Google's Moonshot Lab Is Now in the Strawberry-Counting Business

A partnership with Driscoll's exemplifies a shift toward more pedestrian projects with actual commercial applications. From a report: When Deb Menicos walks a strawberry field, she doesn't just look at the berries. Menicos, who holds a Ph.D. in plant breeding from Ohio State University and works as a senior scientist at Driscoll's, will often find herself counting leaves and examining the small stalks protruding from the base of the plant. These parts, known as trusses, are important because they're where the flowers and berries grow. "We want a small plant, with compact leaves and trusses poking out -- not too long, because we don't want them to touch the dirt," she says. Developing a new berry variety at Driscoll's takes at least five years. It begins with a crop of 25,000 genetically distinct plants that grow in the company's breeding field near its headquarters in Watsonville, California. Menicos and her colleagues winnow that down first to 250 plants, then clone them and replant them, narrowing the field until they have a winner. The goal is to make the most and tastiest berries while minimizing the cost of fertilizers, pesticides and labor. Today, determining which genetic attributes translate into the easiest plants to harvest comes down to "observations and feelings," Menicos says. "We want to have better data, more quantitative data. And that's where Mineral comes in." Mineral is another way of saying Google. The closely guarded project grew out of an effort by the company's famous innovation lab, X, to use cameras and machine learning to help farmers make better decisions. Working with Driscoll's, Mineral created large unmanned rovers -- the vehicles are a little bigger than a Smart car and are packed with sensors and cameras -- that drive up and down crop rows collecting data that tell farmers which plants are thriving and which aren't. This is known as "phenotyping," and it's a huge challenge for farmers, says Elliott Grant, Mineral's general manager. "The price of genetic modeling went down to pretty much nothing, but you still don't know what the plant does when you engineer it," he says. "Breeders and crop researchers are still going into the fields with tape measures and notepads." [...] Besides at Driscoll's, Google is testing versions of its agricultural technology with more than a dozen other companies including Syngenta, the Chinese state-owned agricultural giant that develops seeds, insecticides and herbicides for staples such as soybeans, corn and wheat.

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