Deep Dive: David Guerena on the Future of Agriculture

In the sixth installment of our Moonshot Podcast Deep Dive series, X’s Captain of Moonshots, Astro Teller, discusses plant breeding and the future of agriculture with Agricultural Scientist, David Guerena. David works with The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) — a partner of Mineral, X’s moonshot for computational agriculture. They discuss plant breeding, the challenges facing smallholder farmers around the world, and how the tools Mineral developed are helping plant breeders grow more resilient crops. For more on Mineral’s impact on agriculture, check out Episode 4 of The Moonshot Podcast, “Feeding the World”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQS3lY6pRvY And to learn more about how Mineral’s technology is being used by public plant breeding programs in the Global South, check out The Artemis Project: https://alliancebioversityciat.org/projects/artemis 00:00 - Introduction 1:09 - Why humans eat certain plants 3:20 - How plants have historically been domesticated 4:53 - The origins of plant breeding 6:52 - The changing face of plant breeding 8:42 - Gene banks that preserve genetic diversity 10:22 - Helping small farmers with plant breeding 12:33 - How David’s career started 14:00 - The process of identifying and cataloguing plants 23:32 - CIAT and CGIAR’s partnership with Mineral 26:13 - Mineral’s technology 32:59 - Unexpected findings from Mineral’s early days 38:40 - Solving for the biggest challenges in plant breeding 40:08 - Phenotyping 101 41:06 - The impact of Mineral’s technology 44:39 - The challenges of existing breeding systems 50:10 - The future of computational agriculture 57:00 - The impact of AI on plant breeders and farmers 59:19 - A surprising insight about bean cooking time 1:01:47 - The future of plant breeding 1:03:58 - David, finally, talks about Bruno Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices