What Plants Crave feat. Kathleen Debrota: The Flavor of Plants

This episode is part of our “What Plants Crave” series, where Dr. Sabeh speaks with growers, researchers, and other experts in controlled environment agriculture, to get their insights about the direction of the industry, and of course, what exactly it is that plants crave. This week’s interview was with Aerofarms’ Kathleen Debrota.

Kathleen DeBrota is the Director of Horticulture Operations at AeroFarms, a leading indoor vertical farming company transforming agriculture and championing innovation in the space. As a Certified B Corporation, AeroFarms was honored on Fast Company's World Changing Ideas list four years in a row and was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions.

Ms. DeBrota oversees crop cultivation and works to continuously improve grow operations at all AeroFarms facilities. She works with a cross-functional team to research and test new techniques and technologies aimed toward improving yield, quality, resource-use efficiency, and diversity of produce offerings.

Following her B.S. in biology from Indiana University, Ms. DeBrota earned both a Master of Science in environmental engineering from Georgia Tech, where she focused on aquaponic nutrient dynamics modeling, and a Master of Science in data science from Indiana University.

• Timestamp Notes

  1:53 Kathleen's path to Aerofarms
  4:00 The legacy of the late Ed Harwood, co-founder of Aerofarms
  5:50 Fitting R&D into the bigger operations puzzle
  7:35 What does Aerofarms grow?
  10:00 What are the benefits of growing indoors?
  12:30 Do you always want plants to be "happy"?
  16:10 Keeping the indoor farm clean to preclude the use of pesticides
  18:15 Using R&D to inform Operations
  21:15 Data management and organization: understanding granularity
  24:30 Data visualization and correlation: creating information
  27:00 The importance of controlling for individual variables
  29:45 How will AI and machine vision impact CEA?
  32:00 How does indoor agriculture improve efficiency in the food system?
  37:00 Data integrity: system response and remediation
  39:30 Using Operations to inform R&D
  40:30 The value of academic research and partnerships
  45:45 Why grow hops and other crops indoors?
  52:20 The flavor spectrum of plants
  57:50 The difference between heat and spicy
  1:01:30 Collaborating as an industry toward common goals
  1:03:00 What advice would you give others who want to get into this industry?
  1:06:00 Our industry’s future: Economies of scale, crop diversity, and the circular economy
  1:13:00 What is next for Aerofarms?
  1:16:45 What do plants crave?
  1:17:30 Rapid fire questions
  1:23:00 What is Kathleen’s favorite plant and flavor profiles?