Half a century after Borlaug received the Nobel Prize, we live in a world where yield growth is plateauing and the total land under cultivation is decreasing. Changing weather patterns and water availability is altering productivity in certain agricultural regions. At the same time, world population continues to grow and is projected to reach at least 9 billion people by 2050, much of the growth is clustered in developing countries, where rapid economic expansion is allowing for increased calorie availability and consumption with an increased demand for protein. As these two forces of population growth and demand for food gain momentum, is a risk of reaching a Malthusian doomsday--a scenario where population growth outpaces the growth in food supply resulting in large-scale famines--becoming increasingly likely? Preventing this may very well be one of the most important challenges of the 21st century.

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.