Can Artificial Intelligence Help Feed The World?

The benefits of AI are also applicable to plant breeding. Monsanto evaluates corn hybrids for many years in the field before bringing them to market, this process can take up to 8 years from discovery to commercialization. Corn breeding has often been compared to finding a needle in a haystack, a 32,000-gene haystack, representing a difficult search problem for generations of breeders. Historically, a breeding program could select around 500 combinations annually for trials from a set of hundreds of thousands of available options. This selection is constrained by the logistics and costs associated with managing the field testing program.