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Talking Biotech is a weekly podcast that uncovers the stories, ideas and research of people at the frontier of biology and engineering.
Each episode explores how science and technology will transform agriculture, protect the environment, and feed 10 billion people by 2050.
Interviews are led by Dr. Kevin Folta, a professor of molecular biology and genomics.
Kevin Folta (00:00.11)
Kevin Folta (01:25.646)
Hi everybody. And welcome to this week's talking biotech podcast, the 500th episode, 500 episodes. It's taken 11 years to do it almost exactly. And moving into the 12th year of weekly podcasts. And it's almost weekly, you know, where there's been a few spots where I've had to take a hiatus from a freaky illness or activist skewering of my career or the birth of my son who decided the end of life just a little too early, needing months of NICU care, but he's good now.
In general, producing this media satisfied a passion to learn and teach at the same time and use the powerful medium to address disinformation, inspire thinking about how innovation can help farmers, the consumer, the environment, and the food insecure. And thanks to Calabra New England Biolabs for sponsoring this effort. It helps to have a few bucks to defray the cost of hosting, the bandwidth needed, and the support of a producer.
and most of all thanks to weekly listeners in this loyal community online as we approach over 3 million downloads. To me, this is like a message in a bottle. I write a note, shove it in a bottle, throw it into the ocean of the internet, not ever believing anyone will find it or care. And I'm truly grateful for the magnitude of support it gets and has seen over 11 years. You have many choices and it's truly humbling that Talking Biotech still gets an amazing number of downloads and interested to see of outstanding content.
and it's huge teams of promoters and producers and big budgets and professional tools. For 11 years, it was just me. the last few months, Jim Gritch has joined me as a producer. He does the editing and processing of the episodes and it makes a massive difference. So for our 500th episode, I wanted to talk to somebody special and it didn't take long for me to land on Dr. Scott Engel. Yes, he's my boss's boss and someone who has had a unique perspective on the intersection of agriculture and technology.
as observed from various lenses in academic and government science. Dr. Engel served as a professor at the University of Maryland in soil science, was the director of the University of Georgia Agriculture Experiment, was the director of the University of Georgia Agricultural and Environmental Sciences before being appointed at NIFA, the National Institute for Food and Agriculture at the USDA. He arrived at the University of Florida during the peak of the COVID pandemic.
Kevin Folta (03:47.698)
where he has served as the senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources when he wasn't serving as produce, as produce, as provost. You got me in agriculture right away. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Engel. Thank you. Glad to be with you. Yeah, it's really nice to have you here because you have such an important perspective on state agriculture here in the state of Florida and nationwide. And while we can sit for hours discussing the major issues, what are the problems that really
keep you up at night right now? Lack of agricultural research funding. We rely on agriculture both as a business and as a vehicle for our culture. Our advantage in the United States is that we are on the cutting edge of technology compared to other places where labor may be much lower cost, maybe fewer environmental regulations.
fewer trade issues, our only advantage in the US, our only major advantage is that we have good technology. And as we have reduced spending, both whether it's industry or government, states as well, we've reduced spending on agricultural research, I'm afraid we may lose our place in the world economy as a...
as the place where you go to have the cheapest, most healthy supply of food in the world. And that said, are there any bright spots where maybe you can see that because of certain technology, maybe because of policy that maybe there is some way that we're going to pull through this like we usually do. So I, here in Florida, we are a state that lives by producing fruits and vegetables. That's our agricultural economy for the state.
We do have some small grains on the panhandle, but for the most part, it's fruit and vegetables. That work is all done by hand. And it is very, very hard work. It's backbreaking, it's tedious, it's life-shortening type of work. I personally don't think people should be doing that type of work because of the difficulty of it. But anyway, we do bring in people from other countries to come and do this hard, backbreaking work for us.
Kevin Folta (06:11.854)
The work's fine, but what we are finding is that we're losing that labor and lots of reasons sometimes it's political sometimes it's the economy of Honduras is growing quickly right now people want to stay home with their families and Make a living there, so we're losing our labor supply as this trend continues at multiple levels we will lose our labor and Agriculture will no longer be the number two industry in Florida here sooner rather later
And so we've got to have automation robots in the fields doing this type of work. We've always had the mechanical part of the robot down. for 50 years, we've had robots that could do quote, dome type work. But we never had the intelligence associated with that to do fine manipulation of field work. So give me a good example. Picking a strawberry. Human can pick, is that strawberry right?
It's easy, you know, if it is Earth. When you grab it, how hard do you grab it? If you grab it too hard, you squish it. If you don't grab it hard enough, it falls out. We've had the mechanical side of that down. We never had the ability to make decisions instantaneously for that. We do now through artificial intelligence, the widespread adoption of that and data management, we can now integrate AI and data into
the mechanical part of these robots. So we're there. We're still working on getting costs down, still working on refining this, but I'm confident that 10 years from now you're going to see a lot of robots in Florida fields, California fields as well. Not so much in Midwest where one family can run 2000 acre farm, but here in Florida it's very different. There are a lot of other advantages to that. When you're picking up strawberry, computer can...
Peter, you can take a look at that structure. Does it have a disease? Was it undernourished? Do need more fertilizer or less fertilizer? can do all kinds of things as you're going through that field. And as we integrate all of this together, what you're going to see 10 years from now is really a fully integrated, mechanized production system in the field. Yeah, I really share your optimism on that because it's a question of integrating the data that we get, but also the sensor technology is becoming more phenomenal.
