Is This Weed-Spotting, Yield-Predicting Rover the Future of Farming?

By the year 2050, Earth's population is expected to reach nearly ten billion people. With this growth comes a staggering demand for food resources, particularly drought, heat, pest and disease resistant crop varieties that give high yields in the face of climate change. Enter X, Alphabet Inc.'s so-called "moonshot factory," where innovators face the world's biggest challenges head-on and develop ground-breaking technology at a startup pace. Project Mineral, one of X's current efforts, is focused on finding an effective way to address the global food security crisis through "computational agriculture," a term coined by X to describe new technologies that will further increase understanding about the plant world. "The agriculture industry has digitized," says Project Mineral lead Elliott Grant.