In the sixth installment of our Moonshot Podcast Deep Dive series, X’s Captain of Moonshots, Astro Teller, discusses plant breeding and the future of agriculture with Agricultural Scientist, David Guerena. David works with The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) — a partner of Mineral, X’s moonshot for computational agriculture. They discuss plant breeding, the challenges facing smallholder farmers around the world, and how the tools Mineral developed are helping plant breeders grow more resilient crops.
For more on Mineral’s impact on agriculture, check out Episode 4 of The Moonshot Podcast, “Feeding the World”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQS3lY6pRvY
And to learn more about how Mineral’s technology is being used by public plant breeding programs in the Global South, check out The Artemis Project: https://alliancebioversityciat.org/projects/artemis
00:00 - Introduction
1:09 - Why humans eat certain plants
3:20 - How plants have historically been domesticated
4:53 - The origins of plant breeding
6:52 - The changing face of plant breeding
8:42 - Gene banks that preserve genetic diversity
10:22 - Helping small farmers with plant breeding
12:33 - How David’s career started
14:00 - The process of identifying and cataloguing plants
23:32 - CIAT and CGIAR’s partnership with Mineral
26:13 - Mineral’s technology
32:59 - Unexpected findings from Mineral’s early days
38:40 - Solving for the biggest challenges in plant breeding
40:08 - Phenotyping 101
41:06 - The impact of Mineral’s technology
44:39 - The challenges of existing breeding systems
50:10 - The future of computational agriculture
57:00 - The impact of AI on plant breeders and farmers
59:19 - A surprising insight about bean cooking time
1:01:47 - The future of plant breeding
1:03:58 - David, finally, talks about Bruno
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