Kevin Folta (08:40.65)
And more affordable. what good is a million dollar robot to a grower who doesn't have those kinds of profits? How long does it take to pay it off? We see this already happening in the Midwest with the high cost of repairs and equipment that's there, where you actually are driving the robot to do the work. You're the robot's brain. And there'll be probably a different business model as well. I doubt any one farmer is going to buy their own automated
strawberry harvester. It'll probably be custom production. be a whole new industry that has planting, cutting, harvesting, packing. They'll probably do a lot of this work and a farmer will, they'll have the land and they'll make the decisions and they'll be out there kicking the dirt every day. But there'll be a lot of custom applicators that end up doing much of this work because no one person's going to be able to afford a $2 million strawberry harvester.
Yeah, so it really is a question of stimulating new industry and how much is the university here leading those efforts? mean, are we positioned to kind of see the technologies that can be blossoming into those technologies or where are we in that? We are leading this effort, I think nationally. This is about four or five years ago where the university invested in artificial intelligence. We had some leaders at the time who looked around the corner and saw
This was before Chat GPT was released, but they saw this coming and working with NVIDIA and a gift, a very large gift from one of our alumni who was founder of the company. We had the fastest supercomputer in academia donated to the university. The state then invested well over 100 new positions in artificial intelligence and that was an interesting
decision that was made, most schools, most universities, most industries that were looking at artificial intelligence very much focused on a very narrow topic. at the university you put AI into the computer engineering department. University of Florida we made the decision to integrate AI into everything. So it's agriculture obviously, but and engineering, but it's also art and music and law.
Kevin Folta (11:07.918)
medicine and history. So there's no place at the University of Florida now that's not touched by artificial intelligence and all of our students are taking classes in AI because training is a big part of what needs to be done as well. We are calling Florida the new Silicon Valley of Agriculture and it's for those reasons that we have had the largest state investment in artificial intelligence and academia.
But in agriculture, we have tried to double down on that. We're now building a very large facility just outside of Tampa. It's a city called Bomb, which is where one of our research centers are located, where we do a lot of food and vegetable research. But this will be probably the world's largest center for artificial intelligence in agriculture. And in here, we will have businesses associated with it. In essence, we're going to have
graduate students and academics on one half of the building and businesses on the other side and then we'll have a collision space in between. So we're training students, we're developing new technologies and we're building up the economy by trying to bring these new businesses to Florida. There's a large ag tech conference called FIRA, it's in California every year, it's actually gonna be in state of Washington this coming year, but we're gonna bring this to Florida too.
where we will, what we want to do is show people around the world what Florida is investing in. And I want go back to our original reason for doing this and why we started. We won't have agriculture in Florida if we don't have technology doing much of what we're doing now. So this is a life or death situation for this industry in Florida. And I'm, making great progress, being well supported by the state, universities all bought in and industries are learning now what we're doing.
So it's all coming together. It's all coming together. And I really appreciate those efforts. I think they're fantastic. We're actually publishing our first paper using AI and genomic analysis this year, something five years ago, I would never would have guessed that we were doing. But one of the other big issues in the state of Florida is people want to be here. And you see a lot of retirees coming here, a lot of tax advantage to being here. You can't beat the weather for nine months of the year.
Kevin Folta (13:33.102)
How is the issue of development and the loss of agricultural land really affecting our ability to farm in the state? Well, we've been adding about a thousand people a day to Florida. I think that's probably gone down. It's probably more like 500 people a day right now, but that's still adding a medium-sized city to Florida every year. So that's a big issue.
Probably the most significant impact of all this is that we have farmers selling out for these new developments You see it all over Florida, but that's mostly been in the citrus industry because of citrus greening We've lost about 90 % of our citrus production in state. We're not giving up by any means We're making some pretty good progress right now. Maybe it will come back But it's pretty hard to tell a farmer who is losing money. They're seeing her trees die
and they're sitting on $50 million worth of land. It's hard to tell them. You need to just keep losing money and don't sell out. So it does happen on a pretty regular basis. I track the loss of land in Florida and it is significant every year. The way we're going to keep people in business producing food, we do need food produced in Florida for much of our winter fruit and vegetable production in the country and indeed around the world.
It's by keeping farmers profitable. They're a business. They're not here because we all like to live next to a beautiful farm. They're not here to protect our culture. They're here to make a living for themselves and their family. And if they can't do that, they are going to sell out. So keeping them profitable is the number one way that we can protect our land. We're not going to stop people from moving into the state. But where people move and where we have these new developments, there are choices.
Often right now, these developments are going on prime agricultural land. It doesn't have to be that way. Maybe it won't be in the future. It costs a little more to remediate the land for construction and developments, but we got to protect land here that's prime for agriculture. And that will only happen if farmers can make decent living. And when you talked about seeing around the corner in the last AI rush and predicting that this would happen, which really was spot on.
