Heritable Agriculture, a Google spinout, is bringing AI to crop breeding

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. When Norman Borlaug moved to Mexico in 1944, 60% of the wheat consumed in the country was imported. The government wanted to produce enough of the staple domestically to meet demand, so with money from the Rockefeller Foundation it had started the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Programme, and asked Borlaug to lead it.

Borlaug and his team ran breeding programmes for the next 20 years, at first to improve Mexican wheat’s resistance to disease, and then to increase its yield—largely by breeding shorter plants that did not collapse under the weight of a heavily fertilised wheat ear. By 1963 some 95% of wheat sown in Mexico was Borlaugian, yields had sextupled and Mexico was self-sufficient. American governments and philanthropists exported this “green revolution" around the world in the hope of helping places like India and Pakistan feed fast-growing populations.

Borlaug was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1970. Crop breeding remains a fiddly business. Plant geneticists must decide which traits they are looking for, cross plants which appear to possess them, run a series of field trials and wait to see if their new plants are an improvement.

The interplay between a plant’s genes and the weather, the soil condition and scores of other environmental variables in which it grows, are complex. Working out which genetics suit which conditions can take decades, as it did Borlaug in Mexico. Heritable Agriculture, which spun out of X, Alphabet’s moonshot lab, in December, aims to speed things up.