Big data, small farms and a tale of two tomatoes | Erin Baumgartner

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2020

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

The path to better food is paved with data, says entrepreneur Erin Baumgartner. Drawing from her experience running a farm-to-table business, she outlines her plan to help create a healthier, zero-waste food system that values the quality and taste of small, local farm harvests over factory-farmed produce.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Today we have a talk that starts with trash, but moves on to something far more nourishing, food. Big data expert Aaron Baumgartner uses her data science skills to help us better understand the current national food system. In her talk from TEDx-NATIC in 2019,
0:22.9	she follows the numbers to give us a revealing look at the food system,
0:26.9	its profit motives, and the harmful effects that that can have on all of us.
0:34.0	So data and analytics are dramatically changing our everyday lives, not just online, not just in some distant future, but in the physical world and in very real and tangible ways.
0:47.5	I spent the past 11 years of my life as a geek at MIT working in big data labs that seek to use data science to study the physical
0:56.3	world and try to solve society's great problems.
1:00.3	The field of big data seeks to analyze massive pools of data using computational tools to find
1:06.8	patterns and trends. Data can be a really extraordinary storyteller, unveiling the hidden
1:13.3	narratives of things in our everyday lives that we never would have seen. I find the personal
1:18.5	stories of inanimate things brought to life to be extraordinarily compelling. I want to highlight
1:24.4	first two projects from my time at MIT that I think highlight this phenomenon really well.
1:29.7	The first is called Trash Track. And in this project, we sought to better understand the waste management system.
1:35.8	To answer the question, where's your trash go when you throw it away? Your old coffee cup or that flip phone that you carried around in the early 2000s or a bagel or this morning's paper.
1:48.4	Where did these things go?
1:50.2	This data didn't exist, so we had to create it.
1:53.8	We answered and then visualized this question by installing small sensors into pieces of trash and then throwing them into the waste system.
2:03.1	Every line, every node that you see
2:05.9	is a single piece of trash moving through the city of Seattle
2:08.6	and then across the state
2:10.6	and then across the country as weeks and months go by.
2:15.6	And it's important to visualize this data
2:17.6	because none of you are probably sitting here thinking,
	...

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