Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has publicly launched Mineral, a tech business it’s been incubating in stealth within its so-called “moonshot factory” X since 2017.
Mineral aims to provide foundational and actionable data and analytics for companies across food, agriculture, and technology to better understand the natural systems driving our food supply and find new and improved ways to manage the industry in the face of climate change.
And it solves for what Elliott Grant, CEO of Mineral, says has been a key issue holding back digital agriculture advancements for years: low levels of high-quality, diverse, and scalable agricultural datasets.
“It is still early days for AI/ML and sensing in agriculture. I love how much innovation is happening — and we need it desperately — but this industry is still at day zero for maturation, so we saw the opportunity to create foundational technologies to help other companies go faster,” Elliot Grant, CEO of Mineral, tells AFN. “Not enough data have been collected and that’s an industry-wide problem.”
Mineral is gathering data at scale. It is combining proprietary sensing technology — a camera-laden rover capable of collecting large imagery datasets — with “large, multimodal, unstructured sets of the world’s agricultural data, sourced from satellite images, farm equipment, and public databases.”
It is also conducting plant research with the goal of being able to provide clients with analysis and insights on the holy grail of ag insights: the relationship between crop genetics, environmental impacts, and management practices on the farm, according to Grant.
The company’s end goal is creating detailed and rich datasets that can be used by farmers across the world to tap into previously unknown factors in growing. In doing so, it hopes to help cultivate crops that are more resilient to climate change, without exacerbating the urgent issue.
Source: techcrunch.com
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