One thing about artificial intelligence: Where there is a significant amount of data, AI can be applied.
“And boy, in agriculture, do we have a lot of data. So between our farmers, our researchers, our satellites, our moisture detection, all of that, we have so much data. And that data can all be mined in a way that we can create models from it that give us a predictive capability.”
Katherine Sixt, executive director for USDA’s Office of the Chief Scientist, says through the White House-launched Genesis mission:
“The Trump administration is bringing the power of AI to bear on ambitious multidisciplinary challenges, creating a platform for federal agencies to collaborate and achieve breakthroughs that would be impossible if attempted alone, and harnessing AI as a scientific tool will just revolutionize the way scientific research is conducted, including research that’s conducted here at USDA and also with our partners across the industry and academia, aiming to double America’s R&D output and translate scientific breakthroughs into practical benefits for the American people.”
As well as the Agriculture Advanced Research and Development Authority, USDA is expected to announce later this year the launch of an agricultural national science and technology challenge.
“One of the places where we decided to really take a closer look at how we could apply artificial intelligence in the science of agriculture is in plant science. And we’re really looking to call on universities, industry stakeholders to help build new AI tools that can translate that huge amount of germplasm or seed data that the agency collects into something meaningful that we can use.”
Think the collective data of images, field information and lab results, producing greater detail on plant and seed traits, which, in turn, can develop more resilient and productive crops. Sixt says this effort is designed to be both systematic and collaborative among stakeholders.
“To do that, we have to have a unified, AI-native germplasm information system. So this is really looking at your data infrastructure that pulls together all of that different information we have about seeds and transforming U.S. plant science by enabling these new lines of discovery that take the genotype, what’s written in the genes in that code, to the phenotype, which is how that plant grows, what it looks like, how it takes up water, what kind of sunlight it likes, and look at all that together so we can kind of advance where we’re going with our seeds.”