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Aug. 19, 2024
By Margy Eckelkamp, The Scoop magazine After seven years of heading up Mineral, a subsidairy of Alphabet who is also the parent company of Google, focusing on developing technology for agriculture, Elliott Grant says this type of work is more like a marathon than a sprint. And with Alphabet dispersing Mineral-its patents, ongoing work and team-Grant says it's like passing the baton. "We chose to pass the baton at this time because it's the best way to maximize our impact in agriculture globally," he says. As of this week, we know what entities are picking up the technology, patents, and ideas from Mineral: 1. John Deere will acquire dozens of patents and a technology suite to support development of its See and Spray platform. 2. Google Research Africa, The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT will carry on the work setup by Mineral's phenotyping methods. 3. As previously announced in July, Driscoll's will acquire and embed Mineral's yield forecasting and quality inspection tools. "This is the fastest way to transfer our technology to other players and for them to pick the baton and go and to take it to the next leg," Grant says. "We needed to work with world leaders in agribusiness who we felt had to capacity to pick up this technology that we developed because it's powerful technology." John Deere provided the following statement: "John Deere has acquired a technology suite from Mineral. This includes patents, pending patents, plant images, and machine learning tools developed by Mineral, a subsidiary of Alphabet. These assets will support the development efforts of John Deere See & Spray solutions to be delivered to more growers. "See & Spray technology allows John Deere sprayers to see, target, and kill in-season weeds using advanced cameras and machine learning that distinguishes crops from weeds and selectively target sprays only the weeds. That means less herbicide, less costs, and less impact to crops and land." In Mineral's work--which never had a business model to be sold directly to farmers but rather made accessible via partnerships--Grant says the team concluded partners with access to data, hardware, or end users will be ideally placed to serve farmers and solve the problems specific to agriculture. "Our mission has always been to make a meaningful, positive difference to the global food system - which we knew was an audacious, high-risk undertaking-so we would regularly ask ourselves: "is this the best way to maximize impact?" and "are we reaching the diversity of farmers we want to, worldwide?" We've shared before that we've been looking for new and innovative partnerships that can transcend traditional approaches," Grant says. He goes on to share that over the past 18 months, the pace of change in foundational artificial intelligence (AI) improved even more rapidly than expected. This caused the team to rethink the value and differentiation it was bringing to farmers. "Therefore we selected organizations to pass the baton to which had the talent, data, market position, and recognized the acceleration that Mineral technologies brings," Grant says. He adds about the assets John Deere acquired, "We had developed ag-specific ML Ops tools that were optimized for the unique challenges of training and tuning high performance plant perception models. The tools allowed a 75% reduction in training time per epoch (i.e. one complete pass through the entire training data set), and slashed training time to less than two days for 100K images. We knew that every farm and every crop and every season are slightly different - so the ability to retrain and fine-tune quickly is critical to scaling to more farmers and more geographies. "These custom ML Ops tools also produced more robust AI models (that means models that work in diverse environments, in uncontrolled lighting conditions, and situations that differ from the training data), which is critical for farmers to capture the economic benefits that will drive adoption of new technologies like precision spraying." To read the entire report click here. Tweet |
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