UC Davis

Transcribed by AI. May contain errors.

Andy Fell 

Hey, Amy. 

Amy Quinton 

Oh, hey, Andy.

Andy Fell 

Are you eating lunch in here?

Amy Quinton 

Yeah.

Andy Fell 

Don't you have a podcast episode to write?

Amy Quinton 

Well, that's why I'm eating and staring at my bowl of pasta with tomato sauce,

Andy Fell 

And how is staring at pasta going to help you write a podcast?

Amy Quinton 

Well, I'm hoping it's going to spark some idea. I want the next episode of Unfold to be about food.

Andy Fell 

Where did you get those chunky tomatoes for your sauce?

Amy Quinton 

Don't they look good? 

Andy Fell 

They do.

Amy Quinton 

 Out of a can from the store. I'm a great cook.

Andy Fell 

A can? You know, tomatoes pair nicely with both pasta and UC Davis.

Amy Quinton 

Huh?

Andy Fell 

Well, back in the 50s, a UC Davis plant breeder and an engineer walked into a bar . . . no. They teamed up to invent the mechanical tomato harvester. It was the first machine that sorted and loaded tomatoes automatically. The processing tomatoes the ones you use in cans for your sauce.

Amy Quinton 

And I recall they also developed a new tomato that would be tough enough to survive that harvester. It was kind of square wasn't it? 

Andy Fell 

Yeah, the square tomato. Well, not really square but you know tough enough to harvest. Square-ish. Yeah, so perfect pairing, don't you think? Technology and food.

Amy Quinton 

Right? Well, you know, it's funny you should say that since part of my job at UC Davis is to tell stories about food and agriculture. And part of your job at UC Davis is to tell stories about engineering.

Andy Fell 

Well, then I've got an idea for an episode. Why don't we do something on the newest technology, artificial intelligence.

Amy Quinton 

Just said it has to be on food. 

Andy Fell 

Well, AI is used in agriculture. We have an entire institute at UC Davis devoted to this, Artificial Intelligence Institute for Next Generation Food Systems.

Amy Quinton 

Okay, wait, hang on. Let me move my tomato sauce aside for the moment.

Andy Fell 

What are you doing your laptop?

Amy Quinton 

I'm opening up ChatGPT.

Andy Fell 

Are we supposed to be using that? 

Amy Quinton 

Shh.

Andy Fell 

Are you just going to have it write the episode?

Amy Quinton 

Oh, let's not go there. Besides, I've tried it and it's not as good as we are. I still have to do the work.

Andy Fell 

Ah, then you probably aren't using the right prompts. It's all about the right inputs.

Amy Quinton 

You know what it is good at? Coming up with names for a podcast episode. Because calling the episode AI in agriculture is boring. Here's an entire list. From Fields to Feasts: How AI Nourishes Our World. That sounds good.

Andy Fell 

Uh, that's no good. I like number 2. Bytes and Bites: Unraveling the AI Menu for Tomorrow's Food. See how it's a play on words of bites with an "i" and bytes with a "y". 

Amy Quinton 

Yeah, but you just had to explain that to people. So people just listening to a podcast won't get it. Wait, this is it. Number four. Harvesting Intelligence. AI's Journey from Farm to Table.

Andy Fell 

and to stomach. 

Amy Quinton 

We'll figure it out. Coming to you from UC Davis, this is Unfold. I'm Amy Quinton.

Andy Fell 

And I'm Andy Fell.

Amy Quinton 

it seems almost every day we hear something new about artificial intelligence.

President Biden 

Harness the promise of AI to protect us from peril. Ban AI voice impersonations and more. . .

Amy Quinton 

Opinions of AI vary tremendously. You love it, you're afraid of it or little both.

Speaker 1 

AI is going to help us to be healthier, happier, more productive, and more creative.

Speaker 2 

The most important thing to know about AI. It's the first technology in history that can make decisions by itself and can create new ideas by itself. 

Andy Fell 

Love it or hate it how you feel about it. It's already changing the way we work, live and even eat.

Amy Quinton 

And AI has already entered the fields of agriculture. 

Andy Fell 

Advances in the technology could improve the entire food system from breeding better crops to providing more nutritious food.

Amy Quinton 

It could even help you decide what foods you should eat based on your own health.