Kevin Folta (15:55.246)
Can you see around the corner now? Because when I think about this and maybe you can share your thoughts on this, I think of the university as potentially having a role in what are the gaps that AI leaves and what are the gaps that AI can't satisfy and should we be specializing in those areas? And I think a lot about the trades that now are becoming increasingly more technical that even if you're working as an electrician or working in auto repair or whatever.
you're finding more and more training necessary, more and more credentialing, and the more you know, the better you are. And is there a place where the university system can really take a central role in developing a workforce in what are traditionally considered more blue collar jobs? Yeah, you're spot on. I think that is a big part of the future. Not everyone needs a four year college degree. I've spent my whole life in academia.
everyone should go to college and everyone should go on and get a master's degree and a PhD. But that's not true and it's becoming less true in the future. We're seeing that now with the trades. I'm glad that the trades are being recognized through better salaries, better careers, more respect. But in agriculture it's the same thing. A lot of the jobs that will be in agriculture in the future, whether you're in that autonomously driven tractor,
or your programming for harvest or you're collecting data for weather or pesticide application, you're going to need more education than a college degree, but you won't need to get that. So we're partnering right now. There's an ag tech initiative in the state of Florida working with all the, I used to call them community colleges, we hear and we call them state colleges, but working with them.
and we're working with over 20 of them right now to develop ag tech programs for a two year associate's degree. And I think that's the sweet spot. A lot of young people today wake up in the morning and go, I don't want to be in agriculture because I don't want to sit on a tractor all day or milk cows all days. Or when I drive by the strawberries, see people out there picking strawberries, that's not the career I want.
Kevin Folta (18:18.936)
But if it's technology that is doing much of that for us, and we have robotic milkers for cows now. So all this can be, most of it, not all, most of it can be mechanized. Those are the jobs that we want these young people to be turning to. And we can provide the training. We're working with community colleges now to provide the curriculum and hands-on opportunities, internships. This is all being supported through
FDACs for our Department of State, Department of Agriculture and our State Commissioner for Commerce. They're all bought into this because they understand the future need here. So we're working at, and some of the students by the way, they'll get a two year degree and they'll decide they do want to go on for a college degree at the University of Florida. So it's a recruiting tool for us and some will want to go on for a PhD and become a researcher. But it's that two year degree that I think is a sweet spot.
There may be opportunities for certificates or even less than two year degrees. We're working on those too. And we're digging all the way down into four H. So we're starting with eight and nine year olds right now, introducing them to artificial intelligence, to AI technologies and the hopes that they will then want to go on and get a two year, four year advanced degree. Yeah, that's, that's really cool. It's kind of a funny story. I got invited to be the commencement speaker at a biotechnology
program in a high school out by Jacksonville. And I thought I would start with a joke. And this was maybe 10 years ago. And I said, some people believe that children are the future, but I think it's robots. And the room full of parents and students and grandparents, I thought would get a laugh, but dead silence and mean stares. And you know, here I am letting the air out of their balloon, And
the best part was my save as I said, yeah, but they're going to need someone to program the robots and that's you. And didn't realize we were actually hitting the nail on the head back then that really looking at what the next wave of agriculture will look like. And agriculture as always is kind of late to the party or I shouldn't say late to the party. It's not agriculture's fault. It's just that we've always had other ways to solve the problems. And you know, we've been, we've been fixing cars with robots for building cars or robots for years.
Kevin Folta (20:40.716)
and displacing people. it's nothing new to think about in the context of agriculture. But maybe the next big thought is that when you look at how all the tools we have, whether it's technology, AI, whatever, and we're trying to apply this to some of our state's serious agriculture problems, the crises in citrus, for instance, what are some ways that we're using those technologies to address those grand challenges? Certainly in lots of ways. You already mentioned one using AI systems.
something in human.
We believe, and I think collectively we believe that the solution for citrus greening in state of Florida, and ultimately to save the industry in California and probably the rest of the world, the solution's going to come from Florida, because we're already here. We're there. California's not. You can't do much of this research in Florida, in California, because you don't have the disease there. We do. So the solution is going to come from
and it's probably going to be a genetic solution. It's a new treat, maybe genetically modified, maybe traditionally bred, but it's going to be a genetic solution. And that is absolutely being driven by some of these new technologies. AI assisted reading is being used in a number of different ways, but AI solutions, and as we
have more generative AI coming online, we're starting to get solutions generated by AI that we didn't even think of. So this is all changing very quickly. This is literally within the last two or three years that these changes are coming. And the pace of it is accelerating. When you ask AI experts or technology experts how fast is technology changing right now, it's just getting faster, not slower. I keep thinking we surely we...
Kevin Folta (22:40.568)
We've done all the easy things. We've got further we go, the harder problems are left over. So it all take longer. That's just not the case. get our problems are getting harder, but we're getting smarter or we're getting smarter support to stay ahead of these issues. So we're going to use all of these new technologies. Citrus Green is the flagship for all of this.
It's nutrient management, it's disease, other disease management, not just citrus greening, there's plenty of other diseases in citrus. It's weather forecasting for freezes, we had a lot of damage this year. If we had had better weather forecasting, we probably could have avoided some of the damage. I know that's certainly true in the blueberry industry. Our mediocre weather forecasting let us down.
for a lot of our crops this year. And we just weren't prepared. We made mistakes. We used the best knowledge we had.
is the best we can do, but it wasn't good enough. Yeah, I underestimated those cold snaps pretty hard. I it was calling for low 20s. Up by me, we got down to 14.9 degrees and we lost avocado citrus. lost over the last three years, I've lost 58 citrus trees by me out of which is the 90 % of them. So we're, you know, I hear what you're saying. I'm small potatoes when you look at relative to other big growers in the state.
