Artificial Intelligence Improves America’s Food Method

Posted by Scott Elliott, Agricultural Study Company Office of Communications in

Analysis and Science
Technology

Dec 10, 2020

Fresh produce from the farm, including radishes, kale, and lettuce
Among the other issues, the AI Institute for Upcoming Era Food stuff Techniques will research the vitamins and molecular framework of meals and decide how to breed plants for optimum manufacturing. (Photograph by Peggy Greb)

Know-how is everywhere you go in the 21st century, and America’s food stuff system is no exception.

Experts with the USDA Agricultural Investigation Service’s (ARS) Western Human Nutrition Exploration Heart (WHNRC), at the College of California (UC) – Davis, have joined forces with more than 40 scientists from six organizations to variety an institute that will use artificial intelligence (AI) to create the following-technology food items technique. The team, led by UC Davis, also features UC Berkeley, Cornell College, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The venture is funded by a $20 million grant from USDA’s Countrywide Institute of Food items and Agriculture.

“The AI Institute for Future Technology Food stuff Techniques (AIFS) is dedicated to accelerating the use of synthetic intelligence to optimally produce, approach, and distribute safe and sound and wholesome food stuff,” claimed Dr. Danielle Lemay, a USDA research molecular biologist at WHNRC.

The institute’s plans involve applying molecular breeding to improve crop yield, high quality, and disorder resistance working with AI applications and other technologies, these types of as sensing platforms and robotics, to lessen source use maximizing foodstuff basic safety and producing resources for customers to make customized wellness conclusions.

In accordance to Lemay, AIFS is establishing AI to determine how to breed crops for ideal manufacturing, how to far better take care of h2o and nitrogen use, and how to forecast crop yields. For foods processing, AI will assistance notify choices about cleaning to strengthen sanitation and decrease the distribute of pathogens. AI will also assistance lower power use and food waste by advising in opposition to transporting food items that might not be used at its location. In nourishment, AI will predict the components from pics in a consumer’s very own food items journal.

“Also, one of our targets is to help young people realize the price of where by their foods will come from, and to see themselves in potential agriculture and meals occupations,” Lemay claimed. “The possibility is to make more staff at all ranges who have both of those AI and food method abilities. This incorporates engagement at every single degree – from K by 12 and at community colleges, summer internships, and field times with farmers.”

Lemay, who prospects the institute’s diet research, stated AIFS is exclusive in that no other AI investigate exertion has included human diet. “Our grand challenge is to utilize AI technologies to far better seize what men and women are feeding on, to establish the nutrients and molecular composition of that foodstuff, and to predict wellness results of those dietary decisions.”

“In the long term, we hope that AI can be made use of to personalize facts on well being position, genotype, and microbiome,” explained Lemay.

This investigate supports multiple themes outlined in the USDA Science Blueprint (PDF, 2.6 MB), which moves us nearer to meeting the goals outlined in USDA’s Agriculture Innovation Agenda.

Category/Subject:
Exploration and Science
Know-how

Generate a Reaction

Comments