She’s a STEM girl. Rhiannon Woo is the VP of plant science and production for Willo, a startup using vertical farming practices to grow cleaner, fresher, and more sustainable produce.

Here, Rhiannon explains how she turns scientific breakthroughs into practical products, why farmer’s market fruits are always sweeter, and how studying dinosaurs could help kale finally taste good.

What does it mean to be a plant scientist?
My side of being a plant scientist is about understanding how to apply the latest research to the production environment. Science is this huge thing where you’re always discovering new things, and sometimes that’s just for the sake of [it]. You’re like, “Oh, look, we can make a tomato orange now!” And I’m like, “Yay! But does somebody want to buy an orange tomato?” So what I do is called applied science. Other geniuses in the world are doing the discovery work, but my job is to take those discoveries and figure out how they make our farms more efficient, how they make food more nutritious, how they make something that’s special and unique.

What don’t we know about the greens we’re eating that we should know?
Everything is bred so it can travel around the world, [but] being able to ship from California to New York means that product doesn’t necessarily taste good, right? It’s a specific problem across the industry. We want to concentrate agricultural production in parts of the world that have the right environment, but we want to feed people around the whole world. To get a grape from Chile to Canada, it’s a different grape than you grow in your backyard. That backyard grape can’t travel 4000 miles, sit at the grocery store for a week, and sit in your refrigerator for 3 more days. It’s just too fragile. That’s one of the things we’re really hoping to change.

So it’s not our fault that we don’t like kale. Maybe we’re just not getting quality kale.
You’re right! There are varieties that taste great, and we grow a lot of them. But when you’re just going to the supermarket and find that kale, it’s because you’re trying to do the right thing for your body—not necessarily because you’ve tried to have a great tasting experience.

How are you working to get better quality products in everyone’s home?
You know, in New York City, you can go down to the farmer’s market, and there are some really great local growers from Connecticut or New Jersey or Pennsylvania. Since New York was one of the first urban centers of the US, there’s this small little farming community circling [it]. But if you’re in Cincinnati, Ohio, it’s not the same, right? One of the things we want to do is provide that super high-quality farmer’s market product, even if you aren’t in an agricultural community. Our way of getting the product to the customers, we harvest it and within 2-4 days it’s in your [house]. We’re able to shorten that traveling distance because our farms can be built anywhere.

How has climate change affected your growing experience?
Definitely one of the things that impacts the safety and quality of the product is the local climate. Here in California, we have all these fires and smoke and we’re in a huge drought. One of our efforts is to say, “Okay, we’re aeroponic, which means instead of turning on the sprinklers, like for our lawn, we are basically microdosing the plants.” People microdose a lot of things. [Laughing.] We’re microdosing nutrients and water. We give the plant exactly what it needs, when it needs it so we’re able to use less resources… We’re growing indoors, so we have to provide artificial sun. Because we have an energy use that traditional farming doesn’t have, we’re always striving to be at least 10 times more efficient on the use of resources.

Where can we learn more about finding better produce?
The best place to get involved is your local food bank because they’re solving the hunger problem in your community. We’re trying to encourage people to think about food as a local resource. Your community feeds you and you feed your community; it’s a mutual relationship. And community gardens are a great way to learn how a seed becomes food, and a lot of times they even have gardening classes… [Or] find one of those gizmos you see in Instagram ads that has a light and hydroponics [system], and you can become a farmer. Even if you feel like, “Plants don’t like me,” start with a rosemary plant. It’s almost impossible to kill and smells amazing. You’ll understand it’s a relationship between people and plants, and [it’s] those tiny steps that make us go, “We need to be nicer to this planet, so this planet will be nicer to us.”

This is sort of random, but which on-screen botanist is the most accurate? Is it Laura Dern in Jurassic Park or Natalie Portman in Annihilation or someone else?
I actually really love Laura Dern as a paleobotanist. I won’t tell you how old I am [laughing], but I’m old enough that it was formative in my life, just understanding we rely on plants and plants rely on us, too. People always say, “Oh, what do dinosaurs look like? What did they do?” And [I’m] like, “Yeah, but what did they eat? How did they fly when they were that big [just] eating vegetables? What was the nutrient content of the plants available to them, and could we get that nutrient content into plants now?” It was intriguing to think about what plants of the past can contribute to our knowledge today. Even now, with Willo, we look at traditional varieties people used to grow in the 1800s because they tasted better. So we’re still looking to the past—maybe not all the way back to dinosaur times—for clues on how to make food taste better.