Business Lab · MIT Technology Review Insights

Feeding the World by AI, Machine Learning, and the Cloud

November 16, 2022·26 min·2 clips

Agriculture uses 70% of the world's water and contributes a quarter of global emissions—how can technology fix this?

This episode of Business Lab explores how artificial intelligence and cloud computing are transforming agriculture to address global food security and environmental challenges. Host Laurel Ruma interviews Thomas Jung, head of IT R&D at the agricultural science company Syngenta. Jung explains that regenerative agriculture focuses on improving soil health by minimizing soil disturbance, diversifying crops, and optimizing inputs. A primary challenge is climate change, with agriculture using 70% of the world's water and contributing about a quarter of global emissions. Syngenta's mission is to help farmers grow healthy food by developing biological products that enhance plants' natural defenses and more targeted synthetic crop protection. The traditional process to discover new crop protection products takes over ten years, and the chemical space contains an estimated 10^60 potentially active molecules. Artificial intelligence accelerates this by helping find the right chemical compounds and analyzing vast datasets from fields and labs. Syngenta has completed a shift to 100% cloud-based operations, which provides agility for scientists to experiment and scalability to handle unpredictable data volumes. This cloud foundation facilitates collaboration, allowing Syngenta to share data and algorithms with partners like the Open Data Institute and the AgGateway consortium. The company's Cropwise tool uses cloud data to give farmers specific recommendations on seeds and practices. Jung highlights cross-industry learning, such as hiring a digital expert from Formula One for IoT and data transfer insights. A regulatory driver is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's goal to stop supporting certain chemical studies on mammals by 2035, which Jung sees as a catalyst for digital science and alternative testing models. Syngenta also collaborates with NGOs like The Nature Conservancy on sustainable agriculture projects in South America. For the next three years, Jung is excited about creating an integrated understanding of the planetary ecosystem through data and fostering a culture of open-source collaboration within the industry. The tone is conversational and educational, focusing on technological solutions and collaborative strategy. This episode would appeal to business leaders in agriculture, technology professionals interested in applied AI, and anyone concerned with sustainable food systems. Listeners seeking a highly critical examination of large agribusiness or purely technical AI deep dives might find it less aligned with their interests.

As heard by us

A concise look at how regenerative agriculture, cloud infrastructure, and collaboration intersect in modern farm science.

Laurel Ruma and Thomas Jung frame regenerative agriculture as an infrastructure problem as much as an agronomy one, tying soil health, data, and cloud computing into the same conversation.

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Why you'd press play

Cloud computing meets agriculture here, with soil, scale, and shared research data pulled into one practical frame.

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