But maybe just to expand on the role of Florida in the United States agriculture. And I think this is always surprising. And maybe the listener would find this interesting. What are some of the surprises for you when you came aboard with respect to the industries and the crops that you didn't necessarily realize were as important to Florida as they are? Or maybe you did have a finger on the pulse of this.
Kevin Folta (24:44.59)
For me it was potatoes. I didn't know we were the number nine potato producing state. And I didn't know that Florida was such a significant producer of cattle. We have cattle history in the state of Florida. So the state was founded on cattle production that were released by the Spanish and became wild and were rounded up for consumption. I didn't realize that there were 300 crops, 300 plus crops that have over $10 million in revenue.
each year so that was stunning to me. It was really the diversity of agriculture in Florida. I've lived in states where sometimes where it was corn, wheat, soybeans and hogs and that was about it. weren't other things growing for the most part. And coming here where there are so many opportunities you overlay being one of the fastest growing states maybe for a while they're the fastest growing state in the country.
overlay our natural resources concerns. Florida is such a complicated state from a natural resources perspective, especially water. Our water infiltrates in the soil, it comes back up in springs. We've got more springs right around here in Gainesville and anywhere else in the world. It goes back down again, it comes up again. It estuaries in tidal areas and swamps and prairies and...the coastal estuarine areas.
we really have to do. It's hard to manage water in Florida because of the complexity of it. But the number one, the number two industry in Florida is agriculture. The number one industry is tourism. And people come here because of our natural resources, whether it's water on the coastal areas or springs in the center of the state or Paines Prairie close to here to go bird watching.
Kevin Folta (26:44.142)
In Gainesville, something I was fascinated to learn recently was the university is the biggest industry in Gainesville. We're a small town for people who don't know much about Gainesville. But bird watching is probably the second most significant source of revenue. People coming from all over the country, in fact all over the world, to watch birds here and a couple close by swamps or we call them prairies in this case, for that. So people come here for natural resources and that’s, It's protecting agriculture, it's protecting our natural resources, but that's the land, it's the environment, it's our water. It's a very special place.
So with that, we'll take a break. We're speaking with Dr. Scott Engel. He's the Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Florida Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences. This is the Talking Biotech Podcast 500th episode, and we'll be back in just a moment. And then we'll just jump in here. And now we're back on the Talking Biotech Podcast. We're speaking with Dr. Scott Engel.
He's the senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources here at the University of Florida. And we're sitting down together talking. The one ironic episode where we don't have video is the important 500th episode, but that's okay. We'll just do this with audio. So Dr. Engel had, as I understand he had a lot of interesting interactions back in the 1990s around the issue of genetic engineering and how this was being.
move through the system by the USDA and questions around release. And could you give us a sense of what was happening back then and efforts that you were involved in to mitigate that? This was the 1990s, probably the mid 1990s. I'd been working on a genetically modified bacteria to be released into soil. And so I was working in a lot of the risk assessment communities developing risk assessment tools to
to assess the potential safety of that release. Anyway, through that I got more more involved in the risk assessment community and in the biotech community it was burgeoning at the time. It was the early heady days of what could be. They were working on flavor saver tomatoes, which was one of the very first genetically modified foods to be released. was a couple, I think salmon were also one of the early products.
Anyway, so I was working in these circles and I was approached by the USDA, the US EPA, and then the equivalents in Canada, EPA Canada, Environment Canada, and Food and Ag Canada, to develop a risk assessment symposium where we'd bring scientists and journalists together. The idea was that these were complicated topics, they were relatively new, the public didn't really understand them, they were quote,
Kevin Folta (02:24.078)
afraid of these new technologies. And the feeling was that if we could explain these technologies through the journalistic process that people would have a better understanding, probably be more accepting. I'm an advocate for the use of genetically modified foods because I think it has all kinds of advantages. But I also understood the pushback and the concerns that existed at the time.
So we brought together scientists around some of the major genetically modified products at that time. So we had an animal person on salmon and someone who worked on the flavor saver tomatoes and a bacteriologist and so on. And we brought together a large number of journalists from all over the country. In fact, we had a couple from Europe as well. And the idea was the scientists would explain what they're doing, the journalists would ask questions, and then the journalists would go back and write articles to explain.
these within their individual forum. So we did that for about three years and we had a lot of impact, a lot of publication, symposiums came out of this. I thought a very effective process, but the USDA came to us after three years and said, we're not going to support this anymore. We think we're just confusing the public with too much information. That they're not able to handle this. All you're doing is scaring people with
with data and science, and so they cancelled the whole thing. I think looking back at that now, was what we knew at the time was a huge mistake. think it now is realized to be a huge mistake that trying to keep people ignorant about topic, any topic, doesn't have to be science, trying to keep people in the dark about things never ever turns out well. And in this case, the industries that were producing these new products, they...
lost control of the argument and we're still struggling to get it back to some extent. But part of it goes back to that poor decision long ago. And it was such a good idea to have this kind of meeting to get journalists together with scientists and actually learn about the communication strategies that would be effective in trying to bring around a complex topic that was fomenting public concern. It seemed like such a good idea. apparently that
Kevin Folta (04:50.89)
Unfortunately, the other folks are the ones who control that narrative. And so now that we're in the age where genetic engineering still has a lot of detractors, a lot of people who are concerned, the folks in the middle of the curve just would rather not have it if they don't have to, right? But at the same time, it looks like it's going to be a solution, at least part of a solution, for things like citrus greening and probably other issues in the state too.