Ilias Tagkopoulus 

This is a really transformative technology. In human history, there are a few times we had technology that was so powerful, and it is such an opportunity for creating a better world.

Andy Fell 

That's computer science professor Ilias Tagkopoulus who also directs the AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems at UC Davis.

Amy Quinton 

And our food system is an intricate network of breeders, farmers, producers, distributors, and retailers working to ensure that food gets from farm to fork.

Ilias Tagkopoulus 

The food system is really, really complex, the more complex the system becomes, the more the analysis of data and finding the best point of operation becomes difficult.

Andy Fell 

It gets even more complex when you factor in other challenges to the food system like unbridgeable weather, droughts and floods, climate change.

Amy Quinton 

Or shortages in supplies like fertilizer or an increasing demand for food from a growing population. 

Andy Fell 

And that's where I can help by analyzing vast amounts of data making predictions and learning from his mistakes. It can play a role from before a seed is planted in the ground up to the moment the food is eaten.

Amy Quinton 

To understand this, let's start by talking about the tomato sauce in my bowl Andy.

Andy Fell 

No, actually, we should start with the tomato. 

Amy Quinton 

Actually, we should get more granular than that.

Andy Fell 

You mean cellular?

Amy Quinton 

Yeah, so let's begin with a plant breeder and geneticist. 

Christine Diepenbrock 

I am Christine Diepenbrock an Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis.

Amy Quinton 

Christine says when breeding plants for example, a tomato breeders want to select plants with the best traits to cross with each other to create the next generation or new variety. 

Andy Fell 

So they find the different regions of the genome that are favorable for creating those desired traits.

Amy Quinton 

But there are several traits that are important. 

Christine Diepenbrock 

This includes the marketable yield of the crop, it includes disease and pest resistance, it includes tolerance to drought and high temperatures, resource use efficiency and nutrient concentrations, postharvest quality,

Amy Quinton 

That's a lot of traits. And... 

Christine Diepenbrock 

Those can be you know, separately and together complex trait targets, there can be relationships between those traits, which might make it really hard to breed all of them at once. 

Andy Fell 

But AI can take that data to predict complex patterns and relationships. So breeders can make sure by selecting traits that increase nutrition, they don't also decrease the plant's ability to tolerate drought, for example,

Christine Diepenbrock 

So we can get gains more quickly. If we can accurately predict say how the next generation is going to perform or how a given crop variety might perform in a new environment where we haven't tested it before.

Amy Quinton 

So now, let's say we've got what we think is the best tomato seed to plant and let's say in the Sacramento Valley, because that's where most processing tomatoes in the United States are grown. 

Andy Fell 

And let's say it's been bred to be both drought and heat tolerant.

Amy Quinton 

And that's also important in Sacramento Valley, 

Andy Fell 

And to be highly nutritious. 

Amy Quinton 

Perfect, until the pests invade the field or bad weather makes it the perfect breeding ground for mold.

Andy Fell 

It can be unpredictable but on the farm growers can use AI in all sorts of ways to improve their crop. AI-powered robotics can help growers apply the right amount of pesticide, herbicide or fertilizer to get the highest yields. 

Amy Quinton 

Assistant Professor Mason Earles leads the agricultural production cluster with the AI Institute.

Mason Earles 

We use a lot of cameras and other types of sensors on these robots. And those really need to process in near real time, what they're seeing and be able to do something such as remove a weed that we don't want in the field. Or you could even think of spray a certain amount of nitrogen where it's needed, but not where it's not. So we could be using resources more efficiently or producing foods more effectively. That way. 

Amy Quinton 

Think this is just really futuristic? Think again. Mason says growers are already using this type of computer vision in the field. John Deere is even advertising it for row crops.

Commercial 

See & Spray ultimate uses proprietary camera technology that was developed by Blue River Technology, a subsidiary of John Deere. So it uses computer vision and machine learning to scan the field constantly for weeds from crop and then sprays only the weed.

Amy Quinton 

Mason says adapting this AI technology to work in different types of specialty crops. The fruits, nuts and vegetables that we grow in California is the next step.

Andy Fell 

So I can take different kinds of data in the field and combine them. For example, video cameras on tractors can capture images of plants.

Amy Quinton 

Satellites can gather data on soil moisture. And then there are drones. Armed with the right technology, they can capture height, area and volume of each plant and capture spectrums of light that humans can't see.

