The US Supreme Court on Tuesday declined an appeal from Bayer-owned Monsanto that aimed to challenge thousands of lawsuits claiming its weedkiller Roundup causes cancer -- a potentially costly ruling. The high court did not explain its decision not to take the case, which left intact a $25 million ruling in favor of a California man who alleged he developed cancer after using the chemical for years. The decision marks a major blow to the German conglomerate's legal fight against some 31,000 Roundup-related cases. "Bayer respectfully disagrees with the Supreme Court's decision," the company said in a statement. "The company believes that the decision undermines the ability of companies to rely on official actions taken by expert regulatory agencies," it added, referring to a 2020 federal finding that Roundup's active ingredient is not risky.

The United Nations reports that about 1/3 of the food produced globally each year is lost or wasted, and I'd reckon that number is not too surprising. Those of us in the United States see evidence of waste each time we go out to eat or do a weekly purge of jam-packed refrigerators. Outside the waste, however, there's a greater problem many of us don't realize. Just as the amount of food wasted globally is skyrocketing, the global demand for food is, ironically, set to rise. How will we manage to feed and sustain 9 billion humans estimated to populate planet earth by 2050?

Environmental author Wendell Berry might shudder at this comparison, but farmers are like data scientists. To make decisions, they ferret out meaning from a sea of data. That data just happens to be related to environmental conditions like temperature, rainfall, salinity, nitrogen, pests, commodity prices, and other variables. What that data often shows is trouble: increasingly costly or scarce water supplies, new and more voracious pests, herbicide-resistant weeds, and extreme weather. All of this can result in lower farm yields and higher costs.

Farming, as a human activity, is thought to be the basis for civilisations and societies dating back 15,000 years, possibly even further back if you believe the ancient alien astronaut theory. In fact, ancient alien astronauts from the Anunnaki race are thought to have introduced Earthlings to farming in the first place, and gifted humans the plough. Whatever its age, farming is still a globally widespread activity today. Indeed, until around 50 years ago, the vast majority of countries around the world were agrarian, meaning their economies and societies were reliant on the income generated by the agricultural sector – not just the food produced by it. Even today, the largest economy in the world – the US – is also the world's largest exporter of food.

YVERDON-LES-BAINS, Switzerland/CHICAGO (Reuters) - In a field of sugar beet in Switzerland, a solar-powered robot that looks like a table on wheels scans the rows of crops with its camera, identifies weeds and zaps them with jets of blue liquid from its mechanical tentacles. Undergoing final tests before the liquid is replaced with weedkiller, the Swiss robot is one of new breed of AI weeders that investors say could disrupt the $100 billion pesticides and seeds industry by reducing the need for universal herbicides and the genetically modified (GM) crops that tolerate them. Dominated by companies such as Bayer, DowDuPont, BASF and Syngenta, the industry is bracing for the impact of digital agricultural technology and some firms are already adapting their business models. Herbicide sales are worth $26 billion a year and account for 46 percent of pesticides revenue overall while 90 percent of GM seeds have some herbicide tolerance built in, according to market researcher Phillips McDougall. "Some of the profit pools that are now in the hands of the big agrochemical companies will shift, partly to the farmer and partly to the equipment manufacturers," said Cedric Lecamp, who runs the $1 billion Pictet-Nutrition fund that invests in companies along the food supply chain.

YVERDON-LES-BAINS, Switzerland/CHICAGO: In a field of sugar beet in Switzerland, a solar-powered robot that looks like a table on wheels scans the rows of crops with its camera, identifies weeds and zaps them with jets of blue liquid from its mechanical tentacles. Undergoing final tests before the liquid is replaced with weedkiller, the Swiss robot is one of new breed of AI weeders that investors say could disrupt the US$100 billion pesticides and seeds industry by reducing the need for universal herbicides and the genetically modified (GM) crops that tolerate them. Dominated by companies such as Bayer, DowDuPont, BASF and Syngenta, the industry is bracing for the impact of digital agricultural technology and some firms are already adapting their business models. Herbicide sales are worth US$26 billion a year and account for 46 percent of pesticides revenue overall while 90 percent of GM seeds have some herbicide tolerance built in, according to market researcher Phillips McDougall. "Some of the profit pools that are now in the hands of the big agrochemical companies will shift, partly to the farmer and partly to the equipment manufacturers," said Cedric Lecamp, who runs the US$1 billion Pictet-Nutrition fund that invests in companies along the food supply chain.

From targeted online advertising to more precise recommendation engines, consumer markets are bursting with innovation around machine learning and advanced analytics. While there's less buzz around business-to-business markets, these innovations are changing the game in B2B as well, even in old-line industries selling what might be considered commodity products. A growing number of B2B companies are using data and analytics to add services that bring new elements of value to customers, and in some cases new sources of revenue. These elements are fundamental attributes of a company's offering in their most essential and discrete forms – things like product quality, flexibility, and associated expertise; they lift value propositions above commodity status and benefit customers in particular ways. Consider recent moves by Australia-based Orica, which provides packaged explosives materials to mining companies worldwide.

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DataRobot, the pioneer in automated machine learning, today announced that Monsanto Company has selected the DataRobot automated machine learning platform to enable its Artificial Intelligence initiatives. Monsanto is a global modern agriculture company that develops products and digital tools to help farmers around the world grow crops while using energy, water and land more efficiently. Monsanto will leverage the DataRobot platform to improve data processes with automated and predictive analytics models that will provide insights across the company's core business functions including research & development, supply chain, and sales. DataRobot is the world's only software that puts the power of AI into the hands of any business user. DataRobot pre-packages and automates the data science workflow, enabling users to build and deploy highly accurate predictive models in a fraction of the time of traditional methods.

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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.