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Mar. 6, 2023 by Janette Barnard, Prime Future I recently had the privilege to tour Bayer's new plant breeding facility outside Tucson. They describe the facility as enabling the transition from selecting genetics to designing genetics, which Bayer calls precision plant breeding. The facility is 7 acres under greenhouse glass, replacing the need for 20,000 acres of farm ground. And because 365 days of the year make up the growing season, they get 3-4 entire crop cycles per year rather than 1. The facility is automated from start to finish, including full traceability for every seed that is planted into a germination tray all the way to seeds that are shipped out to be planted in field trials. Not to mention, every seed is 'chipped', meaning a tiny sliver of the kernel is sliced off in order to run genomics testing so that selection decisions can be made from the combination of phenotype and genotype data. The combination of these capabilities allows them to capture more data, apply high-powered analytics, and make better and faster decisions. The name of the plant genetics game is speed, balanced against accuracy, so you can imagine how these capabilities complement one another. Bayer describes the net impact as moving 15x faster, realizing 4x genetic gain, and accelerating the genetic cycle by 30%, which has a compounding effect. One of the presenters explained that achieving those 15x, 4x, and 30% outcomes is possible because of the emergence & convergence of multiple technologies simultaneously: greenhouse robotics & automation, plant genotyping, machine learning, massive cloud computing capacity, etc. A very short time ago, the idea of capturing thousands of data points on every seed planted would have been completely unwieldy, let alone to do predictive analytics with that scale of data. My takeaway is that this facility Bayer has assembled is not unique because of any individual technology but because of an incredibly rich tech stack. To read the entire report and view a video of the facility click here. Tweet |
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