control inherently suspicious.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control
Merriam Webster says that meaning (definition 1a) of the word "control" is archaic, but I still hear it used from time to time. It's commonly used in a number of European languages.
Manure works fine. That doesn't mean it's anywhere near optimal.
Whatever product fits into the economies of scale, and selective commoditization solely for the sake of profit concentration not nutrition or environment.
But back to the idea of measuring everything. These are the counterpoints I can think about regarding measuring and controling:
* Measuring and controlling cost resources, some less, some more. E.g. It is easier to measure yields than to measure nutrition.
* There is imperfect knowledge on how to respond (control) after a given measurement, or even what measurements are important. E.g. Premature optimization, Goodhart's law, lack of certainty regarding nutrition.
* There are conflicting interests on what the result of controlling should be. E.g. more profits or more nutrition?
* Under appropriate circumstances systems can respond to variability or keep functioning without human control or input. This is resilience. E.g. Pollinating insects, edible weeds.