Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is working on a sustainable farming project called Mineral. The project is being carried out by the Moonshot Factory, Alphabet's X team, which has designed projects such as Tidal, which focuses on ocean conservation and sustainable living.
According to project leader Elliott Grant, the project focuses on sustainable large-scale food production and farming, with an emphasis on "developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simulation, sensors, robotics and more."
To feed the planet’s growing population, global agriculture will need to produce more food in the next 50 years than in the previous 10,000 — at a time when climate change is making our crops less productive.
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In 2019, the Mineral project, which recently got its name, was announced. The main goal of the project is to feed the growing population of the Earth and generate crops more effectively through an understanding of growth cycles and weather patterns. This project will help breeders understand how different varieties of plants adapt to their environments and predict them. In this way, farmers can focus instead of mapping the wide fields on areas that require special attention.
Project Mineral 's Plant Buggy is an electrically driven low-emission buggy packed with solar panels. It comes in a number of shapes and sizes to allow it to adapt to fields with a variety of different crops.
A GPS device that determines the precise location of plants in the field comes with this Plant Buggy. It also has sophisticated cameras and instruments for machine perception that can detect field problems and evaluate plant traits.
Mineral 's software tools can help breeders understand and predict how different varieties of plants react to their environments by integrating data collected from the field by the Plant Buggy, such as plant height , leaf area and fruit size, with environmental factors such as soil health and the weather.
From strawberry fields in California to soybean fields in Illinois, we’ve been learning about crops from sprout to harvest, so we can find new ways to help breeders and growers understand how plants grow and interact with their environment.