How Agriscience Innovator Corteva is Using Google AI to Supercharge the World’s Food Supply

As someone who grew up on a farm in northeast Ohio, I’ve always felt a deep connection to the land. Farming is one of those unique careers where you experience so much, from how equipment works to how plants grow. It’s also an industry with a profound distinction: It’s the one industry in the world that touches every human every day.

Throughout history, agriculture has been defined by waves of technological innovation that have repeatedly reshaped how we produce food, from the plow to the modern tractor. Today, AI is the next wave. It's revolutionizing agriculture with unprecedented impact and efficiency.

This innovation couldn't come at a more critical time. With a global population rising to 10 billion by mid-century, we must increase food production by at least 50% on the same amount of farmland. The only solution is to dramatically increase the output per acre.

Developing new crop protection products is one of the most difficult challenges in agriculture today. We're tasked with finding a single, highly specific molecule—a proverbial key—that will interact with a pest’s protein—the lock—to prevent it from damaging crops. This can sometimes feel like wandering through a maze with countless dead ends. Now, with AI, we can more quickly find the routes that lead to success.

Equally transformative is our work using AI to enhance seed genetics. One example of this is how we are creating plants that are better able to combat diseases. Globally, plant pathogens remain the leading cause of yield loss in agriculture, resulting in over $200 billion of losses each year. Historically, to make more disease-resistant crops, breeders would cross plants based on the best available resistance traits, hoping to combine beneficial genes in the progeny.

Today, with the help of AI, we can pinpoint multiple native disease-resistance genes in plants, optimize them, and package them into a single ‘cassette’, allowing us to build robust, disease-resistant seeds more intentionally and rapidly.

While many companies are contributing to AI, groups like Google DeepMind are leading the pack in applying AI to some of the key life science challenges we’re tackling. For Corteva, remarkable capabilities of models like AlphaFold 2 to predict protein structures with near-lab accuracy in a matter of seconds underlie many of these breakthroughs. Since proteins are the fundamental building blocks of every plant, these types of advancements in AI are foundational to everything we do.

We're finding that we can drive advances in crop protection and plant breeding so that we'll have more production and less waste. I think it’s very doable now to shrink the footprint of farming and feed everyone at the same time. These are things that sounded like science fiction 10 years ago, but today, they’re happening. If you took AI out of the equation, it would be a significantly harder challenge.