Our Sources

Where the knowledge comes from

Source Philosophy

Save.ag does not generate knowledge from thin air. Every answer, every Learn page, and every debate is grounded in indexed, quality-scored source material. We believe that transparent sourcing is the foundation of trust — especially when AI is involved in synthesis.

A foundational value of this project is sending people back to the source. When a farmer has put years of work into a YouTube channel documenting what actually works on their land, they deserve the audience. When an organization maintains a website dedicated to regenerative techniques, they deserve the traffic. When a scientist publishes research that matters to agriculture, they deserve readers who care about the findings. Save.ag is not a destination — it is a conduit. We cite, link, and attribute so that every source gets both the credit and the attention their work has earned.

Our sources fall into three categories, each bringing a different perspective to regenerative agriculture.

Academic Research

Over 40,000 abstracts from peer-reviewed journals covering soil science, agroecology, animal husbandry, plant science, and related agricultural disciplines.

Academic sources provide the scientific foundation for claims about soil carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, biodiversity impacts, and economic outcomes. These sources are scored for relevance (minimum 6.5 threshold) and tagged by research domain and institution type.

When our honesty engine identifies contested claims, it classifies the institutional source — distinguishing between university field trials, government agency recommendations, and industry-funded research.

Abstract Sources

We index abstracts from three open scholarly databases:

  • Crossref (opens in new window) — The largest DOI registration agency, covering millions of journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters across all disciplines.
  • PubMed (opens in new window) — The U.S. National Library of Medicine’s database of biomedical and life sciences literature, including soil biology, environmental health, and agricultural toxicology.
  • OpenAlex (opens in new window) — An open catalog of the global research system, linking papers, authors, institutions, and concepts across disciplines.

Check Our Index

Search by DOI, paper title, or author name.

Paste a DOI like 10.1038/s41586-021-03629-6 or type a title or author name

Practitioner Knowledge

Over 68,000 transcript segments from farmer channels, extension educators, agricultural podcasts, and field practitioners sharing real-world experience.

Practitioner sources capture what actually happens on the ground — the failures that don't make it into papers, the adaptations that work in specific climates, and the economic realities of transitioning to regenerative methods. These sources are quality-scored (minimum 7.0 threshold) and indexed by topic, practice, and geographic context.

We process full video and podcast transcripts, extract topically relevant segments, and cluster them for coherent retrieval. This means when you ask a question, you get specific practitioner insights — not just a link to a 2-hour video.

Monitored Channels
Additional Content

Curated Web Sources

Over 100,000 articles from agricultural organizations, university extension services, USDA publications, and established farming media. These sources bridge the gap between academic research and practitioner experience.

Web sources are manually curated and quality-scored before inclusion in the index. We prioritize sources from recognized agricultural institutions, cooperative extensions, and publications with editorial oversight.

Quality Standards

Not all sources are created equal. Save.ag applies quality scoring to every indexed item:

  • Relevance threshold: Academic abstracts must score 6.5+; general sources require 7.0+ on a 10-point relevance scale.
  • Authority classification: Sources are tagged by institutional type (university, government agency, extension service, practitioner, industry) with tiered authority ceilings.
  • Recency weighting: Recent research is prioritized where the science is evolving, while established principles draw from the full corpus.

How Sources Appear

Sources are surfaced throughout Save.ag in several ways:

  • Ask answers: Every response includes tagged citations grouped by type (research, video, web, community). You can click through to the original source.
  • Learn pages: Each section includes "Sources behind this view" with the specific materials that informed that content.
  • Honesty engine: Debates cite specific studies and practitioner accounts on each side of contested claims, with institutional classification visible.

Suggest a Source

If you know of a high-quality source that should be included in our index — a research paper, a practitioner channel, or an agricultural publication — we'd like to hear about it.

Submit a source through our intake form, or contact us directly at [email protected].