Alphabet's X lab for emerging technologies "moonshot factory", has unveiled yet another initiative that might this time come to improve the future content of our plates.
The research company - formerly Google X - has developed Project Mineral an attempt to tackle the challenges that the food industry is bracing for in the near-term – namely, how to improve agriculture's productivity in the face of increasing demand and weaker crops.
Using a wheel-mounted buggy fitted with a cocktail of cameras, machine perception tools and AI, the X team is roaming fields to provide growers with high-quality and data-based information about their crops. Armed with clearer insights, farmers can in turn make decisions based on a better understanding of their plants' behavior.
Announcing Project Mineral in a blog post[1], Elliott Grant, who leads the project, explained that he has spent the past few years talking to farmers across the world to assess their needs. "What's changed recently is their sense of urgency and an awareness that current tools aren't equipping farmers to face these challenges," he said.
It is expected that to feed the world's population, agriculture will need to produce more food in the next 50 years than in the previous 10,000. It is no wonder, in that context, that farmers feel that the current tools at their disposal won't be up to the challenge. To understand and manage their crops, growers typically rely on sensors, spreadsheets and GPS tools that gather data in a siloed way, barring them from achieving a comprehensive picture of their fields.
Without access to the right data, growers have had no choice but to standardize the way they grow. Crops are treated uniformly, which means that fertilizers and pesticides are often used unnecessarily, while at the same time depleting the soil's health.