So how do we as a scientific community and as a university lead that conversation in effective ways to address a curious and concerned public's concerns about their food? Yeah, so a little bit of the background. Citrus greening is a disease that's been in Florida now for about 20 years. It came originally from China. It's killed off about 90 % of our citrus production in the state. Been devastating. We are the citrus state. are
not going to be the citrus state much longer if we remain on this current path. I think we're making some pretty good progress right now. I'm optimistic that the industry will be able to grow back. We're trying to provide solutions sooner rather than later. But there are going be a lot of different solutions. There are traditional breeding solutions, but they take decades. These are trees. They don't produce fruit very quickly.
We're using CRISPR technologies, which maybe you've talked about in this podcast array. And we're using more traditional genetic engineering. don't know if that's traditional or not, but we're using those types of techniques at all. So we're looking at all of the above to try to find a solution. But we have, in this work, and this has been funded by the state of Florida, we actually did an economic evaluation of this. And we've looked at...
orange juice produced by regular orange juice, not genetically engineered, and orange juice from engineered trees. we went through this process to look at consumer acceptance. And indeed, the consumer will discount orange juice that comes from genetically modified trees, genetically engineered trees.
Kevin Folta (07:06.126)
And it's a pretty significant discount. If I remember correctly, it's about a 50 % discount. And so that's how economists look at things. Here's a glass of modified orange juice, here's not. How much would you pay for that glass versus that? So that's how they conduct these studies. So that perception still is certainly out there. But I always look at the what if, or what's the alternative? Is the alternative, we don't have orange juice anymore.
Or for some of the other crops, the alternative might be we use higher concentrations and higher amounts of pesticides versus maybe a roundup type of chemical. So nothing is perfect in this world. There are risks to everything. We all choose the riskiest thing you can do is get in your car to drive to work. But we choose to do that every day. So the public has to understand risk assessment.
What's your exposure to the risk? What is the hazard of that? And then from that, each of us makes an individual decision. Are we willing to accept that risk? Again, everything has a risk to it. Most things we intuitively understand that risk assessment process. We make a thousand decisions every day about, okay, I'm going to walk home because I'm afraid to drive my car home. Or I'm not going to take my scooter to work because someone's going to run me over.
So there are real risks in all of this. But having an educated public who understands these issues and can make their own decision, I think is the best way for this to move forward. And I wish we had not canceled that program 30 years ago now, 35, 30 years ago now. But it is what it is, and here we are today still fighting a battle that.
It isn't going away soon. way I wanted to approach this about 15 years ago when they started the Mature Citrus Transformation Center down at Lake Alfred, I wanted to make GM orange in a product where the orange juice was purple. Where you engineered the trees to have higher vitamin A, higher vitamin C, higher polyphenols and anti-synons and all the good health compounds and basically make this thing a super juice that had
Kevin Folta (09:31.182)
potential health benefits. And put this on the shelf, because the problem is that when you tell someone that here's orange juice and here's gluten-free orange juice, they're going to go for the gluten-free one every time, even though there's no gluten in regular orange juice. It's a perception of how they market this stuff. And we should be trying to find ways that appeal to the consumer, not just allay their fears. And I think that's the other flip side of this.
fighting an emotional battle with information. And we need to find ways to do that a little bit better. I guess maybe a kind of awkward segue is, let's just say at the University of Florida here, a lot of folks are looking at questions of what's happening in space biology. And it was a really awkward segue. But they use Tang. I'm usually really smooth with those things.
At University of Florida, where there's a lot of real good interaction with Kennedy Space Center, you two hours down the road. And I know some of the aspects of this you're particularly proud of. Could you give us a little bit of information on what's happening here and potentially its relevance to agriculture? Well, you can only stay in space until you run out food. And you can't, if you're going to go to Mars and it's going to be a couple year round trip.
you can't take enough food with you. So you're going to have to grow food on Mars. We're going to have to grow food on the moon because of the cost of moving food around. And even on the space station, we know we need to grow food. There's also ancillary benefits to it. There's psychological benefits to growing your own food and when you're in space. I've been working a lot with NASA scientists on this, the psychological conditions of being isolated like that. Having a plant to take care of actually has a lot of side benefits associated with it.
But growing food in space is a given. again, when I say space, I mean Mars, Moon, the space station. Growing food in space is a given. It's not that easy to do. There are a lot of difficulties that we have been thinking about for a long time, but we just haven't miniaturized enough. So if you're on a space station, we have greenhouse production, we have controlled environment production. It's a lot of those technologies just making it smaller.
Kevin Folta (11:57.177)
to be on the space station. But because of all of this, NASA has, within the last couple years, recognized that space agriculture is a critical need, probably undervalued in the past. They are concentrating all of their space agriculture work here in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center. And so we are trying to make the University of Florida also the corollary capital of the world of space agriculture. We've got NASA already on board.
We've got some pretty good space agriculture programs already. One of our faculty has been an astronaut and done space agriculture work already, space science. His name's Rob Ferrell. We have grown, we acquired some real moon soil a couple years ago and we grew the first plant in moon soil.