Andy Fell 

And all of that data could be combined with weather data and historical yield.

Amy Quinton 

And AI can then help growers better predict yield while minimizing water and fertilizer use. Mason says AI can give growers a step up.

Mason Earles 

The challenge that they're dealing with is there's a lot of uncertainty out there in any given year, right. And so it's sort of giving them a superhuman suit to be able to go out and do the things they're doing better.

Amy Quinton 

So now that our highly nutritious drought and heat resistant tomatoes have been harvested, they head to the processing plant.

Andy Fell 

Well hold on Amy, because AI can be used before the tomatoes even get through the doors of the plant. 

Amy Quinton 

You're right. 

Andy Fell 

Professor Chris Simmons, the chair of our Food Science and Technology Department has used AI to try to predict the likelihood that a loaded tomatoes could get rejected at the gate.

Amy Quinton 

He says sometimes those tomatoes can get bruised, moldy or squished. And that's a waste. 

Chris Simmons 

It's a concern for tomato processors. And it's a concern environmentally because each time a load of tomatoes is rejected, it's not just an economic loss. It's also a loss of all the resources that were used to produce and become embedded in those tomatoes. So all the water, the energy, the fertilizer, other inputs are lost.

Andy Fell 

Chris and other researchers at UC Davis and UC Berkeley looked at years of data on every load of tomatoes including things like variety or type where it was grown and what time of season. 

Amy Quinton 

They combined it with weather and climate data to train different AI algorithms to try to predict when a load of tomatoes would be rejected for mold. 

Andy Fell 

And they did find some weak predictors.

Chris Simmons 

Those would be the time of the season and the acidity or the pH of the tomatoes themselves.

Amy Quinton 

So the models worked. But Chris says not in an ideal way.

Chris Simmons 

They were predictive, but not with a specificity that would really allow anybody to say, well, this load coming from this location at this time of the season is really at a very high risk of having mold and maybe we should not even bother,

Amy Quinton 

Which just proves your point, Andy, that you made at the beginning of this episode about ChatGPT.

Andy Fell 

It's all about the right inputs?

Amy Quinton 

Yeah, or in this case, more and better data.

Andy Fell 

So now these tomatoes have made it to the processor where the enter a high tech, highly automated environment.

Amy Quinton 

That sound you're hearing are tomatoes, going through a flume system up an elevator to be steam peeled, and eventually through a color sorting machine at Pacific Coast Producers cannery and Woodland, California.

Andy Fell 

So the color sorting machine uses a line of cameras and sensors that can reject green tomatoes with little mechanical fingers.

Amy Quinton 

It's an AI that's been around for decades, says former CEO Dan Vincent, who's also a UC Davis alum.

Dan Vincent 

And you can't see the product going through it's going so fast, and it's making decisions based on density based on size based on color in a split second.

Andy Fell 

Pacific Coast Producers sales about 200 different product types, not just canned tomatoes and paste at the Woodland plant. They also sell sliced peaches, pears, fruit cocktail, maraschino cherries to every retail and food service distributor in North America.

Amy Quinton 

And all those products get labeled at the company's plant in Lodi about an hour away. 

Dan Vincent 

But that adds a huge amount of complexity. So you can say okay, we have dozens and dozens of customers and 100 or 200 SKUs.

Andy Fell 

An SKU is a stock keeping unit in industry speak. They label the same products for many different customers.

Dan Vincent 

So you can take that and say what are my data intersections. And for a company like ours, it's 14,000 theoretically unique items you have to manage.

Amy Quinton 

Dan sees the next frontier of AI helping producers label all the different products, while minimizing the number of times they must pause the equipment for a new label. Because that's where you lose efficiency.

Dan Vincent 

Those 14,000 unique items, I can look at history, I could lay on analytics or algorithms for seasonality, for promotions, for new items, for store count addition, and apply all that to a forecast of demand. We could then use those tools at that level to be more intelligent when we case and label to get bigger runs.

Andy Fell 

AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems at UC Davis is hoping to work with companies like Pacific Coast Producers to research how AI could help improve food processing.

Amy Quinton 

So now our tomatoes have been canned and are on my plate. But we're not done. You might be asking should I eat this? Is it healthy? Well advances in AI will make knowing what is nutritious much easier. 

