This week, Google X, a subsidiary of Google, announced the launch of a company called "Heritable Agriculture," a startup that relies on data and machine learning and aims to improve how crops are grown.
According to the "TechCrunch" website, the company indicated in a post that plants are incredibly efficient and impressive systems, describing them as solar-powered, carbon-free machines that feed on sunlight and water.
However, agriculture exerts tremendous pressure on the planet and its resources, accounting for about 25% of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.
Agriculture is the largest consumer of groundwater on this planet and can lead to soil erosion and water pollution through pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemicals.
The startup emerging from Google is working on these global issues by relying on the analysis of large data sets through artificial intelligence and machine learning.
According to "TechCrunch," data collection is the relatively easy part of Heritable's work, while the hard part is turning all this data into actionable instructions for farmers.
The company Heritable Architecture was founded by Brad Zamft, who holds a PhD in physics and worked as a program officer and fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation before spending a year as chief scientist at a venture-backed startup called TL Biolabs.
After 8 months, specifically at the end of 2018, Zamft joined Google X and soon became the project leader of the startup company Heritable.
Zamft says, "I have a wide range of authority to work on anything I want, as long as it can be scaled to a company the size of Google."
He added in his statements to TechCrunch, "The idea of how we can improve plants stuck in my mind and gained momentum with the leadership at Google. We did an excellent job overcoming the challenges."
Using machine learning, Heritable analyzes plant genomes to identify combinations that can improve crop yields.
For example, Zamft said, "By understanding these genomes, crops can then be bred with climate-friendly traits to increase yield, reduce water requirements, and enhance carbon storage capacity in roots and soil."
The models developed by the company were tested on thousands of plants grown according to those specifications inside a "specialized growth chamber" at the Google X headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area. The researchers also conducted fieldwork at sites in California, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.
Zamft explains that the company's new "CRISPR" technology, which uses gene editing, will eventually contribute to making plants "programmable." However, Heritable is currently focusing on more traditional methods.
"We do not develop genetically modified plants, and genetic modification is not on our roadmap. Gene editing may come eventually, but we are witnessing a huge unmet need to determine what to breed and then breed it better through plant hybridization, not using biotechnology to develop the crop," he says.