So we've got a lot of background. We have a number of faculty who are working on these things already. mostly because we've been working on controlled environment agriculture for a long time. How do we take those technologies? So it's not just about rooting a plant in some media. It's about disease control and pest control and miniaturization and harvest and preparation and nutrition for all. So it's kind of complicated since.
We spent the last 10,000 years learning how to grow a potato. Now we need to learn how to grow a potato in space. It's going to be very different. Yeah, and zero gravity, or microgravity, right? And that's so many interesting challenges to it. And I love talking about it. When we talk about space biology and terrestrial biology, the thing that you probably can talk a lot about is the cost of doing research. And I know as a researcher, just the costs are going up above.
It's phenomenal. I just to get a centrifuge repaired is a fortune. And how do we do this with federal budgets going down? how concerned are you about the current budgetary situation for science, NSF, NIH, USDA? And is there more opportunity for public-private partnerships that can potentially help sustain us and keep us productive?
Kevin Folta (14:15.989)
Yeah, I'm actually very worried about that. We've lost research supremacy, to China, agricultural supremacy to China. India is spending more money on ag research. I was just here two weeks ago and they fabulous programs growing now. Brazil has caught up to the United States and they'll pass us soon. So it's a big problem. Our main competitive advantage in agriculture
certainly in Florida, but probably much of the United States is that we are ahead of the technology curve. We can do things better, faster, cheaper, produce healthier food. Some of the nutrients that you're talking about with your purple orange juice, I love the idea by the way. So that's our advantage. We don't have advantages of low labor costs or we follow, we have rigorous environmental regulation, which we believe and follow in.
know, trade issues that sometimes we get caught up in that have nothing to do with agriculture, but we pay the price anyway. So we need to be on that cutting edge of technology. And if we don't, we're going to lose our supremacy and our ability to produce food in the United States. This is a national security issue. You know, just imagine what happens if we have to rely on other countries for all of our own, import all of our own food.
someone gets mad at us and they decide they're going to sending food to us. can imagine what happens when the grocery store shelves go empty. It's anarchy at that point. So this is national security as much as just agriculture as a business. So our government needs to step up. They've been cutting back on agricultural research and this is a congressional issue. They need to get on board here. They realize it and there are advocates. We've got advocates here in Florida who are
who want to see research well supported, but just collectively as a nation we're losing our mojo in this area. An alternative is to partner up with private industry more. That's a little difficult because it requires a paradigm change in how we think about this at university. At we write grants and we write papers and that's how we get promoted and that's how our salaries are restructured.
Kevin Folta (16:40.429)
Yeah, that's how you become a Senior Vice President for Agriculture is by having a good science program. But that doesn't help in many ways a lot of the getting these technologies into the public sector where they can be used. So if a new technology just sits in a journal article in the library, you might as not even do it. It's like shouting in the forest. No one hears you.
We're not that good at a university of getting technologies into the public sector. We're trying to get better and we're developing new systems for doing that and new administrative processes and new ways of recognizing and rewarding faculty. But industry does this on a regular basis because that's, they're in it to make money and so they have to be efficient at this. So we're trying to partner up with the universities. We have a lot of great ideas and we train grad students who can be in.
undergraduates can become their employees. But just as much they're teaching us about how to be more entrepreneurial and how can we make sure that the good ideas that we have that may end up in a journal actually get out into the real world and make this a better economy, a better place to live. Yeah, I think a lot of that goes back to the question of public trust and getting the public on our side to demand that we have more funding.
People will scream the mantra of drill baby drill, but I'm thinking we gotta do more plant baby plant. We need more abilities to create more food for more people, increase access of better healthy stuff. That needs to happen. the, I lost my train of thought on this. Here's Jim, just tweak this.
Kevin Folta (18:29.473)
Gosh, I lost. had a really good point I was getting to.
Kevin Folta (18:36.237)
Where you're working on why we need more money to why we need more money to support these I what it was. Yeah. So we'll start here, Jim. One of the exciting parts about public funded research is that those data that come from it belong to the public. And in the days of big data and the days of where this information is paying dividends, that it's more of an investment for the public than it is spending money.
I know from one of the most exciting days of my life was after I got back a mountain of sequence data from my first USDA grant, the day I got that data, I put it in the public repository. And I could have mined it, and I could have written papers and papers, but it was more important to put it in the hands of everybody, because now we can accelerate everybody together. And that's maybe just not the story that the public sees, know, something like that. But going forward, how...
How do we imagine the university system will look like, or what will it look like in the next 10 or 20 years? Do you think we're still going to be mostly the same in terms of the way we're educating people around broad general education? Are we going to be focusing more with specialization for new industries and new technologies?
Look, we need to provide the public what they want, not what we tell them they need. And I think that's been a problem with higher education for a long time. We've been telling people what they need, and that has led a lot of young people into, frankly, careers where they're not going to work in that profession. They're simply not trained in anything that is going to get them a job. We still need a lot of those things. We need poets in our society. We need people who understand the...
benefits of beauty and culture and because that's a big part of what we do and that should always be a part of university, but we need to be giving the public what they want not what we tell them they need and so listening better. I think you're starting to see that at some universities right now the the IAVs especially have gotten hit up sideways on the head about what they're doing and how they're not necessarily preparing people for the real world.