Andy Fell 

Right now nutritionists track what people eat by making them fill out questionnaires or keep food diaries. But that's pretty tedious, says UC Davis Adjunct Professor Danielle Lemay. She's also with the USDA's Western Human Nutrition Research Center.

Danielle Lemay 

And not particularly accurate either, um, memories fail. And with the food frequency questionnaire, you kind of have to do math in your head to figure out well, how often do I really eat that over the course of a month.

Andy Fell 

So she thought maybe AI and computer vision could help us track nutrition better.

Danielle Lemay 

Wouldn't it be great if we could just use our phones to capture what we're eating in order to better inform dietary assessment.

Amy Quinton 

Danielle is working on an AI app capable of predicting health effects, just from a food photo.

Andy Fell 

There are already AI apps that can estimate calories and nutrients of a meal from a food photo. But this will go much further.

Danielle Lemay 

We want to know even more about your food. What the nutrients are, is just a piece of it. But there's this whole world of thousands of molecules in each food that we're starting to map with analytical chemistry.

Amy Quinton 

The goal is to eventually come up with a detailed list of ingredients and micronutrients, their health effects and interactions. It would mean combining and analyzing databases about food to databases about molecules, and how those molecules impact our health. It's a bit dizzying.

Andy Fell 

Just consider all the molecules that make up the ingredients of our food. Most of us them are still unknown.

Amy Quinton 

Ilias Tagkopoulus says we only know about 2% of what's in our food. It's referred to as the dark matter of food. And it can influence metabolism and physiological responses in the body.

Andy Fell 

And then just consider how different we are as individuals with age, weight, genetics. 

Amy Quinton 

It's hard for me to get my head around this.

Andy Fell 

But it's just the kind of big data problem that AI is good at solving. And if we get there, it'd be like having a personalized dietitian by your side, helping you make better healthier food choices for your needs and goals.

Amy Quinton 

There is one last and very important piece of the AI in food systems puzzle, and that's integration.

Andy Fell 

Yes, as AI becomes routine at different steps of the food system, these steps can themselves be integrated by AI. For example, information gathered about crops growing in the field can be combined with AI for plant breeding.

Amy Quinton 

Integration is a key goal of AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems. Again, Danielle Lemay.

Danielle Lemay 

Within different parts of the food system, there's many interconnecting loops. And if you only think about one of them, and you're siloed, you'll not be able to solve the whole food system issues. 

Andy Fell 

And that's important because AI could solve many of the food systems most challenging problems. Ilias Tagkopoulus says AI holds promise for a healthier, more sustainable planet.

Ilias Tagkopoulus 

It will allow us to be more efficient in the way that we grow food and we consume food. And that means lower cost, lower resources and better, healthier food for us.

Amy Quinton 

That's not to say AI comes without issues. Ilias says regulation but not overregulation is key to making sure AI is ethical, trustworthy and equitable.

Andy Fell 

Sure, but you know what Amy? We'll probably find in a few years that AI fades into the background. 

Amy Quinton 

Huh?

Andy Fell 

Yeah, AI will just be crunching big data in the background, helping breeders and farmers and processors and consumers to do what they want to do more efficiently. We won't think about it any more than we think about why there's a label on a kind of tomatoes. 

Amy Quinton 

I bet this can of tomatoes I used in my pasta came from that Woodland plant.

Andy Fell 

Quite probably. 

Amy Quinton 

Does it say it on the label?

Andy Fell 

I don't think so. I don't know.

Amy Quinton 

See, just thought about a label on a can of tomatoes.

Andy Fell 

Well, that wraps up this episode. You can learn more about Artificial Intelligence Institute for Next Generation Food Systems on our website at ucdavis.edu/unfold.

Amy Quinton 

And there you'll find links to a longer story that Andy did on AI in the food system. Plus cool AI generated photos and videos, and even this episode transcribed by AI. I'm Amy Quinton.

Andy Fell 

And I'm Andy Fell. Thanks for listening.

Amy Quinton 

This entire episode was written by ChatGPT. 

Andy Fell 

Kidding. Unfold is a production of UC Davis. It's edited by Marianne Russ Sharp. Original music for Unfold comes from Damian Verrett and Curtis Jerome Haynes. Additional music comes from Blue Dot Sessions.