Title: AI-Powered Crop Development: A Potential Solution to Climate Change in Agriculture
The health of agriculture has long been linked to the health of the planet. However, the climate crisis is disrupting farming across the globe, with increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and temperature changes threatening crops. To address this issue, a startup called Avalo is using artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate the creation of new and resilient crop varieties.
Avalo’s algorithm uses machine learning models to identify the genetic basis of complex traits like drought resistance and pest resistance in hundreds of crop varieties. This allows the company to predict the performance of a seed without needing to grow it, speeding up the process by as much as 70%. The traditional method of selecting for favorable traits involves identifying individual plants that exhibit the trait and using those plants to pollinate others, which can take many years.
Avalo is working on a range of innovative crops, including dandelions that can be grown to make rubber, heat-resilient tomatoes, and drought-resilient cotton. The company’s first commercially available product will be a fully edible broccoli, which can be grown using less energy and fertilizers than any other available variety.
Climate scientist Dr. Shruti Nath from the University of Oxford has praised Avalo’s approach, saying that AI’s performance for gene discovery and mining has shown great promise. However, she also warned that using AI techniques for informing breeding decisions has possible pitfalls, such as overfitting on properties that do not exist.
Other companies, such as Silal in the United Arab Emirates, are also working on developing more resilient crop varieties. Silal has developed two new varieties of Quinoa that are suitable for growing in the UAE’s arid desert environment and hopes to establish a quinoa supply chain in the region.
Avalo’s goal is to help protect farmers’ livelihoods in the face of increasingly erratic weather conditions while restoring more natural diversity to crop development. The company believes that by releasing new varieties every four to five years, they can keep pace with the rate of environmental change and help maintain a stable agricultural system for the next 30 to 50 years.