Kevin Folta (20:50.381)
We're a land-grant university here at the University of Florida, so we're a little more connected to what the public wants, but not enough either. And it turns out what the public wants is to be trained in a way that will allow them to have a good life. That's not always a four-year college degree. Now, if it is a four-year college degree, even that's going have to change. We need to meet young people, and not just young people, because we have a lot of people returning back for workforce training.
who want to get a second degree to change professions. We need to meet people where they are, not where we tell them we think they should be. Because they're working. They're often working. They often may have children or parents that they need to take care of, other obligations. And they simply can't come, they can't take four years out of their life and come live on campus in a freshman dorm when they're 60 years old.
and do that type of thing. we need to, for even four-year degrees, we need to be looking very differently at how we provide education to them. It's gonna be a much different model than the four-year college degree on campus. We'll still do that, because that's a great experience, and I think it's good for our society. But that's not how most people want to be trained anymore. They want to come and go. Maybe they have to...
work a semester, take a semester, go to school, work another semester as they save up money for school. Maybe they want their entire class offered in two weeks because they just don't have the time. Maybe they take a vacation out of their job for two weeks. It's all going to be very different. So universities are going have to change in that way. But probably the biggest change is the recognition that not everyone needs a college degree.
a two-year degree or maybe even less. Maybe it's a two-week certificate that you need. It has to be beyond high school. Everyone needs a high school degree. whether you're an agriculture or HVAC repair person, you're going to need to have more training. And so here at the University of Florida in the College of Agriculture, we're now working a lot with our community schools, our state colleges, to help them develop curriculum in ag technology.
Kevin Folta (23:16.898)
When you're on that autonomous tractor or you are looking at data to decide when to spray or you're looking at what new weather data and developing your own weather model, you're going to need more training in high school. But we can give that to you in a two-year degree. So we're working with about 22 community colleges, state colleges around the state right now, to develop those programs to give them those skills. Young people, they grow, when they're thinking about their careers,
They think about agriculture as milk and cows and driving a tractor and out in the field with the hoe, digging up weeds. There is still that. And some people will want to do that, but it's becoming less and less important as technology takes over agriculture. And we need to make sure that young people understand that these jobs are different. It's not out there in the field with the hoe, like the Norman Rockwell picture. It is. You're driving the autonomous tractor.
or you're setting the boundaries for the autonomous tractor, or you're developing a model for when you're going to spray or irrigate your crops, you're using big data to decide how do you forward market your crop so that you can maximize the revenue from that. These are all things that only within the last couple years we've been able to really do at the farm level. But it's here now, and young people need to get on board.
Yeah, one of the things that I get students excited about is the University of Florida's strength is in plant genetic improvement. And so we're not talking about genetic engineering here. We're talking about genetic improvement through all means, whether it's traditional breeding or whatever. And University of Florida has really taken the central role in a initiative, in a national initiative. Where the heck is the name of this thing? Jim, hang on here for a second.
What was the name of that program that came over from Cornell through USDA? Breeding Insights. Breeding Insights. Yeah, was my question. Yeah, I don't know why it was here, but let me go back to that.
Kevin Folta (25:27.479)
So University of Florida has always had a real, maybe underappreciated role in the production of low chill fruits and vegetables. So the things that can grow in a subtropical climate but are producing in a counter seasonal time relative to the rest of the country and other major production areas. And what's happening with the efforts through breeding insights? And can you give us an idea what that program is and how that may change the landscape of breeding efforts here at the university?
We've always had probably the number one traditional plant breeding program, maybe in the world. It ranges over all kinds of crops, certainly citrus, strawberries, we've created a huge blueberry industry in Florida based upon our breeding efforts. But it's always been a pre-traditional program. We do have faculty who have always worked on non-traditional breeding programs, whether they're genetic engineering or
CRISPR technologies, we've had faculty work in them. But that's going to become a much more important part of the future. And the reason is that we don't have 20 years to wait to develop a new variety of citrus. The industry is changing so quickly and may even be gone if we don't get this done quickly. So we just don't have the time to wait. And so there are new technologies that are being developed. There's a program, it's USDA.
ARS, Agricultural Research Funded Program that was at Cornell that has within about the last six months moved down to University of Florida. They came here because of the diversity of our crops, again more than 300 crops. And it's to develop, help scientists, both public and private, develop new technologies for improving the genetics of crops that are important to the United States.
In Florida it be fruits and vegetables, in the it's going to be corn, wheat and soybeans. It's for all crops. Probably even someday little bit in forestry, maybe even animals. How can we better breed animals for improved or healthier production? So we're very excited about the program. It's a very large program, but it's going to complement already the number one breeding program, traditional breeding program in the country, by adding a whole other layer of technologies that...
Kevin Folta (27:51.66)
are just being or are yet to be developed. Well, you've been here for six years and you've seen the landscape obviously for a much longer time than that. And as we go forward and just to kind of wrap up here, how do you feel about the future of agriculture in the United States and here in the state of Florida? Are you optimistic even in light of all of the challenges and what do you think are going to be some, we've already talked about technology but,
Do you think that there are any particular aspects of technology that will be particular drivers of the next waves of innovation?
Let me first talk about
why we need to protect agriculture. First of all, we need to feed ourselves. We feed a lot of people around the world. There are plenty of places around the world where they can't produce enough food. We can. So I think we have a moral obligation to help feed hungry people, but it's also a business. We're making money by doing this. So we need to be always in the business of producing food for ourselves and others. It's a part of our culture.
think there are lot of values that are maintained within agricultural communities that are critical. It's also protection over natural resources.
