FoA 345: Alphabet's Moonshot to Scale Sustainable Agriculture via Machine Learning with Dr. Elliott Grant of Mineral

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Mineral website: https://mineral.ai/

Dr. Elliott Grant is the CEO of Mineral, which is Alphabet's bet in sustainable agriculture.  Mineral is applying the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) to the existential challenge of sustainably doubling the planet’s crop productivity. 

Elliott and I really get past the buzzwords here and into the details of what exactly this technology is enabling on a practical level, and how it has the potential to impact agriculture and the way we do business. From my personal perspective, AI and ML have been talked about since way early on in this podcast, but it often felt like marketing to make their tool seem special. But it does feel like we’re hitting this tipping point now, where there are some really impactful technologies emerging, that can only exist because of the explosion in data collection and advancements in AI and ML, and I find that to be one of the most exciting aspects of agtech today. 

Elliott is a recognized business leader and innovator in food and agritech. He was the founder and CEO of HarvestMark, the world leader in fresh food traceability; the CEO of ShopWell, a pioneering personalized nutrition company; and served as the Vice Chair of the Produce Marketing Association.  Elliott is a manufacturing engineer by training. He earned a PhD and MEng in Engineering from Cambridge University, and is a named inventor on 36 US patents covering topics ranging from cryptography and food traceability, to satellite image analysis and plant phenotyping.