Kevin Folta (29:16.589)
We call housing development the final crop here in Florida because we have plenty of it. Once you build a housing development, you're not going back to agriculture or any other form of natural resources. And so by supporting agriculture, we support our natural environment and push back on some of the unharmful development. I'm all in favor of development.
People have to live somewhere. But we need to be smart about where we build communities and houses and apartments and businesses. And the profitability of agriculture is part of the equation that goes into decision making. So I'm confident that we will continue to grow food here in Florida and the rest of the United States simply because we have to. So what are some of the other technologies?
So agriculture, going back 100 years ago now, we've had several waves of technology that have kept us ahead. You remember that Malthus and others, long ago, said this planet's in big trouble, that we're gonna mass starvation, that he plotted the growth of the population and the ability to produce food, and he said at some point they're gonna cross and we're not gonna have enough food. And that's when all kinds of bad things happened.
He was totally wrong. We've always been able to keep up with the growth of the population. The first great wave was really mechanization. Over 100 years ago now, where we brought tractors into the fields. allowed agriculture, that allowed a lot fewer people to work in agriculture and then move into the cities and start doing other things that were good for a growing country. Fertilizers were probably the next great wave that, again,
When you look at agricultural productivity, it goes along at a fairly modest pace, but then one of these innovations comes along, like tractors or fertilizers, as it jumps up. Genetic modification has been the third one, where you can plot production and that, where we saw a tremendous increase in production. I think we're in the next wave, which is artificial intelligence and robotics.
Kevin Folta (31:43.914)
smart robots that will help us grow more food. indeed, we're seeing, whether it's data analytics or just robots, we're seeing how we're getting a whole lot more efficient very quickly. We're to use fewer resources, we're going to use fewer pesticides, we're going to use fewer fertilizers. A lot of good things are happening right now. But then the question is, what's the next big wave? I don't have enough foresight to know what the next big one is.
There are a lot of small things that are going to happen that are going to keep us on track of growing more with less. Remember, we have less land. We will have less land in the future, and we'll probably have less water as a result of industrial and human consumption. So how do you grow more food to feed more people? And by the way, we need healthier food than we're growing right now. How do you do all that? And it's going to be technology. So a couple of the things I see is coming soon.
This whole notion of food is medicine. How do we produce healthier food? You know right now frankly a lot of our food makes us sick
fruits and vegetables. I talk a lot about food as medicine and my main message is just eat more fruits and vegetables. It's not that complicated, but we can do better than even that. We can produce fruits and vegetables now, or maybe grains, that have healthier components to that. so producing foods that have more flavonoids and antioxidants and all the things that we know are good for human health. we hope that...
our food system now actually does make us sick. This is not particularly true for the US, but globally, the total value of food produced on this planet is about $9 trillion. So that's everything from growing it to selling it. The cost to human health for eating poor quality foods, so that's foodborne illness, but just
Kevin Folta (33:48.512)
all the metabolic diseases, know, too much gluten, that type of thing, is 11 trillion. So globally, our food system's making us sick. We need, I think our next big wave is how do we take a food system that is just filling up our bellies with enough calories, keeping us alive, to how do we actually produce food that prevents disease and maybe even cures disease. So I see that as the next wave, and that's going to involve a lot of different things. But...
It's all going to be very high technology. But it's going to be, we grow food differently. We have different genetics. We have different inputs. To me, that's the next thing that is coming. There's a lot of discussion of that in the public right now. Unfortunately, it's almost become politicized. But healthier food is, I think, the next thing we need to think about.
Well, very good. It's a good place to kind of conclude it, just to share a couple thoughts on this. It kind of came together in my head as we were talking about Paul Ehrlich just died at 94. He was the population bomb guy who said we would never make it through the 1980s. Totally wrong. Totally wrong. He never met Norman Borlaug, I guess. But the other interesting part of this, and I think another big innovation that's going to be coming when you talk about tractors and fertilizer and genetic engineering, every single one of these technologies, and people maybe don't realize this,
was met with social pushback. People didn't want tractors. said, what's going to happen to the horse industry, right? Every single step had pushback. And maybe our next big technology, and here we are on the podcast talking about technology and ways to buffer this with the public, is more education and more effective ways to win social license. And that maybe should be the big role of the university in our communication strategies and.
You know, and it already is, but how can we do it better? And maybe that's a good place to conclude a podcast about technology. How do we, how do you as a listener, take what you're listening here in 500 episodes and share that with people in your network and help them understand what these technologies are and what they aren't and ways they can benefit from them. And I think this is really maybe our next grand challenges. We can create all the technology in the world, but it doesn't matter until it hits the.
Kevin Folta (36:10.637)
the way to get it there faster is to do more effective communication. So Dr. Scott Engel, thank you so much for joining me today. And I really appreciate your efforts here in the state and for the university and the students and staff. And thank you very much for joining me. It great fun. Go Gators. Yeah, thank you. And for listeners, thank you for listening to the 500th episode of the Talking Biotech Podcast. Like and share, connect with some friends, share with people in your network. We're not as big as we used to be because people have more choices.
But we still are generating relevant content that every week I get an email that says, can't believe I just found this. So help me out. Share with your network. This is the Talking Biotech podcast, and thank you so much for listening. And we'll talk to